Monday, June 25, 2012 3:49:37 AM
Mitt Romney’s Empathy Problem
Posted by Alex Koppelman .. May 11, 2012
It’s hard, given the Washington Post’s description of it, [haha, perfect fit] .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-prep-school-classmates-recall-pranks-but-also-troubling-incidents/2012/05/10/gIQA3WOKFU_print.html .. but we can, if we want, forgive Mitt Romney for the way he led some of his high-school classmates in viciously bullying one of their fellow students, John Lauber. We can forgive him because it was 1965, four years before Stonewall and more than forty years before even Tyler Clementi. We can forgive him because he was still only a high-schooler then. We can forgive him because we’re human—let he who did not do something awful to someone weaker and more vulnerable in high school cast the first stone. We can forgive him, if we want.
But it’s getting harder to escape the conclusion that there’s a pattern to Romney’s behavior, that he has a real problem understanding and caring for those with whom he can’t easily identify. As Amy Davidson writes, [rich boy bully] .. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/05/mitt-romney-bully.html .. “This story is resonant because one can, all too easily, see Romney walking away even now, or simply failing to connect, to grasp hurt.” That may or may not be a fair conclusion—we are none of us mind readers—but given what we know about him, it’s certainly a reasonable one.
If it were just this incident, things might be different. Then we could dismiss it as a youthful indiscretion, just another of the standard outrage-baiting .. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/ann-romney-hilary-rosen-and-the-outrage-campaign.html .. campaign moments we’ll all forget soon enough. But there’s a small string of these kinds of things now. We know that when he’s on the trail, Romney has a real problem connecting with ordinary people—or even just talking to them. We know about Seamus the dog, how Romney put him in a crate and strapped it to the roof of the family station wagon for hours of driving. We know that he’s said he likes being able to fire people. (And yes, the comment about firing people has been taken out of context, but he still said it, and without any ear for how it might sound.)
It’s not hard to see where the Democrats will go with all this. In an election about a struggling economy and about people out of work, people want to see that their next President can, to borrow a phrase, feel their pain. Romney’s opponents will spend the next several months telling you he can’t do that. Hari Sevugan, the former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, previewed that strategy Thursday on Twitter, writing, .. https://twitter.com/harisevugan/statuses/200645472464011264 .. “The bullying wasn’t a teenage one-off. Seamus, slashing jobs. It’s all telling of a lack of empathy and compassion - Presidential qualities.”
Thus far, no one’s been able to come up with a very good response to this line of attack. The Romney campaign will no doubt remind voters of the time .. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/30/chain-email/viral-internet-story-says-mitt-romney-helped-locat/ .. he shut down Bain Capital’s office to devote the company’s resources to finding a co-worker’s missing daughter. They should—it’s a heartwarming story, one that shows genuine kindness and generosity on Romney’s part. That doesn’t mean it gets him completely off the empathy hook, though. His co-worker was, after all, his co-worker, someone he could understand. The daughter could have been one of his own children. They weren’t auto workers.
Conservative bloggers have tried a different tack: call it the “Obama did it too” strategy. The right-wing blogosphere was deliriously happy for a while after the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher noted a passage in the President’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” in which he describes having tried dog meat as a child living in Indonesia. In his first blog post .. http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/17/obama-bites-dog/ .. on the subject, Treacher wrote:
“So what? It was a long time ago,” you say. “He was a lot younger. Customs are different there. He was just doing what his stepfather told him. And hey, you can’t even prove that the dogs were ever left on top of a car, you racist.”
Hey, whatever you have to tell yourself, libs. Say what you want about Romney, but at least he only put a dog on the roof of his car, not the roof of his mouth. And whenever you bring up the one, we’re going to bring up the other.
It’s no fun when we push back, is it? That’s why it’s so much fun.
Similarly, on Thursday afternoon, some bloggers were crowing .. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/05/10/Does-WaPo-Know-Obama-Shoved-a-Little-Girl .. about another portion of “Dreams From My Father” that, they said, proved that Obama had been a bully as a child, too:
There was one other child in my class, though, who reminded me of a different sort of pain. Her name was Coretta, and before my arrival she had been the only black person in our grade. She was plump and dark and didn’t seem to have many friends. From the first day, we avoided each other but watched from a distance, as if direct contact would only remind us more keenly of our isolation.
Finally, during recess one hot, cloudless day, we found ourselves occupying the same corner of the playground. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but I remember that suddenly she was chasing me around the jungle gyms and swings. She was laughing brightly, and I teased her and dodged this way and that, until she finally caught me and we fell to the ground breathless. When I looked up, I saw a group of children, faceless before the glare of the sun, pointing down at us.
“Coretta has a boyfriend! Coretta has a boyfriend!”
The chants grew louder as a few more kids circled us.
“She’s not my g-girlfriend,” I stammered. I looked to Coretta for some assistance, but she just stood there looking down at the ground. “Coretta’s got a boyfriend! Why don’t you kiss her, mister boyfriend?”
