Romney faces mounting pressure to release tax returns

IRMO, S.C. — Mitt Romney came under increasing pressure Wednesday to release his income tax returns immediately, rather than waiting until April, in an effort to contain the damage caused by his stumbling responses over two days.

Unanswered questions about his wealth threw the Republican presidential front-runner’s campaign off balance and threatened to undercut his message in the final days before Saturday’s potentially decisive primary in South Carolina, where a new poll showed Romney’s lead in the state shrinking to 10 percentage points.

Romney, who is a former governor of Massachusetts, and his surrogates launched a fresh coordinated assault on an ascendant Newt Gingrich on Wednesday, calling the former House speaker’s tenure in Washington “leadership by chaos” and likening him to former Vice President Al Gore.

“It’s the private sector that creates jobs,” Romney said at a Spartanburg rally. “Congressmen taking credit for helping create jobs is like Al Gore taking credit for the Internet.”

But the Romney offensive did little to quiet a growing debate among Republicans about Romney’s tax returns and his reluctance to make what for decades has been a standard disclosure by presidential candidates.

Gingrich plans to release his tax returns on Thursday and to intensify pressure on Romney, teeing up the tax issue for a debate Thursday night in Charleston. Former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa., said he would release his returns, too, while Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Republican voters need to vet Romney’s returns to determine whether he might “get eaten alive” in a general election against President Barack Obama.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, was the most prominent Romney supporter to call publicly for the swift release of his returns, while Republicans close to the campaign said there was direct private pressure on the candidate and his Boston team to deal with the issue immediately.

“What I would say to Governor Romney is if you have tax returns to put out, you should put them out,” Christie said on NBC’s “Today” show. “And you put them out sooner rather than later because it’s always better in my view to have full disclosure, especially when you’re the front-runner.”

The issue has dogged Romney since he first indicated that he might not release his returns. But after he shifted positions during a debate Monday and acknowledged Tuesday that he has paid an effective tax rate of about 15 percent, Republican strategists said the political cost of delaying the release of his returns has escalated dramatically.

“He looks guilty,” said Ed Rogers, an unaligned GOP strategist. “It’s just going to be untenable for Romney to keep it up. . . . This new tax return issue is a new bumper sticker: ‘Release them.’ And a bumper sticker always beats an essay.”

Added Rogers, who co-writes an opinion blog at The Washington Post: “He’s got to own up to being rich, put it all out there and hope that it doesn’t bog down the campaign.”

Romney, a multimillionaire, committed another verbal gaffe Tuesday in dealing with the question of his income when he described the amount of money he had made from speeches as “not very much.” The sum was $374,000 last year — which alone would make him among the nation’s top 1 percent of earners.

Even Romney loyalists acknowledged Wednesday that the comment had been politically damaging. They added to a growing list of verbal missteps by Romney, who has looked to the South Carolina primary as an opportunity to effectively close down the GOP contest.

With the nomination in his sights, Romney has sought to shift into general-election mode. At a rally in Rock Hill on Wednesday, the candidate who normally speaks about the primary contest as a long battle to win delegates offered a preview of the ads he would run against Obama.

“We’re going to play this on TV time and time again in our ads. (Obama) said that if he couldn’t get this economy turned around in three years, he’d be looking at a one-term proposition,” Romney told more than 400 supporters at Winthrop University.

The handling of the tax issue has been uncharacteristic of the Romney campaign, which has repeatedly fended off problems such as Perry’s widely celebrated entry to the race and Gingrich’s earlier rise in the polls.

Former Rep. Joe Scarborough, R-Fla., said on his television show, “Morning Joe,” that Tuesday was “a day that I suspect the Romney campaign is going to be regretting for some time now.”

“Campaigns are sometimes defined in a moment that the candidate doesn’t realize,” he said, likening Romney’s handling of his tax returns to Democrat Michael Dukakis posing in a tank during his 1988 campaign for president.

Romney aides insisted that they were not caught off guard by the issue, saying Romney had always planned to release his most recent tax return if he became the nominee.

“It would be presumptuous for anybody to put their tax returns out before they were the nominee of the party,” Romney communications director Gail Gitcho said.

She said there were no plans to release the documents sooner and would not say whether Romney would release past returns as well. She took issue with the focus of Romney’s rivals on the tax issue.

“If Newt Gingrich wants to talk about tax returns, we’re gonna talk about the economy,” Gitcho said. “They can talk about it all they want. Governor Romney’s going to talk about jobs and why we need a new direction in this country.”

Romney’s opponents have seized on the tax issue to blunt his momentum and stop or at least slow his march to the nomination.

“It is important for Mitt to release his tax returns,” Perry said Wednesday on “Fox and Friends.” “The fact is, we can’t fire our nominee in September. By then, it’s too late. If we’ve got a flawed candidate going forward who’s going to get eaten alive either because of business practices or because of the taxes and the system that’s set up, we need to talk about it now.”