<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" (Optional soundtrack to this blog post...)      Damn, it&amp;#039;s a good thing that Rick Santorum \u2014 and have I mentioned what a dick he is? \u2014 reminded us the other night that &amp;quot;There are no classes in America&amp;quot; because, if there were, Willard Romney might be in some serious trouble as we get closer to tomorrow night, when the maple syrup is finally separated from all the saps. Because he has no other context in which to view the world, and because he has all the inherent human-relations skill of an andiron, Willard has been wandering the landscape the last couple of days, spouting off like G. I. Luvmoney or someone. First, there was this little beauty, in which Willard seems to be arguing that only really rich people (like, say, him) should run for office, and says flat-out that he was glad that his personal fortune was big enough to run a campaign so opulent that Ted Kennedy had to mortgage his house to keep up. (Of course, Willard lost that race, largely because he&amp;#039;s always been foof enough to say stuff like that.) Then, yesterday, once again attempting to empathize with those hit hardest by the country&amp;#039;s economic travails, and once again sounding like someone who learned 20 minutes earlier that there were other people on the planet besides him, Willard produced a line of bullshit so staggeringly oblivious that he should have had little cartoon birds tweet-tweeting around his head while he said it. &amp;quot;I know what it&amp;#039;s like to worry whether you&amp;#039;re going to get fired. There were a couple of times I wondered if I was going to get a pink slip.&amp;quot;  I will guarantee you that this is how the dialogue went at Willard World HQ as this latest talking-point was fashioned: Adviser: You know, these ads with all the people Bain Capital chucked to the curb are starting to bite a little here. Willard (thinking): I should have had them all killed. Adviser: Sir? Willard: Sorry. Just woolgathering a bit. What should we do? Adviser: Well, I think you might talk about how you once feared being unemployed? Did you ever fear being unemployed? The Voice Of Willard&amp;#039;s Conscience: Don&amp;#039;t do it. You&amp;#039;ll sound stupid. Again. Willard: Sure. Once Dad said he wouldn&amp;#039;t let me mow the lawn any more if I didn&amp;#039;t trim the edges better than I did the last time! Adviser: Scoreboard! The Voice Of Willard&amp;#039;s Conscience: Why couldn&amp;#039;t I have gotten assigned to that Huntsman guy? Or something like that. It&amp;#039;s becoming abundantly clear that, all Santorum aside, this election is fundamentally going to be about class. The Republicans already have talked about blue-collar jobs and middle-class anxiety more in this cycle than they have in the previous two or three combined. And, even if the Republicans had given the whole business a good leaving-alone, the White House is going to force the issue anyway. Unemployment is not going to drop below eight percent before the election. The income gap is not going to go away, either. The basic inequities forced on the country by the looting of the economy in the first decade of the century are alive and well. They are going to bite hard at both parties. But only one candidate is so uniquely vulnerable to their political effects. Let us be absolutely sure of one thing: Willard Romney could have been functionally unemployed for his entire life and not known there was any other way to live. He no more knows the existential dread that people feel in this economy than he knows what a boot feels like when it steps on an ant. The job that made him spectacularly wealthy, as opposed to simply rich, involved exploiting that existential dread for profit, and for the benefit of investors just as heedless of it as he is. I don&amp;#039;t know why his campaign insists on trotting him out as the great friend of the embattled middle-class. They might as well just dress him up as a chicken and send him out to talk about agricultural policy. I suspect, though, it just might have a little something to do with the Occupy people who, as we all know, have no coherent agenda that anyone can identify. MORE FROM THIS WEEKEND IN NEW HAMPSHIRE: \u2022 How on Earth Did Romney Not Survive the Weekend? \u2022 New Hampshire Debate: The Trickless-Dick Mitt Fix Is In \u2022 Jon Huntsman, Fighting Off Invisibility With Sanity \u2022 The Lonely Clang Of Occupy New Hampshire STAY TUNED FOR MUCH MORE FROM NEW HAMPSHIRE ALL WEEK &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and on the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a12266/mitt-romney-class-warfare-6635384/>