Hullabaloo

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

 
Trust him, he cares

by digby

Trying to recover, Romney says he is poor Americans' best bet

That's from Reuters, not the Onion:

"The question in this campaign is not who cares about the poor and the middle class. I do, he does," Romney said, jabbing the podium with his index finger and his voice rising with emotion.

"The question is who can help the poor and the middle class. I can, he can't and he's proven it in four years," he said.

Yeah, if there's one thing about Mitt, it's that he cares. And his wife will vouch for it:

"Speaking from a perspective from a wife and a mother and from the things that I know that I care about, I want to know what motivates the guy, the person that I would be voting for, and I would say that what motivates Mitt is that he cares,” she said. “That this is a guy that is — doesn't, obviously, need to do this for a job.

Obviously.

Mitt understands. After all, he's been there. He learned all about being poor from his time toiling among the downtrodden in ... France:

Mitt Romney attended Stanford University for one year after graduating from the elite Cranbrook School for boys. He then went to France for 2 1/2 years as a Mormon missionary, completing a ritual that generations of his family, including his two oldest sons, have followed.

Romney points to the experience now as an encounter with poverty. He lived in a hotel in LeHavre that had no toilets, and had $100 a month to live on. He knocked on doors seeking converts with little success.

"That's a very humbling experience - no, humiliating - experience, people shutting doors in your face," he said

No toilets even! Sacre bleu!

But that wasn't exactly the the whole story:

Last weekend, Romney explained was "living on no more than $110 a month in France" during those austere times. And the hardships were especially difficult when the call of nature could not be deferred:

"You're not living high on the hog at that level. A number of the apartments that I lived in when I was there didn't have toilets - we had instead the little pads on the ground - OK, you know how that works, pull - there was a chain behind you with kind of a bucket, bucket affair. I had not experienced one of those in the United States."

But when Mitt claimed that "I lived in a way that people of lower middle income in France lived and I said to myself, 'Wow. I sure am lucky to be born in the United States of America,'" he was luckier than he let on. As the Boston Globe documented in 2007, when France was paralyzed by strikes in 1968 "Romney led a group of missionaries into Spain to find an open bank" to cash "checks sent from their parents."

As the Globe also reported, "In spring 1968, Romney moved to the French mission headquarters, a grand building in the tony 16th arrondissement of Paris. The building is now the embassy of the United Arab Emirates." Yesterday, the Telegraph detailed just how tony:

"It was a house built by and for rich people," said Richard Anderson, the son of the mission president at the time of Mr Romney's stay. "I would describe it as a palace"...

"They were very big rooms," said Christian Euvrard, the 72-year-old director of the Mormon-run Institute of Religion in Paris, who knew Mr Romney. "Very comfortable. The building had beautiful gilded interiors, a magnificent staircase in cast iron, and an immense hall"...

Mr Anderson said that as well as a refrigerator, the mansion had "a Spanish chef called Pardo and a house boy, who prepared lunch and supper five days a week".

Now that's more like it.

America had plenty of poverty at the time. He didn't need to go all the way to Europe to find it. And lord knows, he could have gone to a really poor country in South America or Africa --- or even to Vietnam. But he went to France and lived better than Hemingway in A Moveable Feast(as every co-ed in America was dreaming of doing at the time) and called it a terrible, humiliating experience.

The man is simply has no empathy for anyone who isn't of his own class. It's obvious. Some rich people are just like that.

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digby 9/19/2012 02:00:00 PM