Mitt the Awkward Runs for Office
Have you ever had a chance to save someone from an embarrassing situation? It doesn’t have to be a big one. More than once I’ve seen women leaving the ladies room with toilet paper trailing their fancy shoes. It’s easy; walk up to them, step on the trailing end and they are free.
I have the same uneasy feeling watching Mitt Romney campaign for president. I’m embarrassed for him. I get squinchy and want to look away when he speaks. I want to step on something and free him of his awkwardness.
Since he’s been running for office longer than it took the smart kids to get through high school, there’s not much shiny left on him. A recent ABC news article documented that people on both sides of the political aisle have zero interest in reading anything about Mitt Romney. He’s a buzz kill.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. I’m pretty sure Mitt makes most people uncomfortable. He’s just not that into us. By “us” I mean everyone but maybe 48 people.
There are those who say his lack of luster is rooted in some deep-seated envy of his wealth. That’s insane. We make celebrities of the wealthy in this country. We watch TV shows about them and read about their latest shoe purchases. Americans believe that, at any moment, they may be raptured up into the strata of the affluent, and don’t resent them. I know people with more money than Romney who are as cool as cucumbers and lack his awkward nature when it comes to dealing with ordinary, middle-class Americans.
The disconnect is startling, and I think it’s more on Mr. Romney’s end. Born gumming a silver spoon, he’s never gone without. Everyone should be so lucky. Almost no one is.
As a result, Romney can’t connect with middle-class Americans despite his best efforts. The harder he tries, the more painful it is to watch.
Parents get a $1,000 tax deduction for their child. Mr. and Mrs. Romney tried to take a $77,000 deduction for their horse. The annual housing for their mare was almost twice what the average American family spends on a place to live.
I’m not saying fancy horses are immoral or that he shouldn’t enjoy his wealth. He just doesn’t seem to understand that many hard-working, moral Americans struggle every day to make sure they have the basics; food on the table and a roof over their head.
Betting another candidate $10,000 during a televised debate was weird on many levels. His church, like most, condemns gambling. People don’t make $10,000 bets; that’s a down payment on a home, or a day and a half in the hospital.
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson contributed $10 million to Romney’s election war chest.
“Corporations are people, my friend.” No, Mr. Romney, they are not. Corporations don’t cry, give birth or buy yogurt to help with constipation. Until the state of Texas puts a corporation to death, I’m not buying it.
With such fantastic hair and a good-looking family, I want to believe there’s more to Mitt than just being born into money. Several weeks ago there was a dustup when Mitt said his wife was his adviser when it came to women’s issues.
Anne Romney gave an interview to the Boston Globe in 1994. She talked about the young couple’s initial trials and tribulations. They spent their early marriage living off Mitt’s sales of stock. They had their third child about the time Mitt got his first paycheck. She went on about how hard they struggled … living off what in today’s dollars would be $377,000. How did they survive?
It’s great if your parents can afford to put you through school. But for the love of God, don’t tell people it was a struggle. Americans shoulder more debt for student loans than we owe in car loans or credit cards. Why? Because most of us can’t live off our stock portfolios during our college years.
“Which Cadillac should I drive today?” or “Which home should we stay in this weekend?” aren’t questions most of us will ever ask ourselves.
Before you go off all crazy and accuse me of supporting that black socialist who wants people to have health care, shelter and food on the table, unless you mean Jesus, I don’t know who you’re talking about.
he like GW Bush, makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
I have never been wrong about my feelings when that happens. I feel like he will be another puppet in the hands of corporations if he gets elected.
GW was a shill for Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.
All true commentary and observations about Romney, but I really tire of hearing how you don’t support our President. Perfect, he is not, but he is the only sane choice and has done a damned good job in the face of an impossible level of obstructionism in Congress, not to mention the outright racism that has crawled out from under the rocks since his election. Your constant repetition of how you don’t support him in print and on radio only serves to undermine him and fuel doubt in the minds of fence-sitters.
I agree completely. And I sure do not feel embarrassed for Mitt Romney. He has no business running for president if he has so little understanding of the people in this country. Like all modern Republicans he is completely out of touch.
