If you haven't seen this ad, take thirty-two seconds to fix that. It's not just that the Obama campaign hits the jugular. The ad has honest-to-God artistic value: there's subtext and space to read between the lines. There's no grating, insulting voice over. It features irony and satire in a minimalist approach that manages to say more about both Romney and the state of the country than Gingrich's thirty minute epic did last winter. And it satisfactorily savages Mittens' stupid-ass, off-key singing of a song he understands only on the most obvious, superficial level--a song he manipulates into garnering support for himself, having no other means with which to inspire loyalty. But why would we expect loyalty to be a naturally understood virtue for Romney? This man, who disavowed his greatest gubernatorial achievement and nearly all of his past positions in order to appeal to the rump of his father's former party.
And you know the Bain story. The politically disadvantageous outsourcing of jobs (to go with the layoffs) that his former company was involved in. The claims that he wasn't involved whatsoever, despite the $100K/year that he was paid for three years from 1999 to 2002, during which time he wasn't working there (flying in the face of Romney's "no free lunch" line). The non-association he had with any of it because he was in Salt Lake, though was still technically CEO (a lack of accountability we all love in our elected officials). The fact that he wasn't in Salt Lake enough to discount him from running for governor of Massachusetts in 2002 because he was still sometimes in Boston on business (not outsourcing business, of course). And the "retroactive retirement" talking point that might be worthy of an award in the field of Orwellian laziness. Honestly, the whole thing might not even hurt Mittens that much just because the whole thing's too bloody complicated to fathom, a fact that pretty well sums up how the finance industry and the ultra-wealthy have been able to run roughshod on regulators and the world economy lo these last decades.
But Mittens not only makes the amateur mistake of overreacting to the Obama ads, keeping the accusations in the public consciousness (and unintentionally revealing a raw nerve that speaks volumes about the kind of obfuscation he was involved in with Bain), but also seems to think that he can get out of it with the same stilted and confusing business-speak he might feed to the SEC. A language most Americans aren't exactly fluent in. And when someone asks for a clarification, he'll get pissy because he doesn't handle dissent and contrary information well. He'll turn it around, citing an imagined jealousy on the part of the asker because that's all he has--it's the only way he can understand any hostility that comes his way. He's still the privileged teenager at Cranbrook, not sure why he doesn't always fit in, but knows that it's someone else's fault.
See, the modern Republican Party is that obnoxious, nearly friendless kid on the playground, swinging his arms as he shouts "y'all just jealous!" at no one in particular. He never stops to consider the meanings of his words, or the words of others as directed at him. Not because that kind of self-reflection is a sign of weakness, as the last Republican president believed. But because in that evaluation is the doorway to the abyss of the emptiness of a person who's never looked in there before. And Romney is the perfect avatar for them: a plastic, hollow Etch-a-Sktech. An insanely wealthy businessman who speaks in misleading legalese, when he's not awkwardly pandering to his (at best) outdated conception of what a "regular American" is. A man who doesn't understand that most Americans aren't "jealous" of the wealthy (though we may occasionally want to know how they got their wealth), but we do expect them to play by the same rules as the rest of us. A man with an unhealthy and telling distaste for those who are comfortable being the outsider. This is who Republicans believe best represents them among the choices they had in the primaries, probably the closest abyss-moment we'll get from them in the near future. Because when and if Romney fails to beat Obama in November, they'll turn inward again, circle the wagons, and proclaim that it was only because he wasn't conservative enough and because the rest of us are all too stupid. We're all just jealous. And Romney, still set to "pander" mode, will agree with them.
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