MoveOn ad equates Mitt Romney to Richard Nixon
(CBS News) In what may be one of the harshest ads of the 2012 campaign season yet, the liberal grassroots group MoveOn on Wednesday launched an ad that shows Mitt Romney morphing into Richard Nixon, posing the question, "Tricky Mitt: He's not a crook... right?"
The ad isn't the first time the Republican presidential candidate has been compared to President Nixon over transparency issues -- one of President Obama's top advisers recently made the comparison himself. The comparison plays into the Democrats' larger narrative that Romney is a dishonest politician who may be lying about his business record or hiding information about his taxes.
The MoveOn ad points out that Romney's record on outsourcing and his use of Cayman Island tax shelters are already matters of public debate. "So what is it Mitt Romney doesn't want us to know?" a female narrator asks, suggesting that his tax returns could contain politically damaging information or that he may have even broken the law by reporting to the government false information about his role at the private equity firm he founded, Bain Capital.
The ad is running across the key state of Ohio today in Toledo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Dayton. Romney, meanwhile, is holding a town hall meeting in Bowling Green, Ohio and conducting several interviews with Ohio television stations.
Recently, Romney has come under scrutiny over whether he was responsible for Bain Capital's business practices after 1999. Romney was still technically CEO of the firm at that point but says he was no longer managing the company. He's also faced pressure to release more than the two years of tax returns that he's promised to make public.
MoveOn has jumped on the opportunity to cast Romney as dishonest, having its members show up at Romney events this week with banners castigating "Tricky Mitt" for refusing to release more tax returns. In Pittsburgh and Toledo, MoveOn is flying banners over Romney's events reading, "Tricky Mitt: Release Your Returns" and "Tricky Mitt: What Are You Hiding?" The group has also joined other liberal organizations in a petition driving, collecting signatures from voters calling on Romney to release more of his tax returns.
The liberal group may be taking its cue from Mr. Obama's re-election campaign, which has run its own ads asking what Romney could be hiding. In an interview with CBS Radio News earlier this month, senior campaign adviser David Axelrod called Romney, "the most secretive candidate we've seen probably since Richard Nixon."
In response to Axelrod's comments, the Romney campaign charged that the Obama campaign was trying to distract voters from the president's record on the economy.
"With millions of Americans suffering in the Obama economy, it's no surprise that President Obama and his allies would resort to false, negative attacks in an attempt to distract Americans from the President's abysmal record," campaign spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg told CBS Radio News.
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Nixon had an "enemies list" and used the power of the President to attack private citizens.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444464304577537233908744496.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
Now Top Romney donor Vandersloot is being audited for the FIRST TIME IN HIS LIFE by the IRS, shortly after Obama called him out n a speech, and set partisan watchdogs into digging into his past.
Attacking private citizens with the power of government for partisan gain. Why not, Nixon did it, and that is OBAMA'S ROLE MODEL.
Hey, if you can't ignore the rule of law and attack people for having the wrong political views and thoughts; what good is it to be a Democrat President; right?
you all will be ok with President Romney using the presidency to attack all liberal groups with the IRS and DoJ right? Or is this behavior only acceptable when it's used for liberal politicians?
New reporting cites strong evidence that Mitt Romney wasn't actively managing Bain Capital while he was running the Olympics, despite what the Obama campaign (and some news reports) would have voters believe.
Dan Primack, a senior editor at Fortune Magazine, reports on previously confidential "offering documents" that Bain circulated to potential investors in June 2000, September 2000 and again in January 2001. And he says that in each of those three documents Romney's name is conspicuously absent from lists of senior investment managers at Bain.
Dan Primack, July 12: [T]he contemporaneous Bain documents show that Romney was indeed telling the truth about no longer having operational input at Bain...
This has become a key point of contention, because Obama TV ads accuse Romney of shipping U.S. jobs overseas. We reported that the Obama campaign had failed to back up its claims ("Obama's 'Outsourcer' Overreach," June 29), partly because Romney had left Bain in February 1999 to run the 2002 Winter Olympic and wasn't actively in charge of the company at the time.
But the Obama campaign objected, claiming that Romney remained a part-time manager even while he was living in Utah and running the Olympics. We responded, finding the campaign's evidence "weak or non-existent."
Since then some other reporters have weighed in on Obama's side. Articles in Mother Jones magazine and the Talking Points Memo website, and most recently a front-page Boston Globe story on July 12, all cite documents filed by Bain with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The TPM piece noted that in documents from July 2000 and February 2001 Romney listed his "principal occupation" as "Managing Director" of Bain, for example. And the Globe story reported that Bain repeatedly listed him on government filings as the man in charge.
On a media conference call about the Globe story, Stephanie Cutter, Obama's deputy campaign manager, said the story proves that Romney had "full control" of Bain during this time and "therefore directly responsible" for decisions made at companies in which Bain invested. "Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony. Or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments," Cutter said.
But we see little new in any of these SEC filings, and a University of Pennsylvania Law School professor we spoke to sees no basis for the Obama campaign's claim that Romney committed a felony.
Gregory he "retroactively retired," whatever that may mean.
Secondly, you are slightly off-topic. The "Tricky Mitt" appellation is about Romney's determination to keep his tax returns locked away from public view. George Will, The National Review,Texas Governor Rick Perry, former Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour, Iowa Senator Charles Grassley and Georgia Senator Johnny Isakson have all called on Willard to release his returns. This interesting because it is roughly analogous to RepubliCONs calling for Nixon to come clean three decades ago.
Third, there are other glaring questions about Willard's financial dealings. For Example, what does he need with Swiss and Cayman Island secret accounts if he's not hiding income from the IRS. Willard may be a crook. Inquiring minds want to know.
No maybe about it! He definitely is hiding his taxes prior to 2010 and even those aren't complete!
And he was either lying to the State of Massachusetts when he was running for governor and he said he was a resident of the state because he was still running Bain Capital and attending board meetings of the companies it had captured OR he's lying to us now when he says he had nothing to do with decisions at Bain Capital then, despite the fact he was not just CEO, but SOLE SHAREHOLDER.
Business Record (at Bain)
McCain didn't that these stories were "crazy".
McCain 2008 Opposition file on Romney, pages 31-36