Obama vs. Romney: Who will blue-collar Americans hate less?

WaPo via Virginia News ^ | January 20, 2012 | Harold Meyerson

[neverdem]

Romney is the model of everything in modern American capitalism that makes people pine for the kinder, gentler capitalism that his father personified. As the head of American Motors, George Romney, Mitt’s pop, made cars. Mitt makes deals. As Michael Tomasky noted this week, George Romney refused a bonus of $100,000 after American Motors had a good year in 1960, saying that no top executive needed to make more than his $225,000 annual salary ($1.4 million today). Romney the lesser has a fortune estimated in the hundreds of millions for his work in private equity, extracting vast amounts of money from the firms — successful and not...

--snip--

Worse yet, Romney comes off as a walking, talking compendium of upper-class cluelessness. His offer of a $10,000 bet to Texas Gov. Rick Perry, his dismissal of his yearly speaker fees (around $370,000) as pocket money, his equation of corporations and people — these and other off-the-gold-cufflink comments depict a guy whose points of intersection with the lives of most Americans are few and far between...

--snip--

Think of George Wallace’s attacks on not only minorities but also on their enablers — “pointy-head bureaucrats,” professors and elitist journalists (“Huntley and Chinkley and Walter Contrite,” Wallace said in a burst of almost surreal demagogy) who had no understanding of or sympathy for the white working class...

--snip--

The white working class may be a shrinking segment of the American electorate, but it’s still massive. Over time, as this group has become deunionized and downwardly mobile, and as GOP standard-bearers have learned to channel Wallace’s appeal in less explicit ways, these voters have moved steadily into the Republican column. But with Romney as Obama’s opponent, the surge of blue-collar whites into Republican ranks may be smaller this year than GOP strategists have anticipated...

[the invisib1e hand]

Blue collar voters, the union rank and file at least, will NEVER leave Obama. He appears to be a ticket to some sort of freebies to them and plays well to the natural human failings of jealousy and envy.

A good analysis, imho.