“We’ll believe it when we see it. Until Mitt Romney releases his tax returns, Americans will continue to wonder what he’s hiding.” -- Harry Reid, clearly amused by Mitt Romney’s revelation earlier in the day…

Buzzfeed reports that Mitt Romney went “off-script” yesterday during a press conference at the Greer, S.C. airport, during which he planned to wonk-out for reporters — with a white board, marker, and eraser — and explain his Medicare program. Instead, this happened:

…a reporter asked him whether he had reviewed his tax returns to find out how much he’d paid, as he promised ABC News he would when he was in Israel. Apparently frustrated with the distraction from his Medicare message, Romney bristled at the question, calling it “small-minded” — and then spontaneously offered new details on his personal finances.

“I did got back and look at my taxes and over the past 10 years, I never paid less than 13 percent,” he said. “I think the most recent years is 13.6 percent or something like that. So I paid taxes every single year. Harry Reid’s charge is totally false. I’m sure waiting for Harry to put up who it was that told him what he says they told him. I don’t believe it for a minute, by the way.”

See? I’ll bet that if President Obama said things and wanted Republicans to just take his word for it about the things, that would be good enough for the GOP — so why isn’t that good enough for Harry Reid and Democrats!?

Buzzfeed continues with Master Paul Ryan, who was supposed to flash his foreign diplomacy bona fides by talking about China:

Paul Ryan bought a reporter a hot dog for his birthday and answered an off-message question. And so the campaign, yet again, lost control of its story, with Romney making news on his personal tax returns, and Ryan offering a complex defense of his views on Medicare. And questions about the wisdom of picking a policy visionary for a running mate and then rejecting the specifics of his detailed vision grew deeper. [... Moody asked] Ryan to explain why he had included $716 billion in cuts to planned Medicare spending in his famous budget plan, if he now opposes it. Ryan’s answer, couched in the process-heavy language of Capitol Hill, was that it wasn’t his fault the cuts had already been priced into the “baseline” and that while relying on them, he had also opposed them when they passed as part of ObamaCare. Forget China: Medicare drove the day in Ohio.

Maybe in Ohio, but by that evening Think Progress noted that ABC, NBC, and CBS Evening News all led with Romney’s tax returns.

Go Romney! Where are the tax returns? This election could be a referendum on what percentage of income you’ve paid for 10 years, compared to the rest of us — and how maybe, possibly, potentially we might think those tax laws are unfair and want to change them.