Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Taibbi: Romney SHOULD be getting creamed

I'm not superstitious about jinxes, but I guess I've seen too many movies where the guy who relaxed and turned his back on his opponent for premature gloating got a rude surprise.  

Anyhow, Matt Taibbi's latest post seems pretty on-target.  Maybe it's just because the last few elections have been barn burners, but...

The mere fact that Mitt Romney is even within striking distance of winning this election is an incredible testament to two things: a) the rank incompetence of the Democratic Party, which would have this and every other election for the next half century sewn up if they were a little less money-hungry and tried just a little harder to represent their ostensible constituents, and b) the power of our propaganda machine, which has conditioned all of us to accept the idea that the American population, ideologically speaking, is naturally split down the middle, whereas the real fault lines are a lot closer to the 99-1 ratio the Occupy movement has been talking about since last year.

Premature reports of Occupy's death aside, they did successfully change the national conversation from debt reduction to the welfare of the 99 Percent. That was their genius. In that light, candidate Romney, who is a caricature of the One Percent, should be getting creamed:

He has a $250 million fortune, but he appears to pay well under half the maximum tax rate, thanks to those absurd semantic distinctions that even Ronald Reagan dismissed as meaningless and counterproductive. He has used offshore tax havens for himself and his wife, and his company, Bain Capital, has both eliminated jobs in the name of efficiency (often using these cuts to pay for payments to his own company) and moved American jobs overseas.

The point is, Mitt Romney's natural constituency should be about 1% of the population. If you restrict that pool to "likely voters," he might naturally appeal to 2%. Maybe 3%.  

If the clichés are true and the presidential race always comes down to which candidate the American people "wants to have a beer with," how many Americans will choose to sit at the bar with the coiffed Wall Street multimillionaire who fires your sister, unapologetically pays half your tax rate, keeps his money stashed in Cayman Islands partnerships or Swiss accounts in his wife's name, cheerfully encourages finance-industry bailouts while bashing "entitlements" like Medicare, waves a pom-pom while your kids go fight and die in hell-holes like Afghanistan and Iraq and generally speaking has never even visited the country that most of the rest of us call the United States, except to make sure that it's paying its bills to him on time?

[...] The fact that Barack Obama needed a Himalayan mountain range of cash and some rather extreme last-minute incompetence on Romney's part to pull safely ahead in this race is what really speaks to the brokenness of this system.

Part of me is sorry we didn't get to witness a real campaign contest between President Obama and an unapologetically mean-spirited, in-your-face, screw-the-poor, angry-white-guy Republican like Newt Gingrich or Chris Christie.  Oh well, maybe next time... if the GOP hasn't completely cleaned house and started over in four years, that is.


By Matt Taibbi
September 25, 2012 | Rolling Stone

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