WaPo's Ed Rogers Weighs in this Morning.

Romney will release his tax returns. Then what?

By Ed Rogers
Mitt Romney is going to release his tax returns. No doubt he made a lot of money and has followed the rules when paying his taxes. Will Republicans gasp and have a negative reaction to his wealth and the amount of taxes he paid? Aren’t we for more Romneys in America? That is, people who have made money and who are allowed to keep it and invest their savings in ways in which their money isn’t taxed twice at the full rate?

Is there now some amount to have paid in taxes that sounds right and feels right politically, based on a candidate’s income, and if you fall below that number, you have a political problem? Do we think that a wealthy candidate who is following the rules but paying below the “feels right” amount in taxes, is somehow a less desirable candidate for president?

Should GOP candidates now boast, “I paid a higher income tax rate than you did,” as if that distinguishes them in a positive light?
...
It will be revealing to see how we Republicans handle it when we are suddenly confronted with not just the abstract concept of wealth and low taxes, but with its personification in the front-runner for our party’s presidential nomination. We are for success, wealth and low taxes in theory, but when these are personalized in a GOP candidate, do we think it’s bad politics? Is it disqualifying? Much more to come.

He forgot the ... at the end. ;-)

ADDED: I think Romney's defense lies in the numbers he paid in taxes, not the percentages. How much, exactly, is "enough"? It's awful hard to imply somebody is "cheap" when they are contributing 15% of a huge number to begin with...

(and it's even harder to make the point that he's hypocritical, because he's not pushing for more and more tax dollars to be confiscated from middle-class paychecks either to continue to feed Washington's growing government bureaucracy, where clearly they don't know the value of a buck.)

Then, tie that in with the "NOBODY wants to pay a dime more than they have to for a growing menu of social programs they disagree with, sometimes morally and definitely for poor efficiency/rate of return on the dollar investment."

This way,
the problem isn't that richer people pay less, or don't pay enough; the problem is this continually growing vacuum suck out of everyone's pockets, to Washington for redistribution in ways that provide perverse incentives and don't live up to the promises they make.

Not enough "bang for the buck" so to speak...
Not that there's simply not enough bucks floating around in the system for government to access, as the liberal elite Dems might try to convince you.