Ben Smith reports that Rick Perry's campaign is calling on Mitt Romney to release his income tax returns, but Romney's campaign says he won't think about it until next spring, and there's no guarantee he'll do it.
Both Smith and Think Progress note that the "Buffet Rule" might buffet Romney, and if you want to read about the danger for Mitt over that, check out Michael Scherer's piece from earlier this month.
Romney, a wealthy man whose income mostly comes from long-term investments, is exactly the sort of “millionaire and billionaire” that Obama likes to hold up for scrutiny, since the source of Romney’s income allows him to pay a lower percentage of his money to the federal government each year than many middle-class wage earners.
.... Should Romney win the Republican nomination, he will face substantial pressure to release his own tax returns. Usually such disclosures are little more than formality, but in Romney’s case, it would land him in the middle of one of the biggest policy debates of this election season.
I emphasized the text in bold, because it raises an interesting point.
If Perry does, indeed, rap Romney over his tax returns, he'd be implicitly employing something it's only assumed Dems would accuse Republicans of -- being fat cat, rich guys (which actually, Perry has done), and further, it'd be a warning shot to the GOP that Romney's susceptible to bad general election narratives about income.
But Perry's not the first to the punch here.
For months, Romney has been hammering Rick Perry on Social Security, accusing him of being "reckless" and claiming that Perry wants to kill it. That's something that a Republican normally wouldn't accuse another Republican of, and it's also a warning shot to the GOP about Perry's general election weaknesses.
So, in a way, they're both demonizing like Democrats would in a general.
Final point here: During Perry's 2010 gubernatorial race against Democrat Bill White, he refused to debate unless White released all his income tax returns. White released some, but was never willing to release all.
So this is a card Perry has played before.
