The Rude Pundit - Romney to America: Wow, You Guys Were a Bunch of Idiots in 2008
Candidate Bill Clinton was no wilting flower when he attacked the incumbent president, George H.W. Bush, in 1992. "George Bush, if you won’t use our power to help America, step aside. I will," Clinton said to obvious cheers when he accepted the Democratic nomination at the party's convention. "Our country has fallen so far so fast that just a few months ago the Japanese prime minister actually said he felt sympathy for the United States. Sympathy. When I am your President, the rest of the world will not look down on us with pity but up to us with respect again." It was a brutal assault, tying Bush to "a failed economic theory" that helped special interests (read: rich people and corporations) and produced few jobs.
As vicious as Clinton could be, the one thing he never did was say or imply that Bush wasn't a real American, that he didn't believe in America. No, Clinton said that Bush had an economic and political philosophy that rendered the patrician president incapable of helping the plebeians. We gave Reagan and Bush a dozen years to get it right, but they failed. (And, yes, sainted Reagan used to be open to attack.)
Bush was a desperate motherfucker, and he went after Clinton for taking part in demonstrations in England, as well as for visiting the Soviet Union in 1969. Clinton was an anti-American hippie, this narrative went, and unfit to lead the country.
Yesterday, on some Fox Business show no one watches but wonks who masturbate to the Dow, Mitt Romney said about President Barack Obama, "It’s a very strange and in some respects foreign to the American experience type of philosophy." This is the continuation of an attack that Romney and his surrogates have been making, that Obama is "foreign" and, bizarrely, not "Anglo-Saxon" (or, you know, white) enough. It plays to the birther crazies and to the plain racists.
What strikes the Rude Pundit is just how insulting Romney's argument is to the majority of Americans. Here's how Clinton described Bush's ideology: "What is President Bush's theory about what's good about the economy? That the Government would mess up a one-car parade, and you can't trust anybody in politics or Government. So the answer to our economic problems is to make taxes lower on corporations and high-income individuals, and get out of the way and let the market do the rest." And then Clinton said that it failed. It's simple enough. Bush promised you he would do some things, he was voted in on that basis, he tried them, they failed or reality didn't allow them to happen, and so it's time to move on.
But Romney's argument is this: you, that big majority of the American people who supported and, sometimes, loved the Barack Obama of 2008 were complete and total fools who got conned by this slick foreigner who tricked you by presenting himself as American when it was all bullshit. And you fell for it, you fucking idiots.
There you go, people who supported Obama who are now leaning towards or supporting the GOP. In 2008, you weren't wisely rejecting the very policies that Romney now advocates. You were just the marks of a socialist con artist. Vote for Romney because he thinks you're stupid.
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