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" (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)      By now, the steady media rum-tum-tumming about Willard Romney&amp;#039;s incredibly preposterous, goddamned-near-to-the-Ottoman-Emperor&amp;#039;s wealt... er... his tax returns should be proof enough that this attempt to squash the issue has worked about as well at putting something &amp;quot;to bed&amp;quot; as bringing a date to a Rick Santorum event would. (I&amp;#039;m not kidding. Five minutes into a Santorum speech and Jenna Jameson would join the Poor Clares.) In no particular order, Willard is being pilloried for:  a) his hilariously low tax rate of 13.9 percent;  b) his stashing of money in various off-shore locations familiar to fans of Miami Vice; c) the politically tone-deaf manner in which he stonewalled for so long that he winds up being described as having &amp;quot;acquiesced&amp;quot; to &amp;quot;surrendering&amp;quot; the documents, as though CNN had subpoena power; and  d) the fact that he only released his returns for the past two years. What&amp;#039;s in the ones from the previous decade must be utterly dazzling indeed. (My favorite part is how his braniac consultants got him to close his Swiss bank accounts because they might one day become a political embarrassment, and Willard responded by moving his money to the Caymans. So, instead of having his dough stashed next to some Nazi gold, he now has it stashed next to the riches of every narco-billionnaire in the Western Hemisphere. Scoreboard!) The whole thing&amp;#039;s a mess now, and the most remarkable thing about it is that it didn&amp;#039;t have to be. It&amp;#039;s passing strange how maladroit Willard is in confronting who he actually is \u2014 a legacy millionnaire who used his brains and his family connections to make himself so filthy rich that his children are now legacy billionaires. Why can&amp;#039;t he just come out and say that? I don&amp;#039;t think it would have hurt his chances of winning the Republican nomination \u2014 not in the long run, anyway. (His complete lack of human social skills, and the fact that we in Massachusetts once forced him to take some humane positions on the social issues are what&amp;#039;s killing him there.) What he says about President Obama isn&amp;#039;t any less of a lie because he&amp;#039;s rich. His ideas for turning the economy aren&amp;#039;t any better or worse because he&amp;#039;s rich.  You&amp;#039;re a rich guy. Everybody knows you&amp;#039;re a rich guy. This can be a drawback for some voters. (It wasn&amp;#039;t in Massachusetts.) You had to know going in that running for president four years after your renegade buddies nearly blew up the world was going to be an issue you had to confront. There was a way to do it. Release everything, all at once. Be the media&amp;#039;s breakfast for a few days in 2010, and then let everything pass, and then go to work on how you are going to sell it in the general election. After all, it&amp;#039;s not like the Republican party is committed root-and-branch to economic populism, no matter how successful fakes like Newt Gingrich and Santorum have been at pretending that it is.  It&amp;#039;s the strangest combination of armored arrogance and petulant insecurity. It&amp;#039;s not that he&amp;#039;s so bad at explaining himself to the country. I just think he&amp;#039;s never fully explained himself to himself, and a presidential campaign is the worst possible vehicle for doing something like that on the fly. There was a long, now-lost moment in this campaign in which he could have handled this deftly and been rid of it. Why he so missed the signs is the hidden question at the heart of who he is as a politician. Hell, at his most basic, this guy is a salesman \u2014 and, by all accounts, a pretty good one. Now I&amp;#039;m thinking we were really lucky that the Winter Olympics didn&amp;#039;t wind up being held on Guam. (Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12505/romney-tax-return-6644092/>