Having money, on balance, is a net positive in life, but studies of happiness caution that great wealth doesn’t necessarily improve well-being.

For Mitt Romney, it may actually be an impediment. In his campaign for president, Romney’s personal fortune has proved to be a tender subject as well as the source material for many of his worst gaffes. If only his wealth could rest demurely in the Cayman Islands. Instead, it rears up at politically inopportune moments, prompting Romney to offer Texas Gov. Rick Perry a $10,000 bet at a debate; to announce his affinity for “Nascar owners” and his disdain for fans dressed in plastic ponchos; to declare his enjoyment of firing people and to make a joke about being unemployed himself.

His wife, Ann, he told us, has two Cadillacs, which helps to explain both the need for a car lift at the couple’s oceanfront house and the conclusion, reached by 89 percent of respondents in a YouGov poll, that Romney “cares about the wealthy.”

Columnist Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper that sympathetically chronicles the abuses heaped on the upper class by an ungrateful hoi polloi, warned that photos of the Romneys vacationing on New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee (with yet another mansion in the background) was a jet ski too far. In a nation where median family income has been losing ground for more than a decade, is it too much to ask Romney at least to pretend that he understands the ways of commoners?

Apparently it is. Members of the Republican establishment, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former party Chairman Haley Barbour and talking heads of the class Bill Kristol and George Will, have urged Romney to fork over multiple years of tax returns, as countless candidates, including Romney’s own father, have done before him.