Say, Willard Romney, you aren't really thinking of playing for our team when the class war breaks out, are you?

No, I'm not going to inflict a picture of Willard on you. But really we're only talking about him in his capacity as an elite master practitioner -- maybe the elitest -- of bogosity, and who knows more about the bogus than Car Talk's Tom and Ray Magliozzi? As Tommy would say, "Bo-o-o-o-ogus!"


"You know, if you want to create jobs, it helps to have actually had a job, and I have."

-- Willard Romney, talking about his latest
presidential candidacy in New Hampshire

Should We Expect More of This Sort of Thing?

At a good-bye luncheon for an old and dear coworker who was being laid off due to "downsizing," our manager commented cheerfully, "This is fun. We should do this more often!" 

Not a word was spoken. We all just looked at each other with that deer-in-the-headlights stare.

-- lead "joke" in today's ArcaMax Joke ezine

by Ken

Sometime back in prehistoric times I guess I signed up for a daily jokes e-mail courtesy of ArcaMax. Mostly the jokes seem a pretext for all the interlarded ads, and mostly I delete the daily joke "ezine" without even looking at it. But I happened to read the lead joke in this morning's. It's the one I've reproduced above, and I'm only sorry I can't provide any kind of credit.

Now I don't really want to talk about Willard. I'm not sure you can imagine how much I don't want to talk about him. I'm only interested in him this evening, as I suggested above, for his Candidate Fraudulence Quotient (CFQ), which is something close to a perfect 100. I'm not prepared to say that he doesn't believe in anything (his career certainly suggests that he believes in the core values dear to the hearts of all Greed & Selfishness Republicans: greed and selfishness), just that whatever he happens to believe is incidental to, even isolated from, his candidate self, or rather selves. Just like there were all those Young Johnny McCrankys, holding a minimum of three positions on every issue you could name, there've been, well, way too many Willards, and the guy hasn't done anything of a functional poltiical nature, unless you count running for and serving as governor of Massachusetts, and since he doesn't, why should we?

To be as fair as it's possible to be to a rat the size of Willard, when he says that President Obama "had his chance," and makes fun of him for saying that they're "just starting out," he's got a point, even two points. Haven't we to the president's left (and face it, you've got to be pretty far right not to be to the president's left) been warning him, more or less since he took office, that he was going to have to face the music on both these counts? Only to be, as usual, alternately mocked and reviled for not being "serious" or "realistic"?

Let me quickly add that I don't believe at all that Willard is talking sense, a charge that if proved could get him drummed out of the Republican Core Values Corps. First, it's preposterous for Republicans to talk about the president having failed considering that (as we've also been screaming to no avail) they've been doing everything in their power to ensure that the Obama administration would fail, even if it meant sending much of the country down the crapper. In fact, we have plenty of testimony from their own maws that they nothing would suit them more than the country going farther down the crapper, as long as they can pin it on the president -- who obliged by more or less painting a bull's-eye on his back, and his front. Does he really not understand that any grace period he had is long since gone, that he now owns the economy? (There certainly didn't seem to be anybody connected to the White House who understood this during the 2010 midterm election, and I haven't seen any evidence of any change since.)

The link I've given above for the Willard quote is to a report by NPR's Robert Smith on the Willard rerun candidacy, or to be fair, on how different Willard-for-Prexy 2.0 already looks from Willard 1. It's basically like they're two different people -- neither of them, by the way, any relation to that other Willard who once served as governor of Massachusetts. Which brings us up to Three Willards (possible horror-flick title?), none of whom seems to bear any obvious resemblance to the Real Willard, if indeed there is a real Willard. No, the various Willards all seem to have been crafted in accord with the campaign strategists of the moment decided was the most workable candidate-market opening.

From the online transcript of Robert Smith's report:

Back in 2007, Mitt Romney wasn't as well known, and he saw a chance to retell his life story. He went to a place where the Romney name meant something magical. He declared for president the first time in Dearborn, Michigan, the state his father had run as governor. And Romney portrayed his family's life as a kind of rags to riches story.

WILLARD: He came from very humble roots -- never graduated from college but he made his dreams come true like many, many other Americans.

SMITH: At the 2007 announcement, Romney surrounded himself with props -- old cars from the Henry Ford Museum. Romney barely mentioned his time as the governor of a liberal state. He completely skipped over his work as a management consultant and venture capitalist. He didn't even reference his wealth or talk about the economy. No, 2007 Romney was trying to be the values candidate.

WILLARD: I believe in God and I believe that the family is the foundation of America and that it needs to be protected and strengthened. I believe in the sanctity of human life.

SMITH: It made sense at the time. When Romney was running the first time, there were plenty of other moderates in the race -- John McCain, Rudy Giuliani. Romney wanted to be different, to be the true conservative. The problem was, nobody bought it. And he lost the nomination to John McCain. And so flash forward to yesterday afternoon, four years later, on a farm in the state holding the first primary.

WILLARD: And this really is what New Hampshire's all about, isn't it -- a day like this and a farm like this.

