I’d love to know the back story on how John McCain’s entire opposition research file on Mitt Romney wound up on the internet. I’ve only read the biographical details and some of the issues-oriented stuff. I’m impressed that Romney was valedictorian of his class at Brigham Young University. It’s also impressive that he was able to complete a dual program at Harvard that gave him a law degree and a Masters of Business Administration at the same time. He’s obviously very smart and very driven. One thing I noticed is that he really hasn’t worked all that much, and he didn’t have to work very long to get to the top. He came right out of college and landed a very nice consulting gig. And just three years later he was promoted to vice-president. He obviously comes from a very prominent Mormon family, but there’s no evidence that he didn’t rise on merit. He’d only been in the work force for ten years when he was made managing general partner of Bain & Co. That’s an incredibly swift path to the top. And then he made a lot of money over the next fifteen years, to the point that the only work he’s really done since was for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. By all accounts, he did an excellent job for the Olympics. but that’s the last private sector job he held. He served one term as governor of Massachusetts and proved to be pretty unpopular. Since 1999, he’s been living off the fortune he made at Bain & Co.
There’s a ton of stuff in the file that demonstrates that Romney has no political soul. He’s been moving inexorably rightward as the Republican Party has gone off the rails. And we’re going to use all of that stuff to criticize Romney during this presidential election. But what I found interesting was what I’ve mentioned. On one hand, he’s smart and driven and accomplished. On the other, he really has had a remarkably easy life. His life has been almost criminally easy. He worked from 1975-1999, from the age of 28 to the age of 52. For all but three of those years, he served in the highest reaches of upper management. This guy has no clue what most people go through, and it shows.
His record of singular accomplishment compares with the president’s. But he has no lodestar. What he says means nothing. All we have is a man with boundless ambition but nothing for the rest of us. We have a man of talent, but one who never had to overcome anything. I’m not saying that everything was handed to him. He worked hard and was successful. But he was the kind of guy who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple. And his policies are all aimed at making him richer while we all get to have austerity.
I think Barack Obama’s personal biography offers a lot more hope for the average person. You can be born in the stands and wind up managing the team. And when that happens, the manager has a lot more respect for the struggles we all go through.
