All this talk of Romney hiding his tax records for nefarious reasons got me thinking and exploring.
NOTE: For the record, I think it's a great campaign strategy to attack Romney, and I think that Romney cheated on his taxes by not declaring income from his offshore accounts, and took advantage of the tax amnesty in 2009 - and that this would be more damaging then not having paid taxes for a while (legally.)
It seems that the GOP meme, as expressed by Steve Forbes in particular, is to demand that Obama release his school records. The right-wing blogosphere thinks that something like Obama being registered as a foreign student, or the recipient of a race-based affirmative action scholarship, etc., could be in there. Looking at this objectively at first glance, it does seem to me that this is just as fair a demand as for the Democrats to demand Romney's tax returns.
With that said, could there be anything damaging? If not, why would Obama not want to release them? We got to see Perry's near-horrific grades, and we all suspect that Obama's grades were much better. Now I can understand that there should be a certain level of privacy in such records - including tax records beyond the statutory years as demanded by campaign laws - but if a campaign is going to make a big deal out of it, they have to realize that they then leave themselves open to the charge of hypocrisy by not releasing similar records.