Top surrogates for President Obama on Sunday shrugged off Mitt Romney’s demand for a presidential apology for campaign attacks and instead hammered at Mr. Romney’s business record, accused his former firm of shipping American jobs overseas, suggested he might be hiding damaging information and renewed demands that he release more back tax returns.
The withering attacks appeared to knock the Romney campaign off stride, at least temporarily, as it seeks to shift the national discussion back from a debate about the former governor’s business instincts, extensive wealth and complicated tax history to the tepid growth of jobs and the economy under Mr. Obama. And even some Republicans called for Mr. Romney to release more tax returns.
One Obama surrogate, Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, a former White House chief of staff, offered a blunt suggestion to Mr. Romney, who said on Friday that the attacks on him and the private equity firm he once headed, Bain Capital, were “beneath the dignity of the presidency.”
“I give him his own advice,” Mr. Emanuel said on ABC’s “This Week”: “stop whining.”
Ed Gillespie, a senior adviser to the Romney campaign, was equally scathing, however, in describing what he said were the “completely reckless and unfounded allegations” coming from the Obama side.
“We now know that this president will say or do anything to keep the highest office in the land,” Mr. Gillespie said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “even if it means demeaning the highest office in the land.”
Thus the presidential campaign remained at an acrimonious pass, with a tight race in the polls — a new survey in the biggest battleground state, Florida, found a dead heat there — and each side clamoring to define the other in the most negative fashion.
Mr. Romney had demanded an apology for what he called “absurd” allegations by the president over whether Mr. Romney’s record included outsourcing jobs. Days of goading by the Obama campaign had suggested that Mr. Romney might even have broken the law by lying on a Securities and Exchange Commission filing about the years when he led Bain.
On the Sunday television talk shows, Mr. Romney’s surrogates fended off questions about why, if Bain’s S.E.C. filings listed him as its chief executive from 1999 to 2003, he should not be held responsible for job outsourcing by companies that it controlled in that period, and why he has rejected increasing calls for him to release more tax returns.
Mr. Gillespie said that after Mr. Romney took a leave of absence from Bain in 1999 to head the troubled Salt Lake City Olympics organization, he had nothing to do with Bain management. The Olympics effort was a “16-hour-a-day job,” Mr. Gillespie said, and Mr. Romney “retired retroactively to February of 1999 as a result.”
Mr. Romney’s insistence that he had no decision-making role at Bain after 1999 drew vocal support on Sunday from a former managing director there, Edward Conard.
Because Mr. Romney was so intimately involved in the company’s founding and development, Mr. Conard said on MSNBC, “we had a very complicated set of negotiations that took us about two years to unwind” the Romney role.
“During that time, a management team ran the firm, and we could hardly even get Mitt to come back to negotiate the terms of his departure, because he was working so hard on the Olympics,” he said.
While conceding that Mr. Romney “legally” remained the firm’s chief executive, Mr. Conard said he did not remember Mr. Romney’s taking part in any meetings.
As the Obama campaign continued to press Mr. Romney to release more years of his tax returns and be more transparent about his personal finances, his representatives said he had done everything to comply with the law by releasing his 2010 return and an estimate of his 2011 taxes.
Mr. Emanuel suggested that the undisclosed returns could hold only bad news about Mr. Romney’s finances, and might even have played a role in Senator John McCain’s decision to reject Mr. Romney as a running mate in 2008 and turn instead to Sarah Palin. Mr. Romney gave Mr. McCain’s team 23 years of returns.
“The Romney campaign isn’t stupid,” Mr. Emanuel said. “They have decided that it’s better to get attacked on a lack of transparency, lack of accountability to the American people, versus telling you what’s in those taxes.”
Some Republicans have joined the call for a broader release of tax returns, including the former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour.
The conservative commentator Bill Kristol said on “Fox News Sunday,” “He should release the tax returns tomorrow.” He added: “You’ve got to release 6, 8, 10 years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two.”
Matthew Dowd, a Republican political strategist, suggested that Mr. Romney’s refusal to release the returns could suggest there was something to hide.
“There’s obviously something there, because if there was nothing there, he would say, ‘Have at it,’” Mr. Dowd said on “This Week.” “So there’s obviously something there that compromises what he said in the past about something.”
On that same program, the conservative commentator George Will was similarly critical, saying, “I do not know why, given that Mitt Romney knew the day that McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again, that he didn’t get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest.”
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