Anyone can run for president, though. And we have had presidents who were rich but they had an understanding and compassion for people who weren’t so financially fortunate – Roosevelt and Kennedy. They somehow learned the lesson their parents taught them about how lucky they were to be born into a wealthy family and how they should give back to everyone else. I wonder – did Mitt’s parents forget those lessons when he was growing up or did he just not get it?
I’ve often thought when I hear that he did his mission work in France that it’s too bad he wasn’t sent to some country with people who were really poor. Many of the Mormon kids around here end up going to rural parts of Mexico where they see what it means to be poor. I don’t imagine Mitt saw much of that as he walked the streets in France. A missed opportunity for him.
Shannyn, I understand your point about being embarrassed for Mitt, but really, he should be embarrassed for himself. But he just doesn’t get it and he doesn’t seem to care. So he gets no sympathy from me. If he continues to be so clueless after running for president for so long then it seems clear that his reason for wanting the office has to do with prestige and glory for himself rather than the opportunity to help other Americans have a better life.
What exactly don’t you like about President Obama? Is he not liberal enough? He hasn’t done everything that I hoped he would either. But in reality, with the Congress at a constant stall, there is no way he could get through more things on the liberal agenda.
The day we elect anyone to the office of president and that person is perfect is that day I’ll be sure we’ve all died and gone somewhere else. None of us are perfect, nor should we expect our president to be.
I can’t speak for Shannyn, but she like many of my progressive friends are running in
a fugue state. They won’t be happy if the President is re-elected because he did not shower the place with roses, but they will be ecstatic if they can start hammering a new republican POTUS.
Then all will be right in their world—except a few million people will be dead from wars and American children will starve after being taken off the food stamp roles.
Yay for having it all!
There is something quite odd going on in this thread within a thread. I don’t/can’t follow ANC radio so I have no idea what Ms Moore has said about Mr Obama on there but there is NO thing in this post which disses the President..
There is a slam at all the fools who call him a socialist, which he most definitely is not, but no slam of the President.
I will vote for Mr Obama again but with no real enthusiasm
. I do not want Mr Romney filling Ms Bader-Ginsberg’s seat on the Supreme Court and I do not want him anywhere near education, immigration, and issues which affect women’s healthcare. Mr Obama is better on those issues but not really good, just better.
Mr Obama is a centrist and I am not. I disagree with him on multiple levels about almost everything but he has held up extraordinarily well against the horrendous nasty racist gobbeldygook , managing to get a fair amount of important things done.
I do not like what I am seeing here and which I am seeing too many places where liberals should be able to feel comfortable asking questions and voicing concerns about Mr Obama’s job performance. There are certainly multiple groups within the liberal sphere who are deeply unhappy with Mr Obama but it serves no useful purpose to lecture any and all who have concerns as if they are bad or pouty children… which is how some of this is coming across.
And with no explicit remark from Ms Moore to hang any of it on…? What is this?
I’m beginning to question his “business skills”: doing what he did, shouldn’t he be in fact even richer than he is? There are a lot of hedge fund managers that are worth more than he, so it seems like he really wasn’t all that good in the first place. Evil, yes, zero empathy, and incompetent? Hmmm, methinks he’s not ready for prime time and never will be.
Mitt reminds me of a PC running Windows 3.1: hasn’t had an update in years, can only run 2 programs at a time without crashing, and the PC has no mouse. With limited RAM, and a tiny hard drive, he has a difficult time with doing anything other than very basic word processing.
I don’t have a problem with Romney’s wealth. What bothers me is his completely narcissistic view of the world.
He is so wrapped up in his own little shiny, gold-plated piece of the universe that he is unwilling and/or unable to view life from anyone else’s perspective. He can’t – or won’t – try to understand what life might be like for a single mother struggling to make it on minimum wage. He has no idea what getting through the day is like for someone who has been unemployed for 14 months with no prospects and a looming foreclosure. He has no interest in understanding the fear of a young person just out of college with no job and loans that will take decades to repay. He has no sympathy for someone diagnosed with cancer who has no health insurance.
I’m not sure if he was born that way, with some gigantic character flaw that makes it impossible for him to feel empathy for others, or if he developed that personality trait in order to be successful in his work at Bain. Much like a surgeon needs to maintain a certain emotional distance from his/her patient in order to be able to function properly, I imagine buying companies, heartlessly firing all the workers and selling what’s left requires a certain detachment in order to do it without throwing yourself off a bridge, consumed with guilt.
