Out of touch

Not since for­mer Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush, who famous­ly could not fig­ure out how to use a price scan­ner at a gro­cery store, have we seen a politi­cian so out of touch with every­day peo­ple, as Mitt Rom­ney was today. Mr. Rom­ney, in a pho­ny, pathet­ic attempt at empa­thy, informed vot­ers today that he, too, is unem­ployed.

Mitt Rom­ney sat at the head of the table at a cof­fee shop here on Thurs­day, lis­ten­ing to a group of unem­ployed Florid­i­ans explain the chal­lenges of look­ing for work. When they fin­ished, he weighed in with a predica­ment of his own.

“I should tell my sto­ry,” Mr. Rom­ney said. “I’m also unemployed.”

For­get the audac­i­ty of hope. This is the audac­i­ty of dope. The dope is a man whose net worth is report­ed­ly over $200 mil­lion, a sum that  none of the Flori­da vot­ers Rom­ney met with will like­ly ever get close to see­ing in their own bank accounts. Sim­ply remov­ing his tie for cam­paign events, while still wear­ing design­er suits and jok­ing about not work­ing, does not make Mitt Rom­ney an aver­age American.

And just how did Mitt make his for­tune? Check out this piece from the con­ser­v­a­tive New York Post.

How­ev­er, the for­mer pri­vate equi­ty firm chief’s for­tune — which has fund­ed his polit­i­cal ambi­tions from the Mass­a­chu­setts state­house to his unsuc­cess­ful run for the White House in 2008 — was made on the backs of com­pa­nies that ulti­mate­ly col­lapsed, putting thou­sands of ordi­nary Amer­i­cans out on the street. That truth if it becomes wide­ly known could become cost­ly to Rom­ney, who, while mak­ing the media rounds recent­ly, told CNN’s Piers Mor­gan that “Peo­ple in Amer­i­ca want to know who can get 15 mil­lion peo­ple back to work,” imply­ing he was that person.

Rom­ney’s pri­vate equi­ty firm, Bain Cap­i­tal, bought com­pa­nies and often increased short-term earn­ings so those busi­ness­es could then bor­row enor­mous amounts of mon­ey. That bor­rowed mon­ey was used to pay Bain div­i­dends. Then those busi­ness­es need­ed to main­tain that high lev­el of earn­ings to pay their debts.

In oth­er words, Mitt Rom­ney is a cor­po­rate raider who made his for­tune off of putting peo­ple out of jobs and destroy­ing com­pa­nies. He clear­ly knows noth­ing of the pain of aver­age Amer­i­cans and the sac­ri­fices they make when they lose their jobs. And prof­it­ing off of oth­ers’ mis­ery mixed with false empa­thy sure­ly won’t endear Mr. Rom­ney to voters.