Check out C.S. Lewis’s “Learning in Wartime.”

Much as those who are pro-life and those who are pro-choice might like this election to be decided on the question of abortion, it’s not going to be. So it makes no practical sense to dismiss everything else. Few people decide on which candidate to vote for based on abortion. So for the vast majority who aren’t single-issue voters, things like charitable giving, tax returns, offshore tax havens, and Medicare actually are relevant.

I just gave one above, but that’s the same kind of reasoning that critics gave about the Obama birth certificate and college grades? Why won’t he release them? Surely he has something to hide…innuendo, innuendo, wink, wink, nod, nod.

Obama was happy to let the birth-certificate thing hang out their for years because it made his opponents look stupid. Anytime anyone made any sort of comment about it, he could simply shake his head and say, “why aren’t we talking about the serious issues we face?” and be the reasonable party.

Romney, I think, is happy to let this hang out there for a different reason. It pits the pundit class against him which garners him sympathy from the Republican base. A base, I might add, which has been quite slow to warm to Romney. Romney was elected Governor in a blue state 10 years ago. If there was something damning about his tax returns in that time frame, don’t you think his opponents would have made hay with it? Don’t you think McCain would have used it to his advantage when his campaign was sputtering in 2007 (and nearly broke) to get himself back into the game? It is a nothing issue and Romney loses nothing.

George Will, Bill Kristol and Matthew Dowd just got that one wrong. Are they talking about it now? That’s the thing about being a pundit (of whatever stripe). You can just forget your mistakes and pretend they never happened and opine about the next big thing.

Mike Melendez,

How so? And if so, a lot of important conservatives/Republicans are guilty circular reasoning.

The fact is that Romney has given insufficient reason, in the face of calls from both Democrats and Republicans, for not making his returns public. What are plausible reasons other than concerns that something in the returns will hurt him politically? Granted, it may be something irrelevant or trivial, but that doesn’t mean it’s nonexistent. We do know that George Romney released 12 years’ of returns, so clearly we can’t say, “Like father, like son.”

Does the electorate deserve that kind of transparency? Does privacy mean nothing for politicians, at least at the National level? What will tax returns tell us about a politician that his publicly lived life does not? It’s not like Romney suddenly appeared on the scene and everybody needs to know of his past. His history is well documented.

Too much of this carping comes across as an attempt to divert any substantive discussion on issues that affect us all. Releasing them may just add fuel to the fire of misdirection. Perhaps Romney’s campaign is attempting to let the meaningless fires die from their own repetition. I do not know. But I see nothing at all nefarious here beyond the innuendo itself.

And if his campaign released them tomorrow, would the carping end? I don’t believe that for a second, no matter what is or isn’t in them.

“The cost of not releasing the returns are clear,” [George Will] said on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.” . . .

oining forced with Bill Kristol, Matthew Dowd spoke candidly about his doubts around Romney’s tax returns: “There is obviously something because if there was nothing there he would say have it…But I think the bigger thing is, it’s arrogance. Many of these politicians think I can do this, I can get away with this.” . . .

Rick Tyler: “There’s clearly the problem with the tax returns, otherwise he would release, you know, 10 years of tax returns”

There are three Republicans. I am sure I don’t need to look for Democrats.

Thanks for the correction on “Jim Ryan.” He was the Attorney General in Illinois when Obama declined to vote for the Born Live Infant Protection Act, and I have been writing about that (too much) lately.

My main point is not that there must be something very damaging in the returns (although I think there almost certainly is), but rather that anyone who believes Romney is just trying to hide his generosity will believe anything. It may be that Romney thinks huge donations to the Mormon Church will not make the best impression, but one has to be incredibly credulous to believe the Romneys are taking political heat for not releasing their tax returns because they want to keep it a secret how generous they are.