Campaigning in Florida last week, Republican presidential hopeful and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney joked with a group of people looking for work, saying, “I am also unemployed.” The Left then began an immediate political assault. Romney’s business success obviously fills them with fear.
Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz quickly issued a press release lambasting the former Massachusetts governor.
“Mitt Romney’s comments today at an event with unemployed Floridians that he’s ‘also unemployed’ is inappropriate and insensitive to the millions of Americans looking for work. This comment shows that Mitt Romney — a man who wants for nothing and whose only occupation for more than four years has been to run for President — is incredibly out of touch,” Wasserman-Schultz wrote.
Actually, Romney is in touch, and he is trying to make a campaign issue of precisely what Democrats don’t want to talk about this election cycle: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Political strategist James Carville developed that line for the 1992 Bill Clinton presidential campaign, and while Romney isn’t using it specifically, he is conveying the same message and gaining traction with people looking for work. That’s why the Left is on the attack.
Later on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, the assault continued. Host Anderson Cooper read an excerpt from the Wasserman-Schultz press release, and then scrutinized a Romney television spot responding to what the president said following the release of a dismal jobs report. “There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery. We’re going to pass through some rough terrain that even a Wrangler would have a hard time with. You know that,” the president told an audience at a Jeep Wrangler plant in Ohio on June 3rd.
The Romney ad shows pictures of Americans from every walk of life, as different voices say, “I am an American, not a bump in the road.”
The Left is hypersensitive to the type of comment made by Romney in Florida because it thrives on failure and despair, however hard to believe and twisted that may be. The Democrats in Congress overwhelmingly supported Obamacare, not because they were under any misapprehension about what they were destroying, but because they were happy to provide access to the same kind of mediocre healthcare system that is available in so much of the rest of the world and is a failure. Juxtapose that for a moment with the impassioned opposition from Democrats in Congress to President George W. Bush’s proposed partial privatization of Social Security. The Left furiously opposed it, knowing that it might allow some to secure a better retirement than the uniform level of meager support the program now provides.
So the fact that Romney has been such a business and political success causes fright on the Left, especially given the prospect of having to compete with a Republican who actually was elected Massachusetts governor. Pretty scary for Kennedy and Kerry Democrats, especially after watching Scott Brown win Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat.
Obviously, the Democrats have a problem with the economy. The more Mitt Romney articulates that problem, the more the Left will respond with nasty attacks and innuendo on someone who actually understands both the economy and success.
Kells Hetherington is The Daily Caller’s deputy editor.