Romneybus

Mitt Romney will go down in history, way down in history, as the presidential candidate who strapped the family setter to the roof of the family station-wagon. It turns out Romney himself is strapped to the roof of a busload of extremist interest groups whose support he needs to secure the Republican nomination. They really don’t like Romney because he is not pure enough for their causes, but he is the last man standing in the GOP race to recapture the presidency. And yet he’s still the outsider. He is the dog on the roof. To the evangelical Christian right he’s the Mormon who has too many books in his bible and too many grandmothers in his ancestry. To the fiscal conservatives he’s the guy who brought Obamacare to Massachusetts and gave Obama the blueprint for Obamacare. To blue collar conservatives he is too rich and aloof. To Tea Party purists his record is too liberal no matter how much he promises he will be the Hoover (the vacuum cleaner, not the former president) of government waste. He can ride on the roof of the Republican omnibus, but he’ll never be one of them. He will remain aloof on the roof. Thanks to the media monopoly of Rupert Murdoch and the braying of right wing pundits and commentators such as Rush Limbaugh, both of whom have been in hot water recently for questionable behavior towards victims of injustice, the blue collar masses will be continue to be badgered, brainwashed, and buffaloed into believing that right wing positions on the economy, on government, on everything are the way to economic and spiritual salvation for both the country and themselves. Instead, they will see only a greater and greater divide between rich and poor. It’s all a cruel hoax. They can’t quite fathom it, so they keep Romney at a distance outside their cramped rows of sorry seats, up on the roof. There is no better symbol for that distance between rich and poor than Mitt Romney on the roof of the conservative omnibus. He is noticeable and aloft, pretending to be in charge, but barely tolerated and relegated to a place where excess baggage is sometimes consigned. He looks like a shivering pedigreed setter rather than a greyhound. He is not the driver; he is the driven.