Maddow: Romney campaign hiding George W. Bush offshore in the Caymans

Thursday night on "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow questioned the wisdom of former Pres. George W. Bush's decision to speak to a Cayman Islands offshore investment group in the days just before the presidential election.

Former President Bill Clinton spent Thursday campaigning for President Barack Obama in Cleveland, Perrysburg, Akron and Chillicothe, Ohio. The Cleveland Plain Dealer's headline read, "Bill Clinton rocks the house in Akron as Obama's proxy."

Another former president, however, President George W. Bush, was not on the campaign trail stumping for Republican nominee former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA), but rather in the Cayman Islands, speaking to the Cayman Alternative Investment Summit on Grand Cayman Island.

The event promises to "bring together the world's leading institutional investors, fund managers, academics, economists and regulators in the Cayman Islands - the world's leading domicile for investment funds - to discuss and debate the fundamentals of a vibrant future for the alternative investments industry."

"I didn't think that he would do it, but he did," Maddow said. "On the day when the last Democratic president, President Clinton, did four campaign events for Barack Obama, on that same day, five days before the election, the last Republican president is in the Cayman Islands presumably getting paid a ton of money to keynote a conference on how to offshore your investments in order to avoid paying U.S. taxes."

"Know anybody who's done that?" she asked.

Given how badly things turned out under the last Republican president, Maddow said, it's hardly surprising that the Romney campaign would want Bush as far away as possible.

"But," she said, "the Caymans? Really? It would have been more subtle if they'd sent him to visit Romney's old bank accounts in Switzerland."

Watch the clip, embedded via MSNBC, below:

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