Romney's Wall Street Problem
I have suggested for a long time that Mitt Romney could have a problem in the 2012 election cycle with his connections to the world of high finance. It's not just his own personal history with Bain Capital, but his close connections with people who make a lot of money by moving around large sums of money. Ever since the big collapse of 2008, such people are not exactly well-loved by the American people. Romney depends on those relationships for a very large portion of his fundraising -- an even greater portion this time around, in fact, since he's lost support among some other folks.
Romney, like most GOP candidates, is staunchly in favor of policies that benefit those financial executives, and has very little to say about wrongdoing by any of them. But in his case, it inevitably comes across as payoff to his friends and supporters.
A couple of weeks ago, Boston Globe reporter Donovan Slack had a great piece revealing that shortly after Romney's 2008 defeat, his son Taggart and chief fundraiser Spencer Zwick launched Solamere Capital, an investment firm that raised money from Romney campaign donors to invest in funds run by Romney campaign bundlers. As I wrote then, it sure looks bad.
Now it looks worse: ThinkProgress reports on Zwick & Tagg's ties to Stanford Financial Group, which is the subject of charges that it ran an $8.5 billion Ponzi scheme.
The initial response from Taggart Romney is to suggest that the Solamere folks who worked at Stanford were themselves victims.
Now, if you're Mitt Romney and you start getting questions about this, what do you do? Probably take a similar line. What else can you do?
I don't know if this story will get any traction at all, but I do suspect it's part of a larger narrative, likely to be ongoing for some time, about Romney's place in a world of wealth that seems brazenly stacked in favor of the moneyed.