Ed Gillespie is catching a world of criticism this morning for ‘retroactively retired‘ and the whole Mitt team is getting lectured on extremely poor handling of offshore accounts, outsourcing, and Romney’s quantum physics approach to having been CEO and not CEO of Bain at the same time. But any campaign operative or observer will tell you that it’s very, very difficult for a campaign to be more forthcoming, agile or aware than the candidate himself.A question: why exactly did Romney do his full media blitz Friday afternoon? I strongly suspect it was driven in large measure by Romney’s personal umbrage at being called a liar or having the word ‘felony’ spoken even in proximity to his name. The only logic of doing that kind of full court press is to bring forth something new to the table that can change the direction of the debate. But the only thing that counted as somewhat new was Romney’s emphatic restatement that he’d release only this and last year’s tax returns.

When pressed on how it is that a CEO isn’t responsible for what a company does, Romney reacted much more out of frustration and emotion than political logic …

CBS News’s Jan Crawford asked Romney that even if he wasn’t involved in day-to-day operations at Bain, as the listed owner of the company, “Doesn’t the buck stop with you?” Romney insisted he should not be politically liable for anything that happened after 1999. “Actually, when you leave an enterprise and you have other people who are managing the enterprise, who take responsibility for the investment decisions, who decide who’s going to get hired and fired, who decide compensation decisions, they’re the managers, they’re the people running the business,” Romney said.

I think the best angle on what’s happening here comes from TPM Reader WM …