Romney responds to an OWS heckler (via Michael):

Perhaps Romney should take a cue from Putin and start referring to his party as United America.

The heckler was asking a boilerplate question that many candidates would just ignore, but I find it telling that the best that the pro-bailout corporatist candidate could do was to fall back on the old “love it or leave it” rhetoric, as if the only possible alternatives to the status quo in America are Russia, China, Cuba, and North Korea. This is what comes of Romney’s rhetoric that anyone who finds fault with his business record is attacking “free enterprise.” Michael says that this is a video that conservatives will love, and he may be right, but if they do it’s instructive how easily they can be distracted.

Romney’s tactic of pretending to speak for a “united” America against the division represented by the OWS protester perfectly mimics the OWS rhetoric about “the 99%”: Romney pretends that he speaks for the whole of the country against those awful few who would “divide” it (i.e., disagree with him), just as the protester imagines that he is speaking on behalf of everyone else except multimillionaires and billionaires. Of course, Romney is playing the demagogue here to imply that his political opponents are insufficiently American, since they must prefer the political and economic models of authoritarian and communist states, which is just the latest version of what he has been doing for most of the last three years.