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" When professional pundits talk about the Romney campaign&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;messaging problem,&amp;quot; they generally mean the mystifying problem that the campaign has in establishing one grotesque lie on an issue to which the campaign and all its surrogates can stick. (This is alternatively known as The Fehrnstrom Conundrum.) What it does not mean is the campaign&amp;#039;s complete inability to get the rich and clueless dingbats supporting it to shut their yaps around reporters, lest the entire Romney campaign sound like even more of a living Thomas Nast cartoon than it actually is. Quoth The Lady In The Range Rover: &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got the message,&amp;quot; she added. &amp;quot;But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies \u2014 everybody who&amp;#039;s got the right to vote \u2014 they don&amp;#039;t understand what&amp;#039;s going on. I just think if you&amp;#039;re lower income \u2014 one, you&amp;#039;re not as educated, two, they don&amp;#039;t understand how it works, they don&amp;#039;t understand how the systems work, they don&amp;#039;t understand the impact.&amp;quot; And then she picked her teeth with the bleached metacarpal of an indigent child and went off to get another cocktail. Then, of course, there are the disillusioned former Obama supporters among the swells. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not helping the economy to pit the people who are the engine of the economy against the people who rely on that engine,&amp;quot; Michael Zambrelli said as the couple waited in their SUV for clearance into the Creeks shortly after the candidate&amp;#039;s motorcade flew by and entered the pine-tree lined estate. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s basically been biting the hand that fed him in &amp;#039;08. ... I would bet 25% of the people here were supporters of Obama in &amp;#039;08. And they&amp;#039;re here now.&amp;quot; Is it time now to point out that the Dow is doing fine, and that executive compensation is back where it was before, and the fact that the same people who cratered the economy last time are still engaging in massive fraud and reckless cupidity? &amp;quot;The engine of the economy&amp;quot;? &amp;quot;Biting the hand that fed him&amp;quot;? Jeebus, get over yourself. As it happens, HBO is running an incredibly moving, and incredibly infuriating, documentary tonight about people from another part of Long Island, all of whom lost their jobs in the Great Recession, and none of whom have been able to get another one. One of them, Anne McCarthy Strauss, is one of my oldest and dearest friends going back to our days at Marquette. She was a lifelong Long Islander who met her husband while both of them were commuting on the LIRR, which is about as Guyland as you can get. Let&amp;#039;s be quite clear. The personal tragedies suffered by the people in this film are no less severe just because they may have had further to fall than other people whose lives were upended. We are all in this together and we will either rein in the power of unaccountable oligarchy or we will all fall into the same fire. The people waiting in line to help Willard Romney hand the country back to what they perceive to be its rightful owners simply do... not... care if that happens. The fact that this is a bad political message is the least of its horrors. (Photo Illustration by DonkeyHotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics Blog) "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14762/romney-hamptons-fundraisers-10487353/>