Mitt Romney Lost the Summer: Tax Returns, Overseas Gaffes, & More

Labor Day is weeks away, but the battle of the summer is over—and Obama won. Robert Shrum on the unreleased tax returns, easily foreseen Bain attacks, Olympic stumbles, inept tax plan, and other calamities that sank Romney.

After the worst foreign excursion of any presidential hopeful since his father visited Vietnam and announced afterward that he was “brainwashed,” trippy Mitt found no surcease of sorrow in an unwelcome return home.

Surrounded by Secret Service, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney hops on a picnic table to address a crowd gathering outside the Jefferson County Fairgrounds building in Golden, Colorado, on August 2, 2012. (Melina Mara / The Washington Post, via Getty Images)

The first blow came from a brace of polls. The Pew Research Center showed Romney suddenly behind Barack Obama by 10 points, with the president above the crucial 50 percent mark. Quinnipiac/CBS/New York Times surveys in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania had Obama hitting or exceeding that mark, with leads between 6 and 11 percent. The underlying numbers were more ominous for Romney. His favorable/unfavorable, already underwater in Pew’s June numbers, collapsed from -6 to -15. No nominee in either party has entered the final phase of the race so tarnished in the American mind.

Republicans assailed the Pew and Quinnipiac polls with the fervor they usually reserve for inconvenient truths about climate change or the Affordable Care Act. But while they can quibble with figures, the overall lay of the swing-state land is clear. On Aug. 1, The New York Times’ Nate Silver had the president ahead in every one of his 10 “tipping-point states.”

The problem with Romney isn’t just what the Obama campaign has done to him, but what he has done to himself. Months ago, as he struggled through the GOP primaries, we learned in the debates and in his days on the trail, and he should have learned it too, that he can’t trust his mouth. From “I’m also unemployed” to the $10,000 bet—the list is legion—Romney blurted out a discordant symphony of tone-deaf proof that he was out of touch and perhaps out of his depth. He instinctively says the wrong thing.

As the debate over Romney’s taxes rages, Peter Beinart and Dan Gross discuss whether his returns are even relevant.

A prudent campaign would corral the candidate, scheduling practice and more practice, and abjuring spontaneity. The latter wouldn’t sacrifice anything anyway, as scripted or not, he sounds like Romney the robot. It’s doubtful that he can’t memorize, but it’s indisputable that he can’t tell a joke. When he tries, the joke is generally on him. And it’s political malpractice for his political handlers to let him, or for him to insist on breaching the bounds of his buttoned-down persona. Richard Nixon found this out the hard way in 1960, and eight years later, in his second run for the White House, he was tightly contained, sanitized, and successfully resistant to any debate with his opponent Hubert Humphrey.