Former President Bill Clinton said in an interview on the Today show this morning that he believes Mitt Romney’s offshore accounts and time at Bain Capital are legitimate lines of attack against the Republican presidential nominee.
Clinton said Romney’s professional life is just as relevant to his fitness to be president as “the going over my record as governor got when I ran for president. I’d been a governor for a dozen years.”
“And because he’s put it at the forefront. He’s said basically, I’d be a better president ’cause I know how to create jobs ’cause that’s what I did. And he’s going to take credit for running a successful Olympics, for example,” Clinton said. “So all your work life before you run for president is relevant, and I think that will be relevant.”
Clinton said it left him “a little surprised” that Romney released a year’s worth of tax returns.
“That’s kind of perplexed me because it’s the first time in, I don’t know, more than 30 years that anybody running for president has only done that,” he said. “You know, it’s typical, I think, we all release 10, 11 years. I think Senator McCain released over 20 years of tax returns. That, I think, has been — that struck me as a little odd.”
Clinton said “the public ought to know” about whether Romney placed his money in legal tax shelters overseas, and “voters can make up their own mind about whether they think it’s a good thing.”
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