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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (65438)	2/6/2012 12:03:49 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	1 Recommendation Respond to of 103300

Wealthy Well-Bred Willard By A.B. Stoddard, columnist, The Hill - 02/03/12 04:43 PM ET thehill.com Mitt Romney is poised to take the Nevada caucuses easily Saturday — snore. He could win again on Tuesday in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri. Yet no matter how many contests he wins, the guy has problems. As Newt Gingrich tries to revive his faltering presidential campaign, he is echoing criticism of Romney that Romney's own supporters are saying behind closed doors. Willard Wealthy Well-Bred Romney is no average American. Not only can he not fake it, he has become an admaker's dream as he makes more and more statements drawing attention to it. The disconnect that exists between most voters and an unemployed guy who makes more than $50,000 a day in income from investments would be staggering any time, but in tough economic times he is rapidly becoming a handy foil for President Obama should he win the nomination and face Obama in the fall. This week Romney added his lack of "concern for the very poor" to his long list of statements that help portray him as the uber-rich Other in the race. He tried empathizing with Florida voters last June by telling them he was unemployed too; he said "corporations are people too" soon after; he offered Texas Gov. Rick Perry a $10,000 bet; he said he once feared a pink slip; and he laughed off nearly $375,000 in speaking fees from only one year as "not so much" money. Now he has brushed off the very poor in this exact statement: "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I will fix it. I'm not concerned about the very rich. They're doing just fine. I'm concerned about the very heart of America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling," he added. Republicans, both those who want Romney to win the nomination and those who have accepted that he will, fear this is only the beginning. They worry not only about Romney's failure to connect with average Americans but that his comments about the poor reveal a fundamental lack of understanding of conservative principles. Many Republicans who don't support Gingrich agree with his attack about why Romney shouldn't be relegating the very poor to safety nets but rather talking about how he can help them escape through opportunity and work. Pete Wehner, who worked in the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, wrote this week that "one of the main moral defenses of democratic capitalism, after all, is that it's done more than any economic system in history to lift people out of mass poverty and mass misery." Wehner also wrote that "most of us became conservatives in some measure because we believed liberalism had failed the underclass and conservatism had something important to offer. So to have the likely Republican nominee say, 'I'm not concerned about the very poor' reveals a mindset that is disquieting." Gingrich may no longer be able to beat Romney, but Romney may be able to beat himself.