Happy Monday!
Well, not so happy for Mitt Romney, who has been dealing with relentless attacks on his record at Bain Capital centered on whether he was in fact involved with the company during an outsourcing palooza. Romney insists that he had no management role whatsoever after 1999, and he even called on President Obama to apologize for a staffer's suggestion that he may have committed a felony by misrepresenting his position at Bain. Obama has since doubled down on his Bain-based attacks, saying that if Mitt Romney touts his business record as his main qualifier for the presidency, then that business record warrants a scrupulous examination.
In an attempt to explain the discrepancy between Romney's assertion that he left Bain in 1999 and federal documents suggesting he was still in charge as late as 2002, senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie said that Romney "retired retroactively" from the firm. But the confusing word choice seems to have muddied the waters even further, causing commentators on the Left and Right to criticize Romney's lack of transparency on this issue and on the issue of his tax returns. Yesterday, Bill Kristol argued that Romney should release up to ten years of tax returns, take the hits for a couple of days, and then redirect the conversation back to the President's record on the economy. Either way, Romney may be in a lose-lose situation.
If you have at all been following the contentious debate over voter ID laws, Nate Silver has a must-read piece for you that measures the effects of voter identification laws. Bottom line, they're not as scary as we thought, and they seem to only decrease turnout by about 2 percent as a share of the registered voter population.
Plus, we're all looking at a new Nielsen study that lists the most memorable TV events for U.S. audiences over the last 50 years. Surprisingly, not one in the top 20 is an entertainment or sporting event - they're all news events. Guess we're in the right business!