Another clone, apparently.
"I will be a voice of the children and their parents," Romney said today. But the Romney campaign's own white paper on education promises a field day for for-profit education companies, not children and parents. He'd bring rapacious banks back into the student loan process and funnel public money to for-profit schools.
Pell Grants for college education offer a badly-needed gateway to a better life for young people not born with Romney's wealth and privilege. But the Romney paper sneers at them. Pell grant funding reflects our "expanding entitlement mentality," the author sniffs.
No wonder Romney used the word "future" so much. He must be from there. Who else could have so many clones running around, doing things that are against his own principles?
Attack and Destroy
Romney asked his audience to "look beyond the speeches and the attacks and the ads." That was odd, since he was giving a speech -- and was only seconds away from launching into his usual litany of attacks. And as for "ads," one of the latest from Romney is a Miami-area attack ad in Spanish which links Obama to Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro. Apparently red-baiting never goes out of style.
(The Chavez ad has a clip of the Venezuelan leader saying "If Obama was from Barlovento he'd vote for Chavez." Most Americans are less familiar with the region than Romney's target audience, who know that Barlovento's population is primarily of African descent. The ad also appeals to racism.)
Romney's campaign must've known the ads were dirty, since they broke with their typical practice and didn't distribute them to the press.
Love Offerings
Here is Romney's real "closing argument": By cutting taxes even more for guys like me, you all will do a little better, too. But that approach failed for 10 years, so the argument makes no economic sense.
Romney may be hoping that it makes emotional sense. When I was a kid there was a TV preacher named Reverend Ike. The Reverend told audiences that if they sent him money -- a "love offering," I think he called it -- they would soon prosper themselves. He called that magical payback an "Increase of God."
His economic "plan" is even called "Believe in America." That sounds right, since it's essentially economic faith-healing. There's no "plan" behind the verbiage, just the desire to keep siphoning off the nation's wealth to the already wealthy. Don't call it "inequity," call it a "love offering."
Mitt Romney is the Reverend Ike of American politics.
Dog Day Afternoon
The ugliest part of the speech excoriated Obama for being too "partisan" and not working with the GOP Congress. Obama tried so hard to work with those Republicans, in fact, that he waited too long to tell the American people about the GOP's obstructionist battle plan, which Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell described clearly when asked why Republicans wanted control of the House and Senate:
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president."
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