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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Romney and the “Wealth Issue”

Yesterday David Brooks recounted Romney’s family history at length while spending remarkably little time on Romney’s own biography. He concluded: He may have character flaws, but he does not have the character flaws normally associated with great wealth. His signature is focus and persistence. The wealth issue is a sideshow. This is a strange argument. […]

Yesterday David Brooks recounted Romney’s family history at length while spending remarkably little time on Romney’s own biography. He concluded:

He may have character flaws, but he does not have the character flaws normally associated with great wealth. His signature is focus and persistence. The wealth issue is a sideshow.

This is a strange argument. The one advantage that Romney has over his “career politician” rivals is that he has experience in business, and the main argument for his candidacy is that he will be able somehow to translate his ability to earn profits at his former company into policies that will spur faster economic growth. One of the most important campaign pitches he makes is that he “knows how to create jobs,” which is why he kept citing the number of jobs created thanks to the efforts of his firm. His wealth and how he earned it are unavoidably connected to that, and he is the one responsible for introducing them into the campaign. Now that “the wealth issue” may be working against him and making it a little more difficult for him to glide to an easy nomination (which he is still going to win, barring unforeseen disaster), he and his defenders are annoyed that anyone is talking about it.

No one doubts that Romney has worked hard and continues to do so. There is a reason he has been compared to robots and machines more than a few times. By all accounts, he has an impressive work ethic. No one is going to accuse Romney of being one of the “idle” rich after he has spent the better part of six years running almost continuously for President. That isn’t the point, and Brooks knows that it isn’t. The point is that he is a pro-bailout corporatist oblivious to the problems of decreasing social mobility, income stagnation, and rising income inequality. Romney’s wealth by itself isn’t the issue. It is the substance of his stated views on these and related issues that provokes negative reaction, and he has no response to this except to accuse other people of envy and accuse them of engaging in class warfare.

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