Who are you callin' a plutocrat? Mitt Romney is from the mean streets
Headline of the day? Politico: "
Mitt Romney tax returns issue causes him to battle plutocrat image."
Thing is, it's harder to battle an "image" when it's also a reality and when your response to the image is a combination of belligerence and untruth:
“I went off on my own,” he said. “I didn’t inherit money from my parents. What I have I earned, I worked hard, the American way.”
But Romney’s parents helped him purchase his first home in Belmont, Mass., according to, “The Real Romney,” the biography penned by Boston Globe journalists.
Because everyone knows it's only the money your parents leave you when they die that helps pad your way through life and put you in a position to become wealthy. In fact, Romney did inherit money from his father; it's just that by the time of his father's 1995 death he was already wealthy enough to donate the money to Brigham Young University. His parents' help buying his first house, supporting his education, and giving him connections to people in a position to help his career were just incidental to that, we're to believe.
That's the pattern: On the one hand, how dare you question the unbridled essence of locust capitalism. On the other hand, don't you know that Mitt is a man of the people?
The fact that these issues just keep coming up and Romney keeps not having good answers for them may suggest that as a Republican candidate, you can have hundreds of millions of dollars, and the Republican primary voters won't mind. You can have made your hundreds of millions by profiting from layoffs, and the Republican primary voters won't mind. But sometime around the time it's coming out that you have millions parked in the Cayman Islands and you're refusing to release your tax returns, even Republican primary voters are going to start getting a little edgy. Even if they wouldn't use anything as anti-capitalist as "plutocrat" to describe you.
And it is so much fun watching Mitt get all brittle and pissy when challenged.