On a trip to Detroit to research an article for a car magazine, I discovered some speeches that show just how far Mitt Romney fell from the family tree (however perfect its height).
Rich and poor—conversation, not war
Do you realize that because of the national election that's been taking place for the last two years, we're actually talking about some really important things that we rarely talk about?
Like rich people—or "the wealthy," as the wealthy say—and poor people, who are so poor they can't afford their own euphemsim.
I don't think I heard Candidate Obama utter the word "poor" throughout the 2008 campaign, just as the term was mostly avoided by Bush and Clinton and Bush and Reagan before him. (Notwithstanding Reagan's unbelievably rancid coining of the term "welfare queen.") The poorest people those guys ever referred to were the middle class, which I always think of as People Who Worry About Money Constantly, and For Good Reason, But Who Own a Lawnmower.
The status and size of the middle class is one fair measure of how well a country's doing. But the extremes matter too. You can't declare a climate mild upon hearing the average high temperature is 50 degrees—not until you make sure it's not 120 one day and minus-20 the next.
So how do you have national elections without talking about the nation's rich, and how rich they are, and its poor, and how poor they are?
That's not class warfare. Just class conversation. And one that's long overdue.
So thanks, Occupy and thanks, Mitt.
This is going to be interesting.
And so we beat on: me, Mitt Romney, our dads and my mom
I'm having a lively private dialogue with a big-company speechwriter about, the quality of Mitt Romney's rhetoric. Essentially, he thinks it's passable, I think it's shit. He suspects that's because I'm a Democrat, I think it's because I'm a communication expert. And so on. The conversation is in good faith and is engerizing rather than energy-sapping so far, so I'm keeping it up.
But I had to send him a footnote:
A funny footnote to this whole discussion: My Republican dad was an adman—creative director at Campbell-Ewald, in Detroit. My Democrat mother was a writer—a novelist, but also a copywriter, working for my dad in the late sixties. George Romney was a friend of the agency’s president, and as a favor, the creatives worked on some speeches for him for his [1968] presidential campaign, and helped him with his delivery. Guess who my Republican dad tapped to help? My Democrat mom.
How did she like that? I asked him once (after she died, alas). “How do you think she liked it?”
She was a little too blunt with George, and they took her off the job ….
And here we are—the Republican pragmatist and Democrat idealist inside me, talking to you about a presidential candidate named Romney—44 years later.
… boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past, etc.