It’s been conventional wisdom for quite a while that Romney, mass of warts and all, is nonetheless the strongest candidate the Republicans have for the general election. I bought into that, and while I’m not quite ready to declare outright apostasy, I think the argument is losing a lot of its force awful fast. Newt is every bit as big a liar as Newt, and would arguably be an even worse president, but he’s glib, and he expresses himself with a faux conviction that almost perfectly resembles the real thing.
Romney has two things going against him and they feed into one another.
The first is the fact that he is a flesh and blood exemplar of the privileged status that the rich have consolidated in this country. Of course, they’ve always had a certain amount of privilege, but it’s grown with the growth of inequality. It would be one thing if he regularly condemned his privileged treatment, as both Obama and, in the past, Bill Clinton have done. But he can’t bring himself to condemn the disparity in tax rates that requires a working stiff to fork over a higher percentage of his income than a guy who sits back and collects interest.
The second is his total inability to even feign being a normal person. He just can’t help himself. Consider this article, in which we learn that Romney, a la Clinton, feels the pain of his base:
“The banks are scared to death, of course,” he said. “They’re feeling the same thing that you’re feeling…”
Bear in mind that the “you’re” he’s referring to are flesh and blood people, who actually have the capacity to be scared. The truth is, Romney feels the banks pain in a way that he can never feel the pain of the losers who have lost their jobs and/or home on the altars of high finance. Worse, he finds it impossible to even pretend that he cares about normal people. Every time he tries, he comes across as a transparent phony.
I don’t know if the people around him are trying to rein him in or to teach him how to fake a connection to the 99.9%, but if they are, they have failed, and the fault is not theirs but in Willard. He will continue to say stuff like the above until the day of the election, if he manages to wrest the nomination from Newt.
Has ever a political party put on offer such a collection of clowns? Our local Republicans run people for the school board who are more qualified to be president.
Along these lines, I must pass along a few lines recently uttered by Fidel Castro. Hey, when he’s right, he’s right:
“The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is — and I mean this seriously — the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been,” said the retired Cuban leader, who has dueled with 11 U.S. administrations since his 1959 revolution.
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