Paul Krugman, “Plutocrats on Parade”
“Plutocrats on Parade”
by Paul Krugman
by Paul Krugman
“Robin Wells has a very good essay on the Romney phenomenon in the Guardian. After all the whining over “class warfare”, the GOP has more or less forced an election that really is about the very rich versus everyone else — and the Romney supporters are so insulated by their wealth that they can’t even see the problem. I would just chime in that I agree with Robin that Romney is in very serious trouble. Think of the pattern that’s accumulating: the obfuscation over the Bain record on jobs, outsourcing, and all that, the mysterious offshore accounts (and the magical $100 million IRA), the stonewalling on past tax records, and now his insistence that he was no longer working at a company that continued to list him as CEO and pay him lots of money.
Republicans have long thrived on the “not like you” strategy — portraying Democrats as somehow alien and un-American (remember how John Kerry supposedly “looked French”). But they’ve been throwing that stuff at Obama for four years; if they haven’t managed to turn him into a Kenyan Muslim Marxist yet, they never will. Meanwhile, they themselves have a candidate who is definitely not like the rest of us, heavily engaged in tax-avoiding financial deals that may have been legal but which voters will rightly see as the kind of thing only the very rich can pull off.
What’s more, I suspect that the honesty thing will finally gain traction. For months some of us have been groaning over Romney’s almost surreal dishonesty over policy issues, but have largely given up hope that reporters would get best “shape of the earth: views differ”. But saying you were no longer at a company that listed you as CEO gets this down to the personal level. And all of this is completely fair when a candidate makes his business success his prime argument for why he should be president. This could be famous last words, but it looks to me as if Romney is in the process of getting defined — and his party won’t like the results.”
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