Willard Inc. got paid HOW much to do WHAT?

No, that $374,327 isn't in Monopoly money.

"Now is not this ridiculous, and is not this preposterous?
A thorough-paced absurdity -- explain it if you can."

-- the Dragoons, in Act I of G&S's Patience

by Ken

I think most of the numbers in the following paragraph have been pretty well circulated and digested, at least among people who are actually listening.

On Tuesday, Romney finally lifted a corner of the previously tightly sealed file containing his tax returns. The partial disclosure won't help him. He said his effective tax rate was "probably closer to the 15 percent rate than anything." That 15 percent is on investment income -- a huge perk for the very rich -- as opposed to the higher rates on wages and salaries -- up to 35 percent -- paid by most Americans. He also deprecated his speaking fees last year of $374,327 as "not very much."

-- Alexander Cockburn, in "Mitt Romney's Gingrich Nightmare"

And I don't mean to suggest that the numbers that have gotten the most attention aren't in fact the most important ones. But I look at this and you know what pops out?

"his speaking fees last year of $374,327"

Say what? $374,327? In speaking fees?

In the course of a single year, some collection of somebodies paid that man almost $375K to, you know, speak? Okay, I realize it probably wasn't in, like, $375 increments. But still.

It's possible to disagree about the quality of Willard Inc.'s, er, intellect. Noah and I, for example, have gone a round on this. His position (articulated in the "Stupid' is what the Republican voter craves (and Mittens could be that man!)" installment of "Selections from THE NOAH DIARIES 2011") is that the guy is a no-account dunce. Whereas I'm not at all sure of this. I'm quite prepared to believe that this is just another case of a person whose intelligence, such as it is, has been so devilishly misdeveloped that it's useful for certain functions, like economic predation (aka plundering and ravishing the masses of humans), and singularly unuseful for others, like understanding and communicating with people, especially people who are unlike himself.

Either way, however, I find it hard to imagine anyone who would advance the proposition that Willard Inc.'s useful skills include, you know, speaking.

In the rollingstone.com column from which I've been quoting endlessly, "What Mitt Romney Learned From His Dad," Rick Perlstein recalls: "I wrote a Los Angeles Times op-ed four years ago, just before Romney dropped out of the 2008 race, arguing that he would 'go down as the most robotic big-ticket presidential candidate in history.' "

When you try to listen to the man speak, between the doltishness of what he's saying and more particularly the hopeless bumblitude of the way he says it, you're likely to think, "Why, that man could never be elected to anything!" And yet he did actually get elected to one term as governor of Massachusetts. Yeah, I suppose the beefcake photos serve to, um, "humanize" him a tad, simply for the way in which so many of us tend to attach nonexistent pretty qualities to people who are pretty enough, but still . . . .

And yet, there the number stands. The Incorporated Willard may consider the that $374,327 worth of speaking fees "not much," but perhaps that's only because his frame of reference for what's "much" in income terms is the going rate for extracting billions of dollars from the economy for the private edification of the extractors. By any other standard, this is "ridiculous" and "preposterous" and "a thorough-paced absurdity." "Explain it if you can," indeed.

Unless, of course, the people who forked over that $374,327 weren't doing it in exchange for pearls of wisdom they expected to receive in return, but for favor they hoped to curry with an individual who already wielded a hefty amount of clout in financial circles and might one day soon wield even more clout on an even larger platform, and therefore stood to be in a position to generously return the favor. This would be utterly consistent with the precepts of market capitalism, wouldn't it? At least as it's practiced in 21st-century America, where the role of government is taken to be to further stack the deck in favor of the economic elites. Or, to borrow the motto of the Roberts Court, "Money makes the world go around, the world go around, the world go around."

I find that kind of depressing, though, and might prefer to go back to the "ridiculous," "preposterous," and "absurd" position, and leave it to somebody else to explain.

That's three hundred seventy-four thousand three hundred twenty-seven dollars. Presumably not in Monopoly money.


ONE LAST QUESTION ABOUT THE $374,327

Do we know if any of the suckers lucky speech-buyers subsequently asked for their money back? Just wondering.

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