“I’m not her boyfriend!” I shouted. I ran up to Coretta and gave her a slight shove; she staggered back and looked up at me, but still said nothing. “Leave me alone!” I shouted again. And suddenly Coretta was running, faster and faster, until she disappeared from sight. Appreciative laughs rose around me. Then the bell rang, and the teachers appeared to round us back into class.
This type of pushback may be fun, as Treacher said, but it’s not very effective, and anyone who thinks otherwise is missing the point.
The Seamus incident has been brought up so many times because it’s about Romney mistreating a creature whose life was in his hands, and, ultimately, about how he’d care for the people for whom he’d be responsible if he’s elected President. The “Obama ate a dog” story is about him doing the same thing we all do when we eat any kind of meat—it’s just that we’re more attached to the animal he ate. If he’d abused the dog before eating it, that would be something else entirely.
The story about Romney bullying his classmate is about him being a leader among his classmates and not using the privilege he had for good, but to harm someone just because he could. (An example .. http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/20/opinion/oe-davis20 .. from George W. Bush’s past shows that there was another way besides Romney’s, even back then.) And the Obama passage doesn’t even show him bullying anyone. It’s about him struggling to fit in at his new school after returning to the U.S., and how, in an effort to be less of an outcast, he made a victim out of someone who was having the same troubles he was. The bloggers who jumped on that bit from “Dreams From My Father” left out what comes immediately after .. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=HRCHJp-V0QUC&lpg=PA61&vq=coretta&dq=dreams+from+my+father&pg=PA61&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=coretta&f=false .. the passages they quoted: Obama expressing regret and shame, two things Romney wasn’t able to muster when he responded to the Post report on Thursday.
It comes down to this: a bad act here or there, dredged up from decades ago, won’t hurt Romney; just as a counterexample from Obama’s past won’t save him. Deep down, most of us know that a President can’t fix everything that ails us. But we want to feel, at least, that he knows why certain things hurt, and that he cares.
Photograph by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/05/mitt-romneys-empathy-problem.html
Mitt, you might have said, something more like ..
'I'm not concerned with the very rich they are just fine and getting richer, i am very concerned about the very poor as our safety net does have holes in it and many suffer terribly, my focus however is on the middle class as Republican policies of the last 30 years have decimated their living standards.' .. grin .. 'hey, I have the nomination, don't I' .. grin .. ok Mitt you could change the last two bits .. it still would have been much better than what you said .. i mean it would have sounded as though you actually did have real empathy with those living in cardboard boxes beneath the streets of Las Vegas .. great cartoon F6 .. LOL ..
Posted by Alex Koppelman .. May 11, 2012
It’s hard, given the Washington Post’s description of it, [haha, perfect fit] .. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mitt-romneys-prep-school-classmates-recall-pranks-but-also-troubling-incidents/2012/05/10/gIQA3WOKFU_print.html .. but we can, if we want, forgive Mitt Romney for the way he led some of his high-school classmates in viciously bullying one of their fellow students, John Lauber. We can forgive him because it was 1965, four years before Stonewall and more than forty years before even Tyler Clementi. We can forgive him because he was still only a high-schooler then. We can forgive him because we’re human—let he who did not do something awful to someone weaker and more vulnerable in high school cast the first stone. We can forgive him, if we want.
But it’s getting harder to escape the conclusion that there’s a pattern to Romney’s behavior, that he has a real problem understanding and caring for those with whom he can’t easily identify. As Amy Davidson writes, [rich boy bully] .. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2012/05/mitt-romney-bully.html .. “This story is resonant because one can, all too easily, see Romney walking away even now, or simply failing to connect, to grasp hurt.” That may or may not be a fair conclusion—we are none of us mind readers—but given what we know about him, it’s certainly a reasonable one.
If it were just this incident, things might be different. Then we could dismiss it as a youthful indiscretion, just another of the standard outrage-baiting .. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/04/ann-romney-hilary-rosen-and-the-outrage-campaign.html .. campaign moments we’ll all forget soon enough. But there’s a small string of these kinds of things now. We know that when he’s on the trail, Romney has a real problem connecting with ordinary people—or even just talking to them. We know about Seamus the dog, how Romney put him in a crate and strapped it to the roof of the family station wagon for hours of driving. We know that he’s said he likes being able to fire people. (And yes, the comment about firing people has been taken out of context, but he still said it, and without any ear for how it might sound.)
It’s not hard to see where the Democrats will go with all this. In an election about a struggling economy and about people out of work, people want to see that their next President can, to borrow a phrase, feel their pain. Romney’s opponents will spend the next several months telling you he can’t do that. Hari Sevugan, the former press secretary for the Democratic National Committee, previewed that strategy Thursday on Twitter, writing, .. https://twitter.com/harisevugan/statuses/200645472464011264 .. “The bullying wasn’t a teenage one-off. Seamus, slashing jobs. It’s all telling of a lack of empathy and compassion - Presidential qualities.”
