The Banker or the Professor: Who will blue collar Americans hate less?

[denem]

Last edited Fri Jan 20, 2012, 05:10 PM - Edit history (8)

That was the icon I saw in Wapo. Why the Banker of course!. Newt isn't much of a Professor, except in his own mind.

Except Harold Meyerson in Wapo isn't talking about Newt, and his Blue Collar America is WHITE Blue Collar America. You see, Barack Obama is the professor, a representative of the very elite that 'Reagan Democrats' love to hate - an 'ivory Tower' detached, academic know-it-all who has "no understanding of or sympathy for the white working class". Add in race and "Barack Obama seems sent by central casting to embody the target of neo-classic, racist right populism."

Um No. Meyerson is off target. As more or less every DU'er knows, and some would say, knows only too well, President Obama and Candidate Obama are two very different job lots. Candidate Obama is more Populist than Professor. It took Obama ten months, from announcing his run in Springfield Illinois, to the 'Yes We Can' speech in New Hampshire, to become Candidate Obama, to transcend the passionate optimism of 2004. Six months later, accepting the Nomination , the steel, the indignation, was there for all to see. He denounced the 'Ownership Society' - they own it and you are on your own.

Romney IS the man from central casting, the embodiment of the Ownership Society. He IS the guy only too willing to leave workers, small investors and anyone else in the lurch. He IS the millionaire who nays less than his secretary. If the President is all smiles, Joe Biden. his attack dog. must be breaking arms, straining to get at this guy. The VP from Stratton does blue collar popularism very very well. He is more than passionate, it's part of his DNA, literally.

Harold admits as much. "Romney is the model of everything in modern American capitalism that makes people pine for the kinder, gentler capitalism that his father personified." I''d put less diplomatically, Romney is the unacceptable face of capitalism that disgusts the American People: From the 'let them eat grass' Hooverites, to the Mr Potters of it's a Wonderful Life, to Michael Milken's corporate raiders, to the Too Big To Fail boys of today. In his hubris, Mitt Romney will induct Bain Capital into that all time hall of shame. I couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

For what it's worh here is the first for paragraphs Meyerson piece

Obama vs. Romney: Who will (white) blue-collar Americans hate less?

If Mitt Romney becomes the Republican nominee and ­faces off against Barack Obama in November, we may finally be able to answer a question that has vexed students of American politics since the heyday of George Wallace: Which elite do white, blue-collar Americans hate more?

Despite Newt Gingrich’s apparent surge in South Carolina, Romney remains the odds-on favorite for the Republican nod. And a Romney-Obama contest would pit the very personification of the two elites that generations of Americans have been brought up to loathe: the paper-shuffling, unfeeling banker, utterly out of touch with most Americans’ concerns, and who comes from inherited wealth to boot; and the cool, academic social engineer who is culturally estranged from the white working class and isn’t opposed to governments helping racial minorities.

Romney is the model of everything in modern American capitalism that makes people pine for the kinder, gentler capitalism that his father personified. As the head of American Motors, George Romney, Mitt’s pop, made cars. Mitt makes deals. As Michael Tomasky noted this week, George Romney refused a bonus of $100,000 after American Motors had a good year in 1960, saying that no top executive needed to make more than his $225,000 annual salary ($1.4 million today). Romney the lesser has a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions for his work in private equity, extracting vast amounts of money from the firms — successful and not — that Bain Capital took over. The younger gets all manner of tax breaks that his father never could, apparently availing himself of the special rate for private equity and hedge fund managers that, he admits, has brought his rate down to around 15 percent.

Worse yet, Romney comes off as a walking, talking compendium of upper-class cluelessness. His offer of a $10,000 bet to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, his dismissal of his yearly speaker fees (around $370,000) as pocket money, his equation of corporations and people — these and other off-the-gold-cufflink comments depict a guy whose points of intersection with the lives of most Americans are few and far between. A rich kid who became a bean counter: Could anything be worse?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/romney-and-obama-two-elites-going-head-to head/2012/01/19/gIQAX9o5BQ_story.html