Finding a Lethal Label for Romney
Presidential campaigns need a pithy phrase to nail the opposition, and the President is edging toward a killer label for Mitt Romney.
In 1940, FDR won reelection against a likable corporate lawyer, Wendell Willkie, who was dubbed the Barefoot Boy from Wall Street and easily defeated.
Four years later, Thomas E. Dewey, a buttoned-down former prosecutor with a campaign strategy of not being “prematurely specific” on issues, was described as an opportunist who “changes his views from hour to hour.” Pictured by his own aide as “cold as a February iceberg,” Dewey was dispatched as the Little Man on the Wedding Cake.
Now, Obama is running for reelection against a changeable Wall Street insider with current views that make Willkie and Dewey look like flaming radicals, one who claims that his experience as a venture capitalist qualifies him to be President.
Democrats have floated Vulture Capitalist, but the label has not stuck. Now Obama is working on another, Clueless Capitalist.
On the stump, the President tells of Romney’s answer to a question about financial struggles, “right out of an economic textbook. He said, ‘Our productivity equals our income.’ And the notion was that somehow the reason people can’t pay their bills is because they’re not working hard enough.
“If they got more productive, suddenly their incomes would go up. Well, those of us who’ve spent time in the real world (laughter) know that the problem isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough…”
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Hopefully Obama is focused like a laser on coming up with a snappy label for Romney.
Yea, snappy labels, that’s what we need. What they need to do is focus on the obvious disconnects in GOP financial theory. Namely, that taking care of the wealthy is how we take care of the nation. Well, the wealthy have never had more money than they have now. How many companies are posting record profits? Well lets see, the financial sector, the Oil companies, pretty much all large corporations, Wal-Mart, yada yada. And how much of it has trickled down? Wages have stayed flat despite the vast increase in profit at the top. We have a CLEAR case that increased revenue and profit do not mean that it increases payment unless the companies decide to have it do so. And surprise surprise, they have decided not to do so. And now we are expected by the GOP to shoulder more of the burden. To make life EASIER for those at the top even though the vast majority of Americans are in the mess precisely because of the catastrophe foisted upon the American public by reckless private institutions.
Romney and the whole GOP have been clear about that. They want to make life easier for the richest Americans at the expense of the poorest Americans. How can you lose to that level of blatant idiocy? How can you not boil down the facts and history of their policies and what is absolutely going to result if we enact them and don’t get rid of pretty much every GOP sponsored piece of tax and deregulation made in the last 15 years.
We are at the precipice of another major meltdown. The banks have only consolidated making them even too-bigger-to-fail and still have trillions of dollars they can’t afford to lose floating in derivative markets so complex and convoluted even they don’t know how to assess the risk or count the losses when it falls apart. Not since 1929 has there been a time when we needed our government to step in and bring some sanity back to those who would risk all our futures on their short term gains.
Mitt “Profits not People” Romney.