Thus far, no one’s been able to come up with a very good response to this line of attack. The Romney campaign will no doubt remind voters of the time .. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/jan/30/chain-email/viral-internet-story-says-mitt-romney-helped-locat/ .. he shut down Bain Capital’s office to devote the company’s resources to finding a co-worker’s missing daughter. They should—it’s a heartwarming story, one that shows genuine kindness and generosity on Romney’s part. That doesn’t mean it gets him completely off the empathy hook, though. His co-worker was, after all, his co-worker, someone he could understand. The daughter could have been one of his own children. They weren’t auto workers.
Conservative bloggers have tried a different tack: call it the “Obama did it too” strategy. The right-wing blogosphere was deliriously happy for a while after the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher noted a passage in the President’s autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” in which he describes having tried dog meat as a child living in Indonesia. In his first blog post .. http://dailycaller.com/2012/04/17/obama-bites-dog/ .. on the subject, Treacher wrote:
“So what? It was a long time ago,” you say. “He was a lot younger. Customs are different there. He was just doing what his stepfather told him. And hey, you can’t even prove that the dogs were ever left on top of a car, you racist.”
Hey, whatever you have to tell yourself, libs. Say what you want about Romney, but at least he only put a dog on the roof of his car, not the roof of his mouth. And whenever you bring up the one, we’re going to bring up the other.
It’s no fun when we push back, is it? That’s why it’s so much fun.
Similarly, on Thursday afternoon, some bloggers were crowing .. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/05/10/Does-WaPo-Know-Obama-Shoved-a-Little-Girl .. about another portion of “Dreams From My Father” that, they said, proved that Obama had been a bully as a child, too:
There was one other child in my class, though, who reminded me of a different sort of pain. Her name was Coretta, and before my arrival she had been the only black person in our grade. She was plump and dark and didn’t seem to have many friends. From the first day, we avoided each other but watched from a distance, as if direct contact would only remind us more keenly of our isolation.
Finally, during recess one hot, cloudless day, we found ourselves occupying the same corner of the playground. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but I remember that suddenly she was chasing me around the jungle gyms and swings. She was laughing brightly, and I teased her and dodged this way and that, until she finally caught me and we fell to the ground breathless. When I looked up, I saw a group of children, faceless before the glare of the sun, pointing down at us.
“Coretta has a boyfriend! Coretta has a boyfriend!”
The chants grew louder as a few more kids circled us.
“She’s not my g-girlfriend,” I stammered. I looked to Coretta for some assistance, but she just stood there looking down at the ground. “Coretta’s got a boyfriend! Why don’t you kiss her, mister boyfriend?”
“I’m not her boyfriend!” I shouted. I ran up to Coretta and gave her a slight shove; she staggered back and looked up at me, but still said nothing. “Leave me alone!” I shouted again. And suddenly Coretta was running, faster and faster, until she disappeared from sight. Appreciative laughs rose around me. Then the bell rang, and the teachers appeared to round us back into class.
This type of pushback may be fun, as Treacher said, but it’s not very effective, and anyone who thinks otherwise is missing the point.
The Seamus incident has been brought up so many times because it’s about Romney mistreating a creature whose life was in his hands, and, ultimately, about how he’d care for the people for whom he’d be responsible if he’s elected President. The “Obama ate a dog” story is about him doing the same thing we all do when we eat any kind of meat—it’s just that we’re more attached to the animal he ate. If he’d abused the dog before eating it, that would be something else entirely.
The story about Romney bullying his classmate is about him being a leader among his classmates and not using the privilege he had for good, but to harm someone just because he could. (An example .. http://articles.latimes.com/2005/jan/20/opinion/oe-davis20 .. from George W. Bush’s past shows that there was another way besides Romney’s, even back then.) And the Obama passage doesn’t even show him bullying anyone. It’s about him struggling to fit in at his new school after returning to the U.S., and how, in an effort to be less of an outcast, he made a victim out of someone who was having the same troubles he was. The bloggers who jumped on that bit from “Dreams From My Father” left out what comes immediately after .. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=HRCHJp-V0QUC&lpg=PA61&vq=coretta&dq=dreams+from+my+father&pg=PA61&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=coretta&f=false .. the passages they quoted: Obama expressing regret and shame, two things Romney wasn’t able to muster when he responded to the Post report on Thursday.
It comes down to this: a bad act here or there, dredged up from decades ago, won’t hurt Romney; just as a counterexample from Obama’s past won’t save him. Deep down, most of us know that a President can’t fix everything that ails us. But we want to feel, at least, that he knows why certain things hurt, and that he cares.
Photograph by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/05/mitt-romneys-empathy-problem.html
Mitt, you might have said, something more like ..
'I'm not concerned with the very rich they are just fine and getting richer, i am very concerned about the very poor as our safety net does have holes in it and many suffer terribly, my focus however is on the middle class as Republican policies of the last 30 years have decimated their living standards.' .. grin .. 'hey, I have the nomination, don't I' .. grin .. ok Mitt you could change the last two bits .. it still would have been much better than what you said .. i mean it would have sounded as though you actually did have real empathy with those living in cardboard boxes beneath the streets of Las Vegas .. great cartoon F6 .. LOL ..
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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