In Axelrod: Romney 'not qualified' to be president under his own definition, Jennifer Epstein describes David Axelrod catching Mitt Romney playing tricks with his recently released 2011 tax return and how Axelrod zings Mitt with some of his own campaign PR fluffery, in his appearance on ABC's "This Week."
"Two months ago on your own air, he said that anybody who didn't take the deductions they were owed wasn't qualified to be president," Axelrod said on ABC's "This Week." "Well, I guess he's not qualified, because that's exactly what he did last week to try and get his number up from 9 percent or 10 percent to 14 percent."
"It's fair to say that a lot of those 47 percent that he was slandering earlier in the week probably pay more -- a higher percentage of their income in taxes overall than he does," Axelrod added.
The top Obama strategist made clear the campaign isn't yielding on the issue. "You know, we learned some things. But he still hasn't disclosed any years before 2010. His father was the one who set the standard -- 12 years -- and you know why?" Axelrod said. " He said you put out one or two years, you can manipulate them to give false impressions. So the question for people is, what?"
And, in a well executed bridge, Axelrod links Mitt Romney's evasiveness about his personal income taxes, to his equally evasive refusal to tell us any details about which loopholes he will close to achieve his vague promises to balance the budget, by noting, "the bigger issue isn't that he isn't being straight about his own taxes. The bigger issue is that he isn't being straight about what he's going to do to everyone else's taxes."
We need to keep up the demand that Mitt Romney release his taxes back to the 1999 Bain period he made so controversial by his own contradictory statements and SEC filings. Mitt Romney will probably not release any more taxes, nor provide any more details about his post-election tax plans for the rest of us, but we shouldn't give him a free ride. He's going to be looking for a "game-changer" in these last six weeks before the election. We should keep him off balance and remind voters he still hasn't come clean, and continues his persistent pattern of evasiveness.