Said Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Martha Jefferson Randolph in 1800, "Politics is such a torment that I would advise everyone I love not to mix with it."
Actually, the aforementioned houses understate the Romney lifestyle. Two other Romney mansions were sold in 2009: a $3 million home on the outskirts of Boston and a $5 million ski lodge on the slopes in Deer Valley, Utah. Additionally, an application has been filed in San Diego to quadruple the living space at the beachfront compound in La Jolla.
To move away from all that, even for a night, in order to roll around in the mud with Newt Gingrich for several hours seems to me to be a bit of madness.
Adding to the craziness, you hose off the mud and wake up the next morning to a headline at the Huffington Post that says, "Mitt Romney: 'I'm Not Concerned About the Very Poor.' "
That's the kind of headline that Occupiers love to read about the One-Percenters, a confirmation of the caricature of the rich as callous money-grubbers who couldn't care less if the rest of us end up as cannon fodder or wage slaves.
It makes Romney sound like the editorial writers at the Wall Street Journal, who referred to Americans who pay no federal income taxes as "lucky duckies" because they don't make enough money to be eligible for the federal income tax - as if a family of four living on $20,000 a year and exempt from the federal tax is luckier than a Wall Street banker who pockets $20 million and pays $3 million in federal income taxes.
With a thrill going up his leg as he read the Huffington Post headline, Chris Matthews, at MSNBC, piled on, declaring that Mitt Romney doesn't care about the poor and that now he's treating Newt Gingrich like he's one of the poor.
