A Backhanded Defense of Mitt Romney

Romney has gone out of his way to point out that he left Bain Capital in 1999, so the Obama campaign claim that he was running it when the company liquidated (and fired the staffs of) a bunch of companies. So when the Boston Globe dug a little and found that Romney is listed as "sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president" of the company until 2002 according to documents filed with the SEC, the Obama campaign ran with that in a big way.

My gut feeling is this is a non issue - I don't read SEC filings but he could have stopped running the company while still maintaining the need to have SOMEONE in those slots on the forms. Probably the company was run by an autonomous subordinate, but in order to avoid contractual problems they couldn't "promote" him for a few years. Plausible.

Where I can fault the Romney campaign is that they don't offer any evidence one way or the other. You can't just say, "I'm a politician, trust me." That's crazy talk. You know what might help? If we had access to 12 years of tax returns.