Sadly, based on the stories of his school days and family vacations, I suspect that he was born missing a critical part of what makes us all human. The more I hear about and from him, the more convinced I am that he has a severe personality disorder. The idea of him running our country scares the cr@p out of me.
Oh dear.
I’m not going to be able to get a picture of Mr Romney with toilet paper stuck to his high heels out of my mind now.
Talk about awkward…
While in Iowa—-Rommney didn’t know what to call a dough-nut.
I agree that people in our country are having a hard time, but I don’t think Mr. Rommeny has a clue as to what a real depression looks like.
I am old enought to remember the stories told by my parents and grandparents– How people lived during the great depression. It was hard for them to come up with $10.00 for the months rent. Wow! $10.00.
I also read the article in Rollingstone- and numerous posts about Romney’s propensity to lie. That concerns me more: mainstream media should focus on the constant fibs, tall tales and outright lies about Obama, the economy, the stimulus… as if the more Romney repeats a lie, the truer it becomes.
I have no problem hating that, and the candidate that does it.
I’m with you. I particularly resent that he continues to repeat the lie long after it has been exposed as a lie, with no stinging conscience or feelings of guilt.
I happen to have no problem disliking Mitt Romney. He has always been a bully – through high school, while in college, as an adult as shown in his treatment of the family dog and in his choice of career. He could have worked for a corporation that made something, cars for instance, because that had been his father’s business.
He is also intellectually lazy. For a man who has been doing nothing but running for president since 2006, he sure has very few ideas about what to do once in office. His intellectual laziness also extends to his failure to be able to interact with ordinary Americans. Remember the ads about wanting to share a beer with George W. Bush? No one is remotely suggesting sharing a Kool-Aid with Mitt Romney or even a glass of orange juice.
He also, considering he has a Harvard law degree, amazingly ignorant of the Constitution; in particular, he does not have any conception of what the separation of church and state means. In New Hampshire early in 2012, he was filmed talking with a Vietnamese war vet who had been in the jungles of Viet Nam while Mitt was in the French countryside as a Mormon missionary. To Mitt the two experiences were not just parallel (bad enough), they were the same. It was really just as difficult being a Mormon missionary in France in the late 1960’s as it was to be shouldering a weapon in Viet Nam. Also during the primaries this year, he was asked about how little he pays in federal taxes (percentage wise, he pays less than most of us). Mitt’s response was that he gives a lot to the Mormon Church. So his giving to his church is just a different way of giving to the federal government. How many other candidates could get away with statements like that?
He also has compared the time spent by his sons working on his campaign to military service. What universe does Mitt Romney live in? How can he face families who have lost sons and daughters, spouses, parents, friends with that kind of drivel?
Mitt Romney just isn’t interested in people. And whoever wants to run for president has to be interested in people. I know all that I need to know at this point about Mitt Romney and the Republican Party. I will vote for President Obama and any other Democrat running for any office who is on the ballot here in Michigan this November.
Please let Romney keep trailing the toilet paper. It’s the only thing that humanizes him. Fortunately, not in a good way.
Romney may be the one person who is so boring that people’d rather watch “Bristol Palin: Life’s a Dripp.”
Short hard look at the results of the economic inequality we’re currently experiencing:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/the-price-of-inequality-interview-with-joseph-e-stiglitz-20120625
“High levels of economic inequality lead to imbalances in political power as those at the top use their economic weight to shape our politics in ways that give them more economic power. If you look at so many of the outcomes in our political process, no one can say that they reflect the interests of most Americans. Most Americans don’t think speculators should be taxed at a fraction of people that work for a living; or that banks should be allowed to engage in predatory lending or abusive credit card practices; or that drug companies be allowed to get special benefits out of the government in the form of overpayments; or that mining companies should be able to get natural resources at below competitive prices.
At the top [of the income scale], a lot of the inequality arises out of efforts that people take to get a larger share of the pie rather than to increase the size of the pie. As you know, economists call it “rent seeking.” What they’re doing is moving money from the bottom to the top. But they’re not creating wealth; they’re just shifting wealth around. And the people who have been exploited are not better off; in fact, they’re worse off.”