The morning after his aniticipated big victory in Florida, Mitt Romney made his own pitch for the middle class that has been President Obama's narrative for a long, long time. But as he is prone to do when he's out on the range, he stumbled badly by leaving the impression on CNN that the poor should be of much less concern than...eh...the middle class.It was pure McMitt Lite, and his take on the poor immediately flashed across the sound waves 0f TV and radio - so harshly at times that an aide conceded that although his candidate meant well, he could have worded it in a little better English.
Insisting that "there's no question it's not good being poor", Romney explained: "My focus is on middle income Americans...We a have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether there are holes in it, but we have food stamps, we have Medicaid,, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor....You can focus on the rich - that's not my focus - You can focus on the poor - that's not my focus. My focus is on middle-income Americans." (Talk about it? In a quiet room?)
Thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, he doesn't have to focus on the rich, who are focussing on his welfare with enormous personal contributions of six and seven figures.
At this stage of the long campaign, it does appear that the only safety net he will need is one that can spare him of the fallout from his own mindless comments. Anybody want to bet $10,000 that this won't be a learning experience for him?
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I don't know that Romney relates to the American middle class any worse than the American middle class and poor relate to the billion or so people of this world living on $30 a month, with no access to clean water, etc. I would probably be no less awkward explaining my lifestyle in the streets of Calcutta.
Bertrand Russel spoke of the implied "moral superiority of the victim", which in the inverse implies the moral fracture of the wealthy.
But neither generalization is correct as a rule or even useful outside the political debate.
Tony Grossi played that card calling Randy Lerner an "irrelevant billionaire" when in fact Lerner's charitable donations would hardly be irrelevant to those benefiting from his foundation's generosity.
I think that Roger Federer made $61 million last year.That's the world we live in.
What else can one expect from someone who was born with not a spoon, but a silver ladle in his mouth?
As one who has actually read his long treatise on economic issues and remedies, I found it alarmingly similar and repetitive of many of the same GOP policies that produced the Great Recession. Among his nostrums for rescuing the economy are proposals to effectively deregulate financial institutions, to ease the oversight of big banks, commodities traders, and private equity firms, to run up even larger deficits by expanding tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, and to castrate the Environmental Protection Agency. In general, what he appears to be calling for is the same old trickle-down theory of economics that favors the rich while spreading peanuts to poor and working citizens. This approach seems to be hard-wired into Republican brains, perhaps a part of their genetic heritage. In Mitt's case, trickle-down to workers essentially means gusher-up to the economic elite. His theory of income redistribution goes one way: UP. His belated notice of the lagging "middle class" -- as it struggles harder and harder simply to keep from continuing to slide backward -- is so inchoate that he can't even keep his thoughts straight when he tries to explain it.
Now anxiously awaiting Abe's commentary on Trump's endorsement of Mittens.
Also, comparison of Pres. Obama's statements at the National Prayer Breakfast and Mitt and Trump's appearance in....
Vegas, baby!
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