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As Jed Lewison reported, Mitt Romney's new "biographical" ad attempts to re-re-re-re-re-introduce him to voters, as if not knowing about him is the problem. Uh, Mitt. The voters know more than enough. They're just not that into you. And this doesn't help:
The ad opens with Mitt Romney talking about his business background and saying that he knows what it's like to start a business and create jobs and "to wonder whether you're going to be able to make ends meet." If you're the Harvard-educated son of an auto industry CEO who is worth hundreds of millions of dollars and has bank accounts in the Caymans, a secretive Bermuda shell corporation, and, until recently, a Swiss bank account, those are words that should never escape your lips. And that's doubly true if you've made millions while firing workers and bankrupting companies.Mitt and his chief adviser on lady things (and horses), Ann, have talked so much about just how hard they had it back in the day that it's clearly a strategy, not a gaffe.
Recall this tale of woe and hardship from Ann:
They were not easy years. [...]Clearly, Romneyland believes that if Mitt and Ann insist often enough that they're just regular folks who've had it tough, lived on the edge, struggled to make ends meet, and, of course, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps all on their own with no help from anyone (except for that stock portfolio from Daddy Romney, of course, and that house from Daddy Romney, of course), maybe voters will believe it.We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time. [...]
Mitt and I walked to class together, shared housekeeping, had a lot of pasta and tuna fish and learned hard lessons. [...]
We were living on the edge, not entertaining. No, I did not work. Mitt thought it was important for me to stay home with the children, and I was delighted.
Right after Mitt graduated in 1975, we had our third boy and it was about the time Mitt’s first paycheck came along. So, we were married a long time before we had any income, about five years as struggling students.
But that's not really the worst of it. The truly sick and twisted thing about this utterly false tale of woe is that Mitt and Ann, though they swear they can relate to people who struggle today, are actually sadists who relish the struggling of others.
Mitt Romney, after all, likes firing people. (Oh, sure, he meant corporations—because he can't tell the difference between corporations and people.) He tells "humorous" stories about his father, as president of American Motors, shutting down a factory in Michigan and putting a bunch of people out of work. Humorous indeed.
And of course, the supposedly more sympathetic Ann Romney, Mitt's "greatest asset" who supposedly humanizes him, yukked it up at the Connecticut Republican Party’s Prescott Bush Awards Dinner, saying:
I love the fact that there are women out there who don’t have a choice and they must go to work and they still have to raise the kids. Thank goodness that we value those people too. And sometimes life isn’t easy for any of us.
Who says that? Seriously, who says that? What kinds of monsters enjoy the struggling of others, take pleasure in the unemployment of others, find the hardships that their fellow Americans face to be "humorous" fodder, and then, on top of it all, they dare to claim that they too know how hard it is, they too have struggled, because gosh, it sure is tough to raise a family on an inherited stock portfolio.
These are terrible people. Really terrible people.
