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Obama calls on Romney to disclose more tax returns

By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times –

President Barack Obama sought Monday to increase pressure on Republican rival Mitt Romney to release years of personal income tax returns.

“What’s important, if you are running for president, is that the American people know who you are and what you’ve done, and that you’re an open book,” Obama said in an interview at the White House with WMUR, a New Hampshire television station. “And that’s been true of every presidential candidate dating all the way back to Mitt Romney’s father.”

George Romney, a former Michigan governor and American Motors chief executive, released 12 years of tax returns when he ran for president in 1968.

Obama’s remarks came as his re-election campaign is trying to get voters in New Hampshire and other crucial battleground states to see his Republican challenger as an unacceptable alternative, largely by raising doubts about Romney’s business background.

On Monday, Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to Obama’s campaign, suggested that Romney’s refusal to release more than one year of tax returns raised questions about whether he would scale back overseas tax shelters as president.

“I think the American people deserve to know: Why does Mitt Romney have a secret Bermuda corporation?” Gibbs told anchor Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “Today” show. “Why does he have a bank account in Switzerland? Savannah, when I pick a bank, I pick one near my house because there’s an ATM that I can get cash out of it. I don’t think you’re picking a bank in Switzerland because there’s an ATM near your house.”

The Republican National Committee’s communications director, Sean Spicer, responded on MSNBC that Romney had released enough tax records.

“I think that this is a distraction,” Spicer said. “They have bad jobs numbers, bad deficit numbers. The economy’s not doing well overall. Now they’re trying to distract everyone from focusing on the issues that they care about, because they know that their record from the last 3 ½ years isn’t something they want to talk about.”

On Sunday, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul called similar Obama campaign attacks an unseemly and disgusting character assault. “Mitt Romney had a successful career in the private sector, pays every dime of taxes he owes, has given generously to charitable organizations, and served numerous causes greater than himself,” she said.

Obama’s campaign also stepped up its TV advertising barrage against Romney’s business history. In a handful of battleground states, it started airing a new ad over the weekend portraying Romney as a pioneer of outsourcing manufacturing jobs to China.

It shows Romney, a former corporate takeover executive at Bain Capital, saying at a campaign event: “The Chinese are smiling all the way to the bank, taking our jobs, and taking a lot of our future. I’m not willing to let that happen.”

With strains of ominous music in the background, an announcer interjects, “He made a fortune letting it happen.”

The Romney campaign’s response was scathing.

“The more President Obama fails the middle class,” Saul said, “the more his campaign resorts to desperate lies. President Obama already has the worst jobs record since the Great Depression, but now he also seems determined to go down in history as one of the most dishonest.”

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