There are a couple of issues where Romney is not forthcoming.   His tax returns.  His Bain Capital Investments.  His relation with his church. Privacy is important.  We support keeping what is meant to stay private, private.

But one can not surpass a smile, when one sees a younger Mitt Romney before the National Press Club on January 3, 2000, brag about the openness he brought to the scandal ridden Olympic committee.

Nor can one surpass a smile, when they hear the young Mitt Romney say he underestimated the budget and the costs required to pull it off.

Nor can one surpass a smile, when they hear the young Mitt Romney say:  we couldn’t do it ourselves;  we had to get help from the Federal government.

And when they hear Romney telling of the four time attempt to the grasp the gold for Dan Jansen, they are reminded of Romney’s own lost election attempts.

In regards to openness, Romney after taking over the scandal ridden committee, hammers out a code of ethics and has everyone sign them.  One of those items on that list was that all transactions, every invoice, would be open to public scrutiny.  Mitt brags:  ”All the documents inside our organization are available to the public.  Simply submit a form saying which document you want to see.  For instance I want to see all the letters written by Mr. Romney to Mr. Samaranch.  You’ll get them all.  Takes us about twenty days for the people to go through and get those things. We collect them and provide them to any citizen that wants to have them”.  Quite different from his currently establishing a new precedent of only showing his tax returns for the years he “knew” he was going to run for president.  Will the public be then prompted to ask:  ”What kind of character do you have?  How do you act when you are NOT running for president?”  We shall see.

It is equally interesting to hear Romney speak on his budget overage.  When he inherited the Olympics, they were $378 million behind.  Up to his entry, they had raised $13 million and had only one sponsor. They predicted they would need to raise $900 million.  Actual cost was $1.8 billion, double the original total. “We were off.   We estimated we would generate $859 million dollars in sponsor revenue.  Of course we calculated that without knowing what had been raised before.  Turns out the all time record for sponsorship revenue, came from Atlanta: $480 million raised in sponsorship revenue.  Our numbers are a little off.  Sometimes when cities get together and get excited about how much money they are going to make on the games themselves, the numbers are not quite accurate.  There is a reason for that.  There is no general accepted accounting for the Olympics. “

His success wasn’t his alone.  ” It is not something which we have done by ourselves.  It is not something we can accomplish by ourselves.  Everything we have accomplished has been done by virtue a collaboration of all sorts of leaders through out our country.  I want to acknowledge the support of the Utah delegation, many the members of which, and their offices are here today, which have been enormously helpful in providing funding for security, for housing, for transportation and so forth.  We also have here today Mickey Ibarra. I don’t know where Mickey is, but Mickey is special assistant to President Clinton for intergovernmental affairs, and he is also, I want to get this title right… he is also vice chairman of the  presidential task force of the Olympic Games.  The Clinton administration has been a ‘friend of the Olympics.” and has worked hard to make sure our Olympics are successful. … We depend enormously on the support of government and all its agencies to make sure we can be wonderful hosts, to the world. ”   Apparently in the real world outside politics,  “everyone” needs a little help.

Some more vignettes that cause the mouth to curl…. ” I believe we should judge people, celebrate people,  not by what they have, but by what they are. “   One can’t help but smile when they remember how Mitt always responds to the question, “what Sir,  qualifies you to be president…”

Of course this is just my opinion  made while suppressing a smile, but I would gladly wager that the Mitt Romney of yesterday (2000) would be a lot stronger of a candidate if  he were running against todays Obama  instead of the Mitt Romney of 2012,….  come November the Republicans would have lost by a much, much smaller margin.

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