The long-running, multi-episode story of the Republican presumptive nominee’s taxes has burst back into flame with Harry Reid’s incendiary announcement that he was informed that Romney didn’t pay any federal income taxes for 10 years.
One reason for this turn of events is something in story theory called “negative capability.” It means that an important hole in the story exists, so that some essential piece of the story is missing, perhaps even a whole chapter or sequence of events. From a storyteller’s point of view, this gap affords users/audience members an opportunity to fill in the blank with their own fantasies, ideas, or imaginings about what might have happened.
The negative capability of the black hole of Mitt’s missing tax returns has spawned an industry of speculation, generating more pages than the returns-in-absentia would have comprised. But there’s something else missing, something that the more you think about it, the curioser it gets.
The starting point is in 2008, when Romney turned in his returns to the McCain staff for VP vetting…
(follow the screed over the orange croissant)
Back then, the McCain staff asked for and received some recent tax returns. They studied them – but they must have asked for more because, in the end, they got two decades of tax documents that included most of the “Bountiful Bain Years.” In all, Romney gave up 22 years of tax returns.
The implication of this set of actions is this: Why hasn’t McCain said: “I have seen Mitt Romney’s tax returns, going back 22 years, and I can tell you that there is no way he didn’t pay taxes for five or six years, let alone 10 years. I haven’t seen his returns since 2008, so I don’t know about what may have happened after that. But as far as anything before 2008, I’ve seen them – and Harry Reid is flat wrong.”
This would seem to be the minimum statement that a loyal Republican elder statesman would offer. Thus, the negative capability inherent in the Mitt’s 10 years of hidden tax returns could be defused easily.
But McCain hasn’t done that. Why not? Okay, this particular break in the story affords me the chance to exercise my own creative imagination to fill in the blanks:
1. McCain can’t make that claim – Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for several of the years covered by the years the campaign examined (so McCain provided his astonishingly tepid response on July 17, saying there was “nothing that disqualified Romney for President.” However, he also explicitly refused to say if Romney had or had not paid taxes during any of the years that he saw);
2. McCain saw tax strategies (note the McCains are hugely wealthy) that made him uneasy with further tarnishing his credibility to vouch for the purity of Romney’s returns;
3. Romney requested that McCain say nothing further about the subject;
4. McCain doesn’t like Romney much and would just as soon him roast on the spit a little longer; or
5. One of McCain’s staff, holding a grudge over the Romney 2008 primary dirty tricks, leaked information to Harry Reid’s sources.
There’s a second aspect of Romney’s tax mystery. Given his decision to run in 2008 and then again in 2012, why aren’t his taxes squeaky clean?
The answer might be that there was a Democratic sweep in 2008, with (apparently premature) opinions circulating that the GOP might not recover for years, even decades. Add to that was the economic collapse in the US, threatening to spread around the world.
Hedge fund artists and other financial wizards took massive losses. Estimates of Romney’s losses run as high as $50 million. (This figure is truly an estimate, because his net worth is unknown; but if his net worth at the time was $300, his losses might have run as high as $100. To estimate $50 million is not unreasonable in the context of the 38.5 percent decline experienced by many mutual stock funds and retail investors at that time.)
When they have suffered losses, the typical tax strategy of the financial class is to “realize” massive paper losses to offset real capital gains and other passive income for the current and subsequent years. Thus, it is possible that the Romneys succumbed to their temptation to zero out, or nearly zero out, their 2008 and 2009 tax liabilities. They had just lost their bid for the Presidency, faced the prospect that no Republican would become president in 2012, and had no assurance he would even become the Republican nominee in 2012. At that time, there were also some high-powered potential candidates who might have run, in spite of the ass clown show the Repubs ultimately committed.
And after all, there’s the limousine class maxim: “We don’t pay taxes, only the little people pay taxes,” famously expressed by tax felon, Leona Helmsley, convicted of federal tax evasion in 1989.
Fast forward to 2010. The R’s demonize the Affordable Care Act, channel populist fear to create an Astroturf Tea Party, pinch off a vulnerable recovery, and take control of the House. Romney thinks, “Golly, now I can run for President – but I haven’t paid any taxes for two years.” Being not quite so tone deaf as to delude himself that his claims to love America (and Michigan’s trees) won’t conflict with his shenanigans to avoid taxes for two years, the Romney’s try to take the high ground with brave, inspiring statements such as: “I’ve done what the law demands” and “It’s none of your business, I don’t have to give anything to you people.”
During the primary, he attempts to brazen his way through the season. And it might have worked, but for his carpeting-bombing of Gingrich and the revenge of the Newtster. This is so High Drama, so profoundly ironic -- a character sowing the seeds of his own destruction. It’s worthy of Shakespearean treatment, no?
So now in 2012, the only serious and leading Republican contender is committed to a path of withholding his tax returns, a gap in his political narrative that spawns an ocean of negative capability from dozens of analysts, pundits, and political operators.
So what’s next on the Negative Capability front?
How about a repeat of Larry Flint’s bounty for Repub philanderers.
Let’s hope someone offers a million dollar reward for evidence of a zero-balance Romney 1040!! O come ye disgruntled Bain employees, country club competitors, tax preparation lawyers… or could it be former staffers from the 2008 McCain campaign?