Two days after that, Michael Kranish and Beth Healy of the Boston Globe published a story headlined: “The story behind Romney and the junk bond king.”

The junk bond king was the infamous Michael Milken, who headed Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. and ended up being sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered to pay $600 million in fines and restitution for securities fraud.

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At the time of Romney’s financial dealings with Milken, the Globe reported, “it was widely known that Milken and his company were under federal investigation, yet Romney decided to go ahead with the deal … saying, ‘It was fun while it lasted.’”

Romney used the money he got from Milken’s company “to turn a $10 million investment into a $175 million profit for himself, his partners and his investors.”

The killer quotation in the story comes from Marc Wolpow, “a former Drexel employee who was involved in the deal and later was hired by Romney to work at Bain Capital.”

“Mitt, I think, spent his life balanced between fear and greed,” Wolpow said. “He knew that he had to make a lot of money to launch his political career.”

The Romney campaign has mounted a defense to these stories, but its greatest luck so far is that the public often does not focus on stories that are both lengthy and deal with complex financial matters.

People often demand that the media dig out the “truth” rather than just deal in “he said/ she said” stories, but the public has to be willing to read, listen and absorb the truth.

You can lead the public to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Yet the Romney campaign has to be worried about how many more shoes are going to drop. After awhile, the public develops an impression of a candidate, even if it doesn’t follow the details behind that impression.

Those people who think this election is going to be determined by the unemployment figure released on the Monday before Election Day are wrong. You can’t beat an incumbent president with a statistic. You have to beat him with a better choice.

And if that choice is between Obama and the guy who balanced his life between “fear and greed,” then Obama has a real chance.

Roger Simon is POLITICO’s chief political columnist.