The Romney Advantages

My pal Roland teaches elementary school in Compton, one of L.A.'s most challenged neighborhoods. But he always tells me his kids are happy. They don't know they're challenged. They don't feel impoverished or disadvantaged and they have no idea about the cruel world that awaits most of them as they transition out of childhood. I can relate. How old was I before I realized people had it better than me? In junior high I noticed my friend Danny had a live in servant-- but she seemed like just one of the family and it didn't mean much to me. In college my other friend Danny let me sit in his limo once. It seemed fun and funny. But I was on top of the my world. I was elected freshman class president. I had the prettiest girl in the school-- at least in my eyes-- as a girlfriend. I had the best drug connections and lacked for nothing I wanted. I got backstage at every concert and made friends with the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, the Jefferson Airplane, the Dead, and every band whose music I liked. What more was there? And then I flew to Europe, bought a van and drove to Afghanistan, India, Nepal... back to Europe... spent almost 7 years living abroad. No amount of money-- and I never had any at all-- could buy the charmed and fantastic live I had.

When I returned to America, I moved to San Francisco, became fast friends with Harvey Milk, got in on the ground floor of the nascent punk rock movement, started an indie record label and felt I was still on the top of the world when I was making $5,000 a year. It wasn't until I moved to L.A. in my late 30s that I realized how the other half-- or the other 1%-- lived. It wasn't attractive. Warner Bros hired me to run one of their labels and my colleagues were all millionaires and Warners seemed determined to make me one too. Many of the super rich people I met were neurotic and obsessed with wealth-- and miserable and bitter comparing themselves to other people who were even richer. It really was sickening. I did my best to keep as far away from it as I could-- as far away from people who had been sucked into it.

A week or so ago, two ex-congressmen, Gingrich partisans J.C. Watts (R-OK) and Bob Walker (R-PA) wrote a widely distributed letter to editors and publishers making a case-- a case most journalists are already cognizant of-- that Mitt Romney is a congenital liar who will say anything at all. People who have observed him carefully are aware that he's a classic sociopath, operating in a world that orbits around him. On one page they assert that "Governor Romney’s negative attack mentality, unfortunately, is a reflection of his own persona. We include documentation of numerous instances of Governor Romney resorting under pressure to the use of falsehoods-- five of them are from a single presidential debate in Jacksonville on Jan 26. Please understand, we believe that if you closely examine the record you will see that we are not discussing here lapses of memory. We are saying that the evidence is clear that Governor Romney has a near Pavlovian reflex of lapsing into falsehoods in order to rearrange reality to his liking. The record shows that when publicly challenged or at a loss for an answer, Governor Romney shows a deeply engrained [sic] habit of mendacity."

Romney claiming that he's parents' wealth didn't have any impact on his own climb to the top of the economic heap is just that kind of rearranging of reality they were warning about. Romney isn't stupid. He's a liar. Surely he knows, in his heart of hearts, that-- as Joshua Holland points out in The 15 Biggest Lies About The Economy-- that the existence of a middle class Romney-- with his quarter billion dollar fortune "is not a natural phenomenon. It was created by providing good-quality public education, mandating minimum wages, and guaranteeing working people the right to organize. Conservatives have spent the last three decades unraveling those kinds of protections-- all have been subjected to death 'by a thousand small cuts' since Reaganomics hit the United States. As a result, it has once again become true that the accident of one’s birth dictates one’s life chances to a very large degree, and that is a wholly predictable result of the rise of the conservative backlash." Romney was given every advantage Roland's kids in Compton will never have. He was born on third base and someone hit a grand slam. He trotted to homeplate like a champion. Meanwhile, the American Dream has been largely shattered with the conservative jihad that started under Reagan and continues, almost unabated, under Obama. Again, Holland nails it: "The reality is that an American in today’s workforce is just as likely to experience downward mobility as he or she is to move up in the world... Contrary to American beliefs about equality of opportunity a child’s economic position is heavily influenced by that of his or her parents.” Even Willard Mitt Romney's.

American families are just as likely to be downwardly mobile-- 33 percent fall into this group-- as they are to join the 34 percent who move up.

It’s crucial to understand the relationship between inequality and immobility, and central to that relationship is the concept of “intergenerational assistance.” That’s a fancy way of saying that a
person’s chances to advance economically are very much impacted by whether his or her family can help with expenses such as tuition payments, a down payment on a house, or seed money to start a business. The wealthy don’t pass on their status to their kids through inheritance alone, but also by smoothing the way for their ascent to the top of the pile.

Dalton Conley, the director of NYU’s Center for Advanced Social Science Research, compared two hypothetical kids-- one from a family with some money and the other from poor parents. Both are born with the same level of intelligence, both are ambitious, and both work hard in school. In a meritocracy, the two would enjoy the same opportunities to get ahead. Yet the fact that one might graduate from college free and clear, while the other is burdened with $50,000 in debt makes a huge difference in terms of their long-term earnings prospects. That’s only one of the myriad ways that parents pass their economic status on to their children, Conley explained. “When you are talking about the difference between financing their kid’s college education, starting a new business, moving if they need to move for a better job opportunity-- [differences] in net worth might make the difference between upward mobility and stagnation.”

Unlike the issue of vast income disparities, which many conservative pundits dismiss as irrelevant, there’s broad agreement across the ideological spectrum about the importance of upward mobility. In the United States, where we take for granted levels of poverty that would be a front-page scandal in most advanced economies, the stakes are that much higher. It’s one thing to live in a new Gilded Age if we all have a fair shot at ending up among the “haves,” but it’s altogether different when a nation’s wealth is concentrated at the top of a rigidly stratified society. As Dalton Conley put it, our lack of mobility “very manifestly displays the anti-meritocracy in America-- the reproduction of social class without the inheritance of any innate ability.”

...The United States is the only advanced country in which the federal government is not directly involved in higher education. That has helped drive dramatic increases in the average cost of a college education since the post–World War II era. In 1957, for example, a full-time student at the University of Minnesota paid $111 per year in tuition, which, in today’s dollars, is about $750. During the 2005–2006 school year, in-state tuition at the University of Minnesota was $8,040. As education writer Naomi Rockler-Gladen noted, that’s an inflation-adjusted increase of 1,000 percent since 1957. At more than $7,000 in average yearly costs (in 2009), a public university education in the United States is a lot more difficult to finance than it was a generation ago. That negatively affects mobility; a college degree is still a bootstrap, even if it’s somewhat less sturdy than it was during the last century.

Isabel Sawhill looked at the relationship between education and mobility and concluded, “At virtually every level, education in America tends to perpetuate rather than compensate for existing inequalities.” She pointed to three reasons for that. First, we have a relatively weak K-12 system. “American students perform poorly on international assessments,” she wrote. “Colleges are forced to provide remedial work to a large share of entering freshmen, and employers complain about workers’ basic skills.” A society with a weak education system will, by definition, be one in which
the advantages of class and family background loom large. Second, the U.S. education system is largely funded through state and local property taxes, which means that the quality of a kid’s education depends on the wealth of the community in which he or she grows up. This, too, helps replicate parents’ economic status in their kids. Finally, Sawhill notes, in the United States, unlike other advanced economies, “access both to a quality preschool experience and to higher education continues to depend quite directly on family resources.”

When you hear the unease with which people talk about Mitt Romney, it isn't because they really think he's an alien from outer space, an actual robot, or even because he's a Mormon. It's because he's so utterly alien to the American way of life and the shared American experience. He's not one of us. It's why everyone-- even Republican voters-- describe him as... weird. Maybe not too weird to be governor of Massachusetts but definitely too weird to be president of the United States.