Is It True That Only The Rich And The REALLY Stupid Vote For Republicans?

Many Republicans, like Eric Cantor, pick up the disease early in life. This was from his high school year book

Wednesday morning I watched John McCain get up on the Senate floor and scoff at young people who had to live in their parents' basements and stoop to staying on their insurance. Republicans like McCain-- who married the daughter of a fabulously wealthy gangster-- detest the non-rich. And if there was ever a Republican "like McCain," it is Willard Romney. He hired a DC lobbyist to take care of the details of overseeing the new beach shack mansion he's building in La Jolla, and what beach shack mansion would be complete without elevators for the autos?-- but he has plenty of time to run around attacking working people struggling to get a small piece of the pie he and his brood and the billionaire cronies who are financing his attempt to seize the White House are hogging for themselves. Greg Sargent picked up on Willard's crass class war from his Leno appearance the other night. It was like he was trying to prove Alan Grayson was correct when he said the Republican plan for health care for the poor is "die quickly."

Romney replied that people with preexisting conditions should continue to get insurance-- as long as they’ve been insured in the past. He refused to say what should be done about those who have never had insurance. Here’s the exchange (video here):

LENO: So you would make the law stand for children and people with preexisting conditions.

ROMNEY: People with preexisting conditions-- as long as they’ve been insured before, they’re going to continue to have insurance.

LENO: Suppose they were never insured?

ROMNEY: Well, if they’re 45 years old, and they show up, and they say, I want insurance, because I’ve got a heart disease, it’s like, `Hey guys, we can’t play the game like that. You’ve got to get insurance when you’re well, and if you get ill, then you’re going to be covered.’

LENO: I know guys at work in the auto industry, and they’re just not covered... they’ve just never been able to get insurance. And then they get to e 30, 35, and were never able to get insurance before. Now they have it. That seems like a good thing.

ROMNEY: We’ll look at a circumstance where someone was ill, and hasn’t been insured so far. But people who have had the chance to be insured-- if you’re working in an auto business for instance, the companies carry insurance, they insure all their employees-- you look at the circumstances that exist. But people who have done their best to get insured, are going to be able to be covered. But you don’t want everyone saying, `I’m going to sit back until I get sick and then go buy insurance.’ That doesn’t make sense. But you have to find rules that get people in that are playing by the rules.

That last section is a bit garbled, but the basic fact here is that when asked what the federal government should do about those with preexisting conditions who have never had insurance, Romney won’t say. This echoes Romney’s recent exchange with a student who asked what the federal government would do to help with student loan debt. Answer: Nothing.

What’s particularly interesting about the above exchange is that Romney himself detailed exactly the problem that the individual mandate is designed to fix: If people wait until they get sick before getting insurance, it fouls up the system. As he puts it, this “you’ve got to get insurance when you’re well.” Romney’s recognition of the policy problem, of course, is why he passed a mandate at the state level in Massachusetts.

But now Romney is obliged by GOP primary politics (and perhaps by his actual beliefs) to insist that a federal mandate is an unconstitutional usurpation of American freedom. So he’s forced to give a nonsensical answer to the core policy and moral question that’s left behind if we do away with Obamacare: What should the federal government do about those who can’t get insurance coverage, thanks to preexisting conditions?

Until Romney details otherwise, his answer, for all practical purposes, is: Nothing.

A little personal story. A few days ago, in a hysterical press release, corrupt Blue Dog Tim Holden accused me of being a "billionaire Hollywood record executive." My friend David Kahne-- who produced the first four hit records I had on my indie record label (by Pearl Harbor and the Explosions, Romeo Void, Translator and the Red Rockers)-- laughed when he saw it and wrote to me: "I sure wish he was right about you being a billionaire, though. You could spend some bucks and PAC him outta his gig." David, who has gone on to produce platinum-selling records for the Bangles, Tony Bennett, Paul McCartney, Sugar Ray, The Strokes, Sublime, used to be the janitor at a recording studio and he would get free time to make our records. At that time I was on food stamps and surviving by taking photographs and selling them to rock magazines. We've both done well, working hard but billionaires? No, not even close. But I'll never forget that the American people saved my life when I came back from living abroad for 7 years with no money and no prospects except my dreams. I needed a helping hand at the time, the food stamps were a godsend and I have never once begrudged paying my taxes and I have never stashed any money in a tax shelter or hoarded it in a Swiss bank account or in the Cayman Islands. I'm proud to pay my taxes to this great country that I love and cherish and that gave me the chance to make my dreams come true and live a good life.

Romney was born rich. He can never understand what it means to go from being poor to being comfortable. He was born into privilege, born wealthy, born white, born with every advantage. No one wants to take that away from him. But why does he begrudge society giving a little help to people who didn't get lucky in the DNA sweepstakes the way he did? And where did he get the idea that it's "humorous" or appropriate to tell stories about shutting down factories and putting thousands of working people out of jobs? What is it with this guy? And why would we want to elect someone like that to be our leader? Remember this video clip? It's worth paying close attention to: