The Bain cloud hanging over Mitt Romney is growing daily. GOPers worried about Bain barrage

On the facts, nothing terribly new was added to the Bain equation by the Boston Globe story charging that Mitt Romney controlled the company for three years longer than he previously claimed. Several fact-checking organizations said the charges aren’t exactly breaking news and Romney’s denials have some validity.

The problem for the Romney campaign, when it comes to the Bain issue, is that things are reaching the point where the facts don’t really matter. The bigger problem is that the Bain cloud now hanging over the former Massachusetts governor is growing daily, and the Romney campaign still hasn’t found a compelling way to respond to what’s becoming the driving narrative, fairly or unfairly, of the 2012 campaign.


After the Globe reported that Romney formally led Bain longer than he’d previously acknowledged — an allegation that Team Romney adamantly contests — Republicans worried that their soon-to-be nominee hasn’t sufficiently answered numerous questions swirling around his Bain tenure.

( Also on POLITICO: Obama camp wages war over Bain 'cloud')

A senior Romney strategist said Thursday that the campaign had a plan and wouldn’t be distracted from implementing it, despite pressure from outsiders. The strategist called the new charges part of an old line of attack that had already been thoroughly aired.

“We went through this in the primary,” the adviser said. “You have a lot of people inside the Beltway, who like to sit back and be armchair quarterbacks, strategists who talk to you and don’t go on the record. We have a plan. We know what the plan is, and we’re going to implement the plan.”

The adviser added: “We aren’t reacting to what the Obama campaign does. … We aren’t reacting to what Republican strategists do. We’ve got a plan to win. We know what it takes and that’s what we’re going to do. All of this hew and cry, you know, from the bedwetters who get to sit on the sidelines, aren’t going to affect what we’re going to do and our plan.”

In many ways, the Globe story didn’t break a lot of new ground, as several truth squad reports pointed out. It simply renewed focus on the fact that Romney has always stated that he technically left Bain in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Olympics, while maintaining legal and financial ties to the company that didn’t include actively managing its affairs or investments.

There was no evidence that the newest allegations had changed that, although Romney’s campaign sought a correction from the Globe, a move they’ve tried with similar stories at other publications in the past. The Globe stood by its story.

The campaign released its first television ad responding to the claims that Romney outsourced jobs on Thursday morning, which pointed to fact-checking reports and used a four-year old video of Hillary Clinton admonishing Obama during the primary.

Fortune published a story on Thursday afternoon detailing confidential reports from Bain that were “obtained” by the magazine and countered the Globe’s timeline.

But Republicans warned that none of that would make Bain go away as a political issue.

“Mitt Romney had an opportunity to answer these questions during the primary,” said Rick Tyler, who ran the pro-Gingrich super PAC that spent millions attacking Romney on the Bain issue. “ He did not answer these questions and now they’re coming up again.”

Tyler warned that the newest Bain twist has the potential to inflict real harm if Romney doesn’t start providing answers.

“I saw Andrea Saul’s robotic response, which was the same as it’s always been,” Tyler said, referring to Romney’s press secretary. “That doesn’t comport with documents that have his name on it after 1999 that list him as CEO who was making money off of transactions. If he wasn’t making money from Bain, then his tax returns from the period in question would reveal that.”

Tyler said Romney needs to be frank and provide all the details necessary to explain his role in the company after 1999. He hypothesized that there could be more documents to come.

“Only [Romney] can provide that information,” Tyler said. “Or we’ll just have drip, drip, drip to November.”

“He needs to get way out in front of it, explain it with detail No. 1 to 100,” said former Mike Huckabee manager Chip Saltsman.

“It festers, because in today’s world an attack that doesn’t have a response, no matter how ridiculous it starts to sound, people will start to believe it,” Saltsman said.

Democrats are weaving the latest Bain news into an overall narrative of wealth and secrecy that they hope will be simply unpalatable to voters, tying it together with Romney refusing to release his tax returns and ads hitting him for setting up offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands.

Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter on Thursday called Romney the “most secretive candidate to run for president since Richard Nixon.”

“Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony,” Cutter said. “Or, he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments,” including layoffs and outsourcing jobs.

GOP consultant Rick Wilson said Romney now has an opening to attack Obama’s operation for calling him a felon; the Republican did demand an apology from Obama’s campaign for Cutter’s remarks, but Chicago declined.

”Romney has an opening to go right to the trustworthiness of the Obama message operation from top to bottom. They’ve already been pushing back hard on this with media on the phony outsourcing issue,” Wilson said. “As always, fortune favors the bold.”

Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist who worked for Jon Huntsman during the primary, said the controversy could be solved if Romney were to release his tax returns, acknowledging that no one wants to put their financials out there but that it has become necessary.

“I feel like we are watching a rerun of an episode from the Republican primary with the return of the releasing of taxes issue,” she said. “It turned into a big deal during the primary, and pretty much got diffused when he released the one-year of returns. I wish he’d hurry up and release more tax returns so this distraction would go away.”

She added that they’re only apt to show he made a lot of money and followed the laws.

“He should just release the stupid taxes and eliminate the Obama campaign tactic of insinuating he’s got something to hide. The Obama people are going to keep the issue alive and it has the potential of mushrooming into a bigger issue,” she said. “It’s time to just pull off the band-aid.”

Following Thursday’s story, the problem for Romney is if voters believe he was firmly linked to the company post-1999, it will torpedo what has thus far been the Republican’s defense against many Democratic attacks against his Bain tenure.

President Barack Obama and Democrats say Bain’s companies, and by extension Romney, laid off workers and outsourced jobs, shipping them overseas. But many of those acts happened after 1999, when Romney says he wasn’t responsible because he was no longer truly running Bain. But the Globe report showing Romney linked to the private equity firm as late as 2002 could contradict those claims, at least in the eyes of voters.

“It could be a real problem,” said GOP strategist Mark McKinnon. “The accumulation of stories about taxes and Bain and offshore and Swiss accounts and secrecy begin to put glue into the narrative Team Obama is pushing that could make it really start to stick.”

Romney’s business experience is his strongest selling point as he frequently argues his time in the private sector makes him more qualified than Obama to fix the economy. The Democratic attacks are starting to get labeled as the equivalent of the “Swift Boat” offensive that sunk John Kerry’s presidential campaign over his Vietnam war record.

Romney is violating a basic rule of politics, GOP strategist Ford O’Connell warns: Define yourself before your opponent does it for you.

“He needs to get out ahead of this and put this issue to rest before it becomes a major distraction,” O’Connell said. “He has yet to do it and if he doesn’t do it, Obama is going to do it for him.”

Not answering has the potential to eat away at Romney’s support in swing states.

“We’re starting to see evidence in some of the battleground states that this is working in the favor of the president,” O’Connell said. “There are only so many more of these chinks in the armor Romney can take.”

Banking on voters casting their ballots against Obama without Romney providing his own vision or plan is a “fool’s errand,” O’Connell said. “The key for Romney is to define himself and provide a bold, clear vision for the future,” he said.

Kellyanne Conway, a Republican pollster who worked for Gingrich during the primary, said Romney can easily turn the Bain attacks into a positive by showing voters the kind of household names that were associated with the firm.

She said Romney should explain that Bain helped create Staples, Sports Authority and Burger King, well-known retailers that voters will associated with success. Romney has already done some of this, but in a very limited way.

“Romney can convert the response into an opportunity to explain what it is he did at Bain. He didn’t just show up and make a quarter of a billion dollars. He helped to start to launch or expand companies,” Conway said. “He should respond for two reasons: to show it’s just a distraction and to show that the big people talk about big ideas and small people talk about other people.”

Dylan Byers and Jennifer Epstein contributed to this report.