Former White House spokesman Bill Burton is chortling on Twitter about this campaign-trail moment captured by the Washington Post:
At one table, a boy offered Romney a $1 bill that he had folded origami-style for good luck. The candidate happily accepted it, but then rifled through his wallet looking for money to give the boy in return. Romney had a $100 bill, but evidently did not want to give that away. An aide handed him a $1 bill, but Romney said that wasn’t enough.
Then, deep inside his leather billfold, Romney found a $5 bill. “We’ll give you an Abraham Lincoln back,” he said, handing it to the boy.
Sensing symbolic gold, Burton labels this “Romney’s Scrooge McDuck moment.” That may be hyperbole; but it is ironic that the episode illustrates a story about the Romney’s increasingly vocal opposition to last year’s Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, which re-regulated Wall Street banks and other big financial institutions in the name of averting another financial crisis.
Opposing Dodd-Frank, incidentally, may be a good position in a GOP primary, and is sure to please Wall Street donors and the Chamber of Commerce. But the bill–which Congressional Republicans and business lobbyists have been trying to weaken and delay quietly, without a full frontal assault–also happens to be one of the few broadly popular achievements of the last Democratic Congress.