Romney Retired Retroactively?

Dear Madame L,

I don't know what to think now about Candidate Mitt Romney, who seems to be wavering on whether he was really in charge at Bain Capital when it was firing people and exporting jobs to China and India.

But how could he have retired retroactively?

Sincerely,

Huh?

Dear Huh, 

Madame L thinks it's impossible to retire retroactively. Madame L thinks Candidate Romney has to have been at Bain or not; he has to have been a Massachusetts resident or a Utah resident; he has to have instituted a universal health-care plan for Massachusets or not; he has to have approved of birth control and abortion or not; and so on.

Clearly the candidate's wafflng indicates that he will do and claim whatever necessary to achieve a pressing goal. To that end, he was a Massachusetts resident and still presiding at Bain when he wanted to run for governor there. But he was not in charge now that he's running for president. He supported universal health-care and women-friendly reproductive choices when he wanted to run for governor. But he thinks those are all horrible now that he's running for president.

Thanks to your question, Madame L has found an article with a good summary of the issues surrounding the Bain controversy:

As the Boston Globe reported last week, Romney was listed on SEC documents as Bain’s president, CEO, chairman and sole shareholder for years after his 1999 “retroactive retirement” date.

• A February 12, 1999, Boston Herald report on Romney taking the Olympic post noted that “he will stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions.”
• A July 1999 Bain press release listed Romney as CEO and said he’s “on a part-time leave of absence to head the Salt Lake City Olympic Committee.” Romney himself is quoted in the release signaling his approval of a new venture launched by two Bain employees.
• In a November 2000 interview with the Globe, Ann Romney indicated that her husband remained involved with Bain, just not on a full-time basis.
• A 2002 Globe story quoted Marc Wolpow, a Bain employee, saying that “I reported directly to Mitt Romney” while Romney was in Utah and that “you can’t be CEO of Bain Capital and say, ‘I really don’t know what my guys were doing.’
• Upon returning to Massachusetts to run for governor in 2002, Romney told the state’s ballot law commission – which was determining whether he met the residency – that he’d left Bain in 1999 “on the basis of a leave of absence, indicating that I, by virtue of that title, would return at the end of the Olympics to my employment at Bain Capital, but subsequently decided not to do so and entered into a departure agreement with my former partners.”

Madame L sticks to her decision not to vote for Mitt Romney for president, not just because of these issues, but because she thinks Pres. Obama is doing an incredibly good job and can get our country back on track to greatness---and will be able to do that even better in a second term.

Sincerely,

Madame L