This week may mark the begin­ning of the end of Mitt Romney’s cam­paign for Pres­i­dent. If you’ve been around Log­a­rchism a while, you know I’m not typ­i­cally one to get all breath­less at the barest whis­per of trou­ble for a Repub­li­can can­di­date. This looks dif­fer­ent from the typ­i­cal polit­i­cal gaffe, though.

See, here’s the prob­lem. Rom­ney has an exist­ing rep­u­ta­tion for a lack of con­vic­tion, for chang­ing his stance on issues more fre­quently than the weather changes. It’s why the Etch-​​a-​​Sketch state­ment was so dam­ag­ing for him, despite for most can­di­dates being merely a benign state­ment of fact. The expected Repub­li­can Pres­i­den­tial can­di­date has a rapidly build­ing nar­ra­tive that he is hav­ing trou­ble defend­ing. Let’s start with the nar­ra­tive, and then look at pos­si­ble defenses and their respec­tive pitfalls.

The nar­ra­tive is that Mitt Rom­ney did not leave Bain Cap­i­tal in 1999 as he had orig­i­nally claimed, but rather left years later. Dur­ing the time he claims to have left, but was still the sole share­holder, chair­man, pres­i­dent, and CEO, Bain was engaged in many prac­tices that are not play­ing well with Amer­i­cans, whether lib­eral, mod­er­ate, or con­ser­v­a­tive. Bain was respon­si­ble for off­shoring numer­ous jobs. The invest­ment firm pur­chased KB Toys, a com­pany that failed after Bain bled it of cash. They also invested in a com­pany that prof­ited from dis­pos­ing aborted fetuses, an activ­ity that is par­tic­u­larly repul­sive to Republicans.

If he did, in fact, leave in 1999, then the Bain SEC fil­ings, which called him the sole owner, chair­man, pres­i­dent, and CEO, look sus­pect. Under the most char­i­ta­ble light, given how much of his net worth was tied up in the firm, it would be irre­spon­si­ble in the extreme for him to be entirely hands-​​off. This is par­tic­u­larly con­cern­ing when you con­sider that he points to his Bain expe­ri­ence as evi­dence of how well he can run the nation.

In the midst of this comes infor­ma­tion regard­ing Romney’s indi­vid­ual retire­ment accounts (IRAs). Some­how, he man­aged to amass $102 mil­lion in his accounts. Now, there’s absolutely noth­ing wrong with hav­ing a large sum of money in a bank account. Where the prob­lem arises is how one gets that much into an IRA, because there are strict laws gov­ern­ing one’s abil­ity to con­tribute to those accounts, due to their advan­ta­geous tax­a­tion. In order for Romney’s IRAs to have reached such stratos­pheric lev­els, he would have had to not only con­tribute the max­i­mum each year, but also gar­ner a return on invest­ment that itself is stratos­pheric. If we had access to his tax returns for the years he is unwill­ing to share, we would find out how he did this.

How might this have hap­pened? It turns out that he could have put shares of Bain Cap­i­tal into his IRA. And it just so hap­pens that if you own a com­pany in its entirety, you can put as many shares as you wish into your IRA account by merely valu­ing the shares at zero. It’s quite the tax loophole.

So how does Rom­ney com­bat all of these skele­tons that are rat­tling in his closet?

Some of the Bain activ­i­ties have a mod­icum of defense. KB may well have failed any­way, for exam­ple. But Bain chose to take money out of the dying firm, has­ten­ing that demise, rather than work on trans­form­ing the com­pany into some­thing that could have sur­vived. By anal­ogy, instead of treat­ing the patient, the doc­tor chose to har­vest the organs, draw the blood, and profit from them. In other words, even the more char­i­ta­ble view of “it would have hap­pened any­way” doesn’t play espe­cially well.

Rom­ney can pro­vide evi­dence that he really did depart in Feb­ru­ary of 1999. But Romney’s aide’s state­ment that he retired “retroac­tively” from Bain has the same prob­lem that Sen­a­tor John Kerry had when he said that he voted in favor of a bill before he voted against it. To those who under­stand the inside intri­ca­cies, the state­ment makes sense, but to most vot­ers it sounds slip­pery, as if they’re being lied to…even if they’re not.

If Rom­ney packed his IRA with Bain shares at zero basis, he has yet another prob­lem. This is the sort of behav­ior that gets less sophis­ti­cated Amer­i­cans livid. It’s the sort of activ­ity that makes the Occupy crowd com­plain bitterly…right along­side Tea Partiers.

The Bain story seems to be becom­ing some­thing of a matryoshka doll. Each part of the story you open reveals another story. It’s matryoshka dolls all the way down, which may turn into a nev­erend­ing story from now until November.

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