America Please Vote for Mitt Romney, Like All Conservatives He Is Just an Ordinary Guy
In 2008, the campaign of John McCain - a hundred-millionaire who literally lost count of how many homes he owned - tried to portray Barack Obama as an out-of-touch, arugula-eating elitist who vacationed in exotic Hawaii. Now Mitt Romney, the latest entrant in the Republican irony Olympics, has branded President Obama a modern day Marie Antoinette whose message to financially struggling Americans is "let them eat cake."
As The Huffington Post reported yesterday, during an Iowa campaign stop the French-speaking Romney who spent much of his 1960's Mormon mission in a tony Paris neighborhood compared President Obama to the famously out-of-touch French aristocrat:
"When the president's characterization of our economy was, 'It could be worse,' it reminded me of Marie Antoinette: 'Let them eat cake.'"
Mitt Romney might have wanted to look into the mirror first before throwing down that gauntlet.
After all, this is the same Mitt Romney who is worth an estimated $250 million but refuses to release his tax returns because they almost certainly show he pays a much lower share of his income to Uncle Sam than most middle class families.
That would also be the same Mitt Romney who nevertheless declared himself part of the "80 to 90 percent us" who are middle class.
This is the same Mitt Romney who despite his retirement from Bain Capital 13 years ago continues to make millions annually from his old employer, a firm which the Los Angeles Times rightly concluded, "often maximized profits in part by firing workers."
That didn't prevent Romney from joking with jobless Americans that "I'm also unemployed."
The son of auto magnate George Romney was raised in upscale Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, claims he's just "a guy from Detroit" and then authored an op-ed piece titled, "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."
That same Mitt Romney proudly declared that "corporations are people my friend," but insisted "I don't think we hurt the poor" by cutting programs like Medicaid.
Marie Antoinette Mitt suggested the equivalent of "let them have cardboard boxes" when his advice to struggling American homeowners is "don't try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom, allow investors to buy homes, put renters in them, fix the homes up and let it turn around and come back up."
Conservatism has come to mean people who are so out of touch with the lives of average Americans they have no concept of how out of touch they are.
