To help answer these questions, I turned to a couple political strategists not involved with the presidential campaign: Jim Jordan, who helped run the early stages of John Kerry's 2004 campaign, and Tad Devine, who co-directed Ted Kennedy's successful 1994 Senate campaign against Romney. I’ll go through each question in turn.

1. Has the press fallen down on the job? A reporter who’s spent time traveling with Romney confirms what I suspected, that the pack gave up a long time ago trying to get the campaign to cough up the bundler lists and additional tax records. It’s not hard to see why: at some point, the campaign’s refusal to disclose comes to be seen as an old story, and a reporter risks being seen as a pest for persisting in the demand. Still, it seems like the press—not just the traveling pack, but everyone—could have done more to stay on the case, to be, as Grist's Dave Roberts argued for a few months ago, “prosecutors for the truth,” constantly pressing the case for transparency on the public’s behalf. Devine recalls a time the 1988 presidential campaign when someone very high up at the New York Times -- he thinks it may even have been the then-publisher, the recently deceased Arthur Sulzberger —sent Devine a letter at the Dukakis campaign and demanded the release of all of running mate Lloyd Bentsen’s financial and health records, beyond the little the campaign had put out. The campaign called back and said it was reluctant to do so. As Devine recalls, the Times executive “said, ‘We’d like the records and if we don't get them, it’s going to be a problem, okay? Bye.’ I was like, ‘Oh, shit.’” The campaign got the records together and released them. Why isn’t anyone doing the equivalent today? “Maybe there’s nobody like that anymore,” said Devine. “But maybe if everyone got together, the TV networks and the major newspapers, and demanded it...”



2. Should the Obama campaign have done more? The press almost certainly would’ve stayed on the case of the tax records and bundler list if the Obama campaign had kept making an issue of them. It did so for much of the summer, releasing hard-edged ads such as this one, and getting a hand from Harry Reid and his declarations that a well-placed source had told him Romney had paid no federal income taxes to speak of for the past decade. But while the campaign has picked up its attacks on Romney’s lack of policy details, it has said virtually nothing in recent weeks about Romney’s lack of tax and bundler disclosures. Obama brought up Romney’s low tax rate at the second debate, but did not bring up his paltry disclosure (nor did any moderator at the three debates bother to ask about it.) Seen one way, this looks like a mistake by the Obama campaign: while Romney’s personal approval rating fell during the summer attacks on his tax murkiness and record at Bain Capital, it surged following his strong performance at the first debate. Why not bring the tax records back into the conversation for the home stretch?

The strategists I spoke with said it was clear why the campaign had not done so: it was too late in the game. “I assume the Obama guys feel it’s a little small-bore for the close,” said Jordan, who spent this campaign season working with a SuperPAC backing congressional candidates. “They go in big at the end, with more thematic matters. The dots have been assembled and now it’s time to get the American people to pull back and see what the dots add up to.” Not to mention, he said, that bringing the tax returns back up would probably not work with the remaining undecided voters. “It’s also about your audience,” he said. "The sliver of Americans you’re still talking to are not political and are not particularly attentive and probably wouldn’t even get it if you went back at it.” Devine agreed: “After the first debate, [Obama] probably figured it would look whiny and little and Romney was looking big for a couple weeks there. For them to go down that road would've diminished them when they already seemed diminished.” And even now, with Obama having regained some momentum, it didn’t make much sense, Devine said, to bring the issue back up, when there are “bigger things” such as Sandy and the improving economic indicators to talk about.