SMITH: This time the props were different -- hay bales instead of cars. Romney ditched the coat and tie. But most importantly, Romney had a new story to tell about Mitt Romney, job creator.

WILLARD: Like many of you, it had been a dream of mine to try and build a business from the ground up. We started in a little office a couple of hours from here. And over the years we were able to grow from our first 10 employees to -- to hundreds.

SMITH: Romney didn't bring up his faith. He never mentioned abortion. Romney's new campaign focused on just one thing: the economy.

WILLARD: You know, if you want to create jobs, it helps to have actually had a job. And I have.

[Soundbite of cheering]

In that "soundbite of cheering," do you suppose any of the cheerers could have explained what they were cheering about?

If Willard wants to talk about his record as a business mogul, involved in actual job creation, he has something to talk about. Not all that much, it seems to me, if you look closely enough at this actual record, and his ascension to the overprivileged class, but still something. But when he says, "If you want to create jobs, it helps to have actually had a job. And I have," does anyone have any idea what he even thinks he's saying?

First, when he takes pains to single himself out as someone who has had a job, does he think he's contrasting himself with someone? Like who, for example? Is he trying to suggest that President Obama has never had a job? Is he really that unclear as to what "a job" actually is? (Maybe, maybe. Perhaps it's been so long since he had one, since he gave up his career as a mogul to be a consulting predator-at-large, that he's playing defense on the subject of his own jobbiness?)

But more to the point, this idea -- "If you want to create jobs, it helps to have actually had a job" -- what could it possibly mean? I'm serious. Can anyone explain? Again, not so much even what it means, which is nothing at all, but what Willard might conceivably think it means. In what way, pray tell, does having had a job qualify you to talk about creating jobs? Oh, it's true that people who perform actual work for a living often know way more about conditions in the workforce than, say, your average Republican governor -- or Willard. But I'm fairly sure that's just about the last thing Willard wants us thinking about.

In sort of the same way that Willard used to actually have a job, I've got a job. I wish I had a different job, but I'm only too aware how grateful I have to be to have this one. I've had a lot of occasion to think about it in recent years, and I never have come up with a Plan B should I suddenly not have this job. Probably I should say when I don't have this job, since there will certainly come a time when I don't. The only solution I've thought of for dealing with the terrors that crowd in when I think about this stuff is not to think about this stuff.

Howie's post yesterday, "How Much Damage Will The GOP's Political Mad Men Cause American Families Before They Strike Back?," resonated like mad for me, especially the first part, about the advertising industry's adjustment to the new reality, as Sam Pizzigati has characterized newly received wisdom from Ad Age:

"[M]oney does not sit in average American pockets. The global economic recession," Ad Age relates, has thrown "a spotlight on the yawning divide between the richest Americans and everyone else." ...

The "incomes of most American workers have remained more or less static since the 1970s," while "the income of the rich (and the very rich) has grown exponentially."

The top 10 percent of American households, the trade journal adds, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches.

I'm also fascinated by the other piece Howie looked at, the Guardian's Peter Wilby's inquiry into why the nonrich -- including the middle class now, remember -- aren't in an uproar over the new drawing of economic boundaries: "Anxiety keeps the super-rich safe from middle-class rage.

Why aren't we more angry? Why isn't blood running, metaphorically at least, in the streets? Evidence of how the rich prosper while everyone else struggles with inflation, public spending cuts and static wages arrives almost daily.

Part of it, Wilby argues, is that working class people are so remote from the rich, and really don't know how they live, or relate to it meaningfully, while the upper middle class, which is to say the 28 percent below the top 2 percent, have so internalized the individualist "values" of their now-betters that they're only just grasping that "their interests are closer to those of the mass of the population than to people they once saw as their peers." In the end, we tend to focus on holding on to whatever it is we have. "As psychologists will tell you, fear of loss is more powerful than the prospect of gain."

I really haven't given anything like a fair accounting of Wilby's case, which I find both fascinating and plausible, though not as personally engaging as Tom Pizzigati's revelations about the restructured advertising industry and what it says about my life. After all, Wilby is trying to explain why the nonrich aren't seething with rage at the moneyed classes, and me, I've got plenty of rage churning in my insides.

To return to our original subject, I'm wondering -- and maybe Willard can jump in here -- is how any of this qualifies me to talk about job creation. But then, as anyone with a lick of sense knows, Willard has a vastly worse idea than I do how to bring about job creation, because he's going to give us the gospel of tax cuts and deficit reduction, and if he's allowed to have his way, that'll guarantee that there's never a "recovery" for those of us who've been assigned to the permanent underclass -- meaning, nowadays, the "under the top two percent" class.

My new image for all this is that manager in the ArcaMax joke who so enjoyed himself at the luncheon for the downsized longtime employee was: "This is fun. We should do this more often!" You don't suppose that was Willard, do you? I don't believe much that comes out of the mouths of any of the Many Willards, but if I heard that, somehow I think I would believe it.

Now if somebody could just explain to me why Willard's harebrained blithering as he pretends to be on the side of the working person produces that "soundbite of cheering" . . .

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