Mitt Romney’s $3m Hamptons’ fundraisers lifted his reputation as champion of the rich
MITT ROMNEY could not have done more to foster the caricature of him as the tone deaf champion of millionaires if he had tried. Journalists were not allowed to attend three fundraisers in the Hamptons that collected more than $3 million for Romney’s presidential campaign last weekend, but they interviewed wealthy guests as they queued in Mercedes, BMWs, Porsches, a Rolls Royce and a Ferrari outside the estates where the fundraisers took place.
“Is there a VIP entrance?” a New York Times reporter heard a woman in blue chiffon shout to a Romney aide from the window of her Range Rover. “We are VIP.”
It may have been the same women who told the Los Angeles Times, “I don’t think the common person is getting it. Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them. We’ve got the message. But my college kid, the baby sitters, the (finger)nails’ ladies – everybody who’s got the right to vote – they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income – one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works.”
It cost $50,000 (€40,800) to attend David and Julia Koch’s dinner at their $18 million home in the Hamptons. The financial impetus behind the Tea Party, David and his brother Charles Koch (pronounced “coke”) are the seventh and eight richest people in the world, with a combined wealth of $70.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires index.
Protesters hired a small aircraft to fly overhead. “Romney has a Koch problem,” said the banner trailing behind it. The Democratic National Committee released an advertisement saying, “Oil billionaire David Koch is hosting a fundraiser for millionaire Mitt Romney at his Hampton estate. And what would Mitt Romney do for the Koch brothers? Give a new $250,000 tax cut to every millionaire and billionaire, protect tax loopholes for companies outsourcing jobs. Protect tax subsidies for big oil.”
President Obama hammered home the middle class vs millionaires theme on Monday, when he asked Congress to renew Bush era tax cuts for Americans earning under $250,000 a year.
“I just believe that anybody making over $250,000 a year should go back to the income tax rates we were paying under Bill Clinton,” Obama said.
“Back when our economy created nearly 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history, and plenty of millionaires to boot.”
The Republican majority in the House will not agree unless the cuts are renewed for all Americans, including the wealthiest.
In the meantime, the millionaires are filling Romney’s campaign coffers. Last month, according to figures released on Monday, he raised $106 million to Obama’s $71 million, surpassing the incumbent president for the second month running.
Nationally, the undertow of what Republicans decry as “class warfare” waged by the Obama campaign has little effect.
A Washington Post-ABC poll published yesterday shows the candidates tied at 47 per cent. But in the crucial swing states that will determine the election, a barrage of negative ads about Romney, accusing him of outsourcing jobs to China and enriching himself at the expense of US workers, have had an effect.
Obama will not hold any fundraisers in the Hamptons this year. To further distance themselves from the playgrounds of the rich, the Obamas have decided not to take their annual holiday in Martha’s Vineyard this summer.
Holidays provided a contrast in social class last week, as Obama slogged through Ohio and Pennsylvania, talking to working class people in factories and roadside diners, while Romney spent the entire week at his 13-acre, $8 million estate on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. Photographs of Mitt and Ann Romney on a jet-ski and a power boat big enough to hold all 24 family members prompted comparisons with John Kerry kite-surfing during the 2004 campaign.
Meanwhile, Obama recounted his childhood holidays on Greyhound buses. His family stayed at Howard Johnson motor lodges and young “Barry” got a thrill from collecting buckets of ice from the machine and swimming in the pool, no matter how small it was.
When Romney finally released his 2010 income tax returns in January of this year, 55 pages were devoted to his holdings abroad. A $3 million Swiss bank account had been closed by his attorney, which nonetheless prompted Romney’s then rival Newt Gingrich to say, “I don’t know of any American president who has had a Swiss bank account.”
New investigative reports by the Associated Press and Vanity Fair magazine have focused on Romney’s money in the Caribbean, in particular a Bermuda-based corporation called Sankaty High Yield Asset Investors Ltd, named after a Nantucket lighthouse and wholly owned by Romney.
“We have no idea what is in this company,” Nicholas Shaxon, writes in Vanity Fair. “It is possible Romney’s wealth is even greater than previous estimates.”
Romneys’ spokespeople insist he has paid all taxes required by law, but in tax havens such as Bermuda, there is virtually no tax and no compliance. “The assertion that he broke no laws is widely accepted. But it is worth asking if it is actually true,” Shaxon concludes.
Romney continues to receive large, multimillion dollar payments from Bain Capital, the firm he founded in 1984 and nominally left in 1999. Bain has at least 138 funds in the Cayman Islands, Vanity Fair reported. Romney has personal interest in at least 12 of those funds, worth up to $30 million.
Democrats are again putting pressure on Romney to release more of his tax records, pointing out that when his father George stood for president, he released 12 years of records, compared to only two for Romney. George Romney paid an average 37 per cent of his income in taxes; Mitt Romney paid 14.65 per cent in 2010 and 2011.
Obama joined the call for Romney to come clean on his finances, in an interview with a New Hampshire radio station on Monday. “What’s important is, 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. “And that’s been true of every presidential candidate dating all the way back to Mitt Romney’s father.”
