Mitt's Just Like All Of Us (NOT!)

Mitt Romney is one of those people who was born on third base, but is desperately trying to convince people that he hit a triple. He has never wanted for anything and has no conception at all of what life is like for those who have to work for a living. And he knows that is one of his biggest weaknesses as a candidate, so he keeps making ridiculous statements to try and convince ordinary Americans that he understands their problems.

While campaigning in Florida a few months ago, he told a crowd of unemployed people that he understood their situation because he himself was currently unemployed. What he failed to say was that he currently has a net worth of about $250 million and still receives millions of dollars each year from Bain Capital. Something tells me that's not quite the same situation those unemployed Floridians were in (and I doubt they'd be worried about finding a new job if they had Romney-like money). Instead of making the unemployed feel like he was one of them, he just wound up insulting them.

Now he has done it again. It's just a fact of life that there are many millions of people out of work in this country. But there are millions more who live in fear that any day they could join the ranks of the unemployed. In an effort to appeal to those people, Romney recently told a New Hampshire crowd, "I know what it's like to worry about whether or not you are going to get fired. There are times when I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip." Really? You have hundreds of millions of dollars and an income of millions a year guaranteed for life, and you're worried about getting fired?

If the people in that crowd (and across this country) had anything near Romney's wealth, I doubt they'd be very worried about being fired. Their fear of a job loss stems from the fact that they know it would be unlikely they could quickly get a new job in the current American job market, and they could be just a few weeks away from losing their house and car and having to go on food stamps just to feed their family -- a fear that Romney has never had (and never will have). With this ridiculous comparison of his situation to theirs, Romney has just insulted millions of hard-working people who live from paycheck to paycheck, and live in fear of losing that paycheck.

There may be some reason why Romney might make a decent president, although I can't think of any, but it certainly isn't that Romney is just like ordinary Americans or has even the slightest idea of what life is like for those citizens. He was born in the 1% and will die as a member of that elite group. Meanwhile, most other Americans are just trying to get by day to day and month to month. It's not the same.