I'm having a hard time this morning deciding which makes me more angry: the extent to which we in America want our Presidential aspirants to be "just like us" and "to feel our pain", or the extent to which the guy I am supporting seems unable to grasp this. I don't want a heart surgeon who is "just like me". I don't want a financial manager who is "just like me". And I don't want a President who is "just like me". I want a President who is demonstrably BETTER than I am. And while I understand the impulse to want to have a President one would like to have a beer with, I maintain that this quality should pale in comparison to many other more important qualities.
Here are a few ways in which Mitt Romney is "not like me".
1. He has been married to the same woman for over forty years.
2. He does not smoke or drink (well, I guess we're tied here, though I do like a cigar now and again)
3. He has law and business degrees from Harvard
4. He is a millionaire many times over, through a combination of his birth, his education, and his talent
5. He ran a successful Olympic Games
6. He won as a Republican in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
7. He is able day in and day out, to perform at the highest level in what must be one of the most pressure-filled positions in American life--Republican Candidate for President.
So do I cringe when I hear that Romney talked about his wife's Caddys yesterday? Of course--not because there is anything wrong with his wife having cars prepositioned at their various houses--but because I realize that we in this country are to some extent protective of our right to earn great wealth and then envious of those who do. I cringed because I knew that there would be wags on both sides of the aisle pointing to how "out of touch" Romney is with "people like me". Guess what folks? People like us are behind on the mortgages on our houses that we bought knowing full well we couldn't afford. People like us are running up debt like nobody's business in order to fund our children's Xbox habits, their meaningless undergraduate degrees and our own second childhoods--all with the expectation that Uncle Sugar will take care of us and make it all better.
No folks--we are where we are because we vote for people who are "just like us". I'll take my chance on a guy who might just be a little better than I am.
Saturday, February 25, 2012
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3 comments:
Well said CW.
Well stated. While we're at it...where was all the "he's not just like us" or "he's out of touch with the average American" commentary when one Barak Hussein Obama entered the spot light? I'm not talking about all those who thought they shared his dogma, well-obscured though he and his lapdogs in the media try to keep it, I'm talking about how many of us were born to a caucasian wreck of a woman whose egg was fertilized by a Nigerian ne'er do well of questionable legality, then raised by our mother's parents, accepted into an Ivy League law school, had "auto"biographies written by a domestic terrorist, attended an America-hating church for 25 years, even as a sitting US Senator, married a woman who when you married her and for some significant time thereafter, was never proud of her country, could not unequivocally prove our citizenship in under two years and, then, without anything more than an absentee voting record during one term in the Senate, become President of the United States of America?
I've got WAY more in common with Mitt...and so do MOST Americans.
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