Romney Digs in on Refusal to Release More Tax Returns as Campaign Drops Gloves
Mitt Romney remained defiant Tuesday in the face of relentless pressure to release more of his tax returns, while his campaign dropped further hints that he would soon be unveiling the long-awaited identity of his running mate.
“The opposition research of the Obama campaign is looking for anything they can use to distract from the failure of the president to reignite our economy,” Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, said in an interview with the conservative National Review Online.
“I’m simply not enthusiastic about giving them hundreds or thousands of more pages to pick through, distort and lie about.”
Earlier in the day, there was evidence the Romney campaign was heeding calls to fight back against Obama’s damaging attacks on their candidate when surrogate John Sununu told reporters: “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.”
Sununu, the former governor of New Hampshire, said Obama “has no idea how the American system functions.”
“And we shouldn’t be surprised about that, because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, and when he came to the U.S. worked as a community organizer — which is a socialized structure — and then got into politics in Chicago.”
The increasingly nasty barbs reflect a presidential race that’s getting more brutal by the day, in particular since the Obama campaign began accusing Romney of hiding something by refusing to release more tax returns while assailing him about the true length of his tenure at investment firm Bain Capital.