Little Bootstraps

Everyone is saying that Romney's 47% speech is the real Romney but that's not entirely true. He was playing to his audience and attempting to manipulate them as well.  All of the speech's quotes are from David Corn's article on the event.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

People who lie, cheat and steal must find a way of living with their acts. They use denial and projection to alleviate any guilt they might feel. Just as Megan McArdle carefully told us that she just happened to meet a (Black) man who told her* that he didn't have a problem with with wealthy whites buying up the homes in her formerly African-American neighborhood because "they weren't doing anything with it anyway," Romney soft-soaps the very rich by telling them that the poor are poor because they are lazy and greedy.

Nobody is more filled with entitlement than the rich. For instance, take Romney.

Contending that he is a self-made millionaire who earned his own fortune, Romney insisted, "I have inherited nothing." He remarked, "There is a perception, 'Oh, we were born with a silver spoon, he never had to earn anything and so forth.' Frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you can have: which is to get born in America."

Nothing could be more untrue. He was the son of a wealthy governor, went to expensive schools, and was able to avoid service in Vietnam. These schools and privliges enabled him to attend Harvard, paid for by family money. But these facts do not flatter his ego, so Romney chooses to lie to himself and others instead.

When one attendee asked how this group could help Romney sell himself to others, he answered, "Frankly, what I need you to do is to raise millions of dollars." He added, "The fact that I'm either tied or close to the president…that's very interesting."

It takes a multi-millionaire to jerk around multi-millionaires. Such people are only interested in winners; Sheldon Adelson dropped Newt like a stone when it became obvious he was a loser.

What [Obama's] going to do, by the way, is try and vilify me as someone who's been successful, or who's, you know, closed businesses or laid people off, and is an evil bad guy. And that may work.

Obama, who rescused the banking industry, also had his eye on his constituents, who wanted to be told that Obama would fight the financial industries on their behalf. Obama told them what they wanted to hear but this irritated the Entitled Elite. They expect to be praised, not villified. Romney stroked their egos and reminded them that the left saw them as villains.

I have a very good team of extraordinarily experienced, highly successful consultants, a couple of people in particular who have done races around the world. I didn't realize it. These guys in the US—the Karl Rove equivalents—they do races all over the world: in Armenia, in Africa, in Israel. I mean, they work for Bibi Netanyahu in his race. So they do these races and they see which ads work, and which processes work best, and we have ideas about what we do over the course of the campaign. I'd tell them to you, but I'd have to shoot you.

Guns for hire don't care whom they shoot. There's no difference between one country or another, one political race or another, for the global elite. They have little allegiance to their own country except in the abstract.

They'll probably be looking at what the polls are saying. If it looks like I'm going to win, the markets will be happy. If it looks like the president's going to win, the markets should not be terribly happy. It depends of course which markets you're talking about, which types of commodities and so forth, but my own view is that if we win on November 6th, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We'll see capital come back and we'll see—without actually doing anything—we'll actually get a boost in the economy. If the president gets reelected, I don't know what will happen. I can—I can never predict what the markets will do. Sometimes it does the exact opposite of what I would have expected. But my own view is that if we get a "Taxageddon," as they call it, January 1st, with this president, and with a Congress that can't work together, it's—it really is frightening.

Romney is trying to straddle a delicate line here, by trying to play on the rich's fears while telling them that they inspire such admiration and confidence that they will heal the economy just by showing up. The stock market and banking system have recovered quite well from the disaster they caused, thanks to the taxpayers' bank bailouts, and they all know it. Their economy is global, and they all know that too. The American consumer, the source of 70% of the economy, are not doing nearly as well and Romney's election will do nothing to improve their lot. Republican Congressmen never had any intention of "working together." They all know this, and all ignore it.

But Romney knows what they--and he--want to hear, and he delivers it to them. The rest of us, as we always knew, do not count, and if we suffer and die it is our own fault for not working hard and smart enough, like Willard "Little Bootstraps"** Romney.


*or so she claims

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