The idea was to quell the request for information about Romney's personal finances. | REUTERS Mitt tax release puzzles strategists

Mitt Romney’s decision to release tax information he’d said was off the table revives an issue seven weeks before Election Day that had finally faded from view, and it could give Democrats new fodder for their caricature of Romney as a secretive businessman.

Republicans are hopeful a piece of the information released Friday that he’d always promised — Romney’s full 2011 tax return — adds little to change the story. Voters already know that Romney is rich — now they know his effective tax rate was 14.1 percent last year.


( Also on POLITICO: See and download Romney's 2011 tax return)

Yet even without the new releases, polls showed Democrats have successfully branded Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy linked to a questionable web of international financial dealings. Releasing additional years worth of tax returns probably wouldn’t help Romney reverse that perception, if that’s even possible at this point.

It was the summary of 20 additional years worth of data, providing tax rate averages but no income information, that could raise more questions.

( Also on POLITICO: Romney releases 2011 tax returns)

“My initial reaction to it is, once again, the Romney campaign wants the worst of both worlds,” said Democratic strategist Jonathan Prince. “All the summary does is raise lots of questions on what the summary hides. At the same time, it completely left everyone hungry for more. … (And) they’re conceding that (that) information is somewhat relevant to being asked for and they’re also continuing to hide it. It’s not like they’re trying to have it both ways — they’re trying to lose it both ways.”

Romney’s aides said the decision was made to release the summary information after Romney told an interviewer a few weeks ago that he would have to go back and look up his effective tax rate over the past 10 years.

“He went back and checked, and then stated that in the last 10 years, he has never paid less than 13 percent of his income in taxes,” the aide said. “Following that, he decided to go ahead and release this summary information covering the last 20 years.”

The idea, one source close to Romney’s campaign said, was to quell what aides believe would be a constant request for information about the former Bain Capital head’s personal finances.

Romney has been adamant throughout the 2012 election that he would not release what the Democrats have demanded. Indeed, during the Republican primaries, he resisted releasing the 2010 tax return his GOP opponents called for. (Under pressure, Romney relented.)

Democrats have exploited the issue for months, most famously when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made the claim, without offering any proof, that a former Bain investor told him Romney didn’t pay taxes for multiple years. And Democrats have repeatedly pointed out that Romney released multiple years of returns when he was vetted by Sen. John McCain in 2008 as a vice presidential nominee.

McCain, in a statement put out by the campaign Friday, said it was time for people to move on to issues the country cares about. They mostly had, since the party conventions at the end of the summer.

Reid pressed down anew after the release, in a statement reported by former Las Vegas Sun reporter Jon Ralston, in which the senator used the opportunity to skewer Romney for choosing not to deduct some of his charitable contributions to raise his tax rate to above 13 percent (Romney had earlier told voters that he had never paid less than a 13 percent income tax rate).

Reid rapped Romney for having “manipulated one of the only two years of tax returns he’s seen fit to show the American people — and then only to ‘conform’ with his public statements. That raises the question: What else in those returns has Romney manipulated?”

There will be more where that came from, of which Romney aides are aware. The decision was made to release the 2011 return so that there would be some distance between that headline and the debate, and to do the best the campaign can with an issue on which voters have likely already absorbed a lot of information.

There was also no ideal time for the release of the information, but Friday was after five days spent discussing remarks Romney made in a secretly taped fundraising video about 47 percent of Americans considering themselves “victims,” and not paying taxes. Providing information about his own tax rate seems geared toward eliminating the question about whether he himself has at any point not paid taxes, but without providing the returns themselves.

But this sets up the discussion next week to be at least in part about Romney’s taxes, instead of letting the GOP nominee change the subject to get back to a message from which he has been repeatedly knocked off.

That Democrats turned Romney’s Swiss bank account and other items in his 2010 return into an issue has been among the reasons that both Ann and Mitt Romney have given for not wanting to give more information to the public, arguing that it was merely a trove for opposition researchers.

But for many in the GOP, Romney’s taxes look like an issue on which the Republican nominee has already lost.

“At first I thought this was an April Fool’s joke,” said 2008 Romney campaign strategist Alex Castellanos, who is currently unaligned with campaigns, referring to the Friday afternoon tax dump.

“But it isn’t April. I can’t imagine that David Axelrod will now say, ‘I’m glad Mitt put this issue behind him.’ This will drag Mitt’s taxes back into the debate. And there’s not many days left. I just can’t imagine why they would do this. There are 40 days left and you have now made more of them about Mitt’s taxes. … You don’t serve a life sentence and then confess afterward. They’ve taken their beating on this (already). … I just don’t understand how a (being) ‘little pregnant’ strategy (works).”

If Romney’s approach to the tax returns represents a kind of worst-of-both-worlds option — giving the opposition some information to pick over, but not enough to claim full transparency — his campaign only had so many options for handling an unhelpful issue.

California-based Republican strategist Rob Stutzman, who handled a delicate tax return debate in Meg Whitman’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign, said the best policy is: “The more transparency the better.”

“For whatever reason, this wasn’t done a year ago, but what’s important now is that it shows a willingness to be transparent and eliminate distractions to the core message push of the campaign to keep the focus on the president’s failure to lead effectively,” he said.

Republican strategist Rich Galen said the 20-year summary Romney released would have been a more effective tactic if it had been deployed a long time ago — but that it might still be enough to get the job done now.

“This 20-year thing would have been a good solution if they had done it, you know, midway through Obama’s first term and by now it would be two-year-old news,” Galen said, adding of the transparency issue: “People can complain about it but at some point they say, that’s enough.”

The Romney team may have handled the issue as well as it could, Galen said, given the candidate’s preference to keep most information private: “There’s a saying in politics that a plan that includes something the boss won’t do is not a plan.”

In a series of statements from prominent Republican officials Friday afternoon, the Romney campaign signaled that it would prefer not to linger on the tax issue. The GOP refrain was that it’s time to focus on the “real” issues in the 2012 campaign.

“Mitt Romney has now released more than 1,200 pages of tax returns, giving voters an incredibly detailed look at his finances. Now that the most recent tax return has been released, it’s time to get back to discussing the issues that voters care about,” Arizona Sen. John McCain said in one release.

But Democrats indicated they had no intention of moving on. In fact, senior party officials said that Romney’s release of a selective statement from PriceWaterhouseCoopers, his accounting firm, would help them underscore his lack of transparency, in general.

Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, the Obama campaign co-chairman who lit up the Democratic National Convention with attacks on Romney’s overseas investments, said the PWC summary only highlights that “there’s so much it doesn’t tell us.”

“It just raises further questions and makes it reasonable for people to ask, what is he hiding?” Strickland said. “If we had the answer to that question, he would not have a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected president. And that’s not off the record.”

Said Strickland: “Mitt Romney releasing his tax summary Cliff’s Notes and expecting us to really understand his tax situation, how much he paid, when he paid them, under what conditions, would be like someone who went to see ‘Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter’ thinking they understood the meaning of the Civil War.”

Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist, said that “breathing new life into an issue that had pretty much disappeared seems pretty bizarre. Presumably, their polling shows that Romney’s obsession with secrecy is a growing problem and they’re worried about how Obama might use it during debates. Another inexplicable move by a clumsy candidate.”