Friday, July 20, 2012

"You People"

Kids, don't piss off the Queen Elect.
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In a tone that used to be reserved for someone's else's children a high restaurant, or for impertinent minorities, or 1950s Jewish people applying to a Harvard  or women applying to Augusta Country Club, Ann Romney let lose on all of us little people (including Democrats AND Republicans!) who want some slight transparency from their candidates for President.
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You can find the ABC News clip easily enough...  And better writers than I have spoken...(SALON.. MSN..Politico...)

Now, it may be OK, in some circles, to call the media “you people,” which is what Romney would probably argue she was doing. But in fact, she’s talking to American voters, a majority of whom (including a third of Republicans) want the Romneys share more tax returns,according to a USAToday poll released Thursday. The poll didn’t ask whether voters would like more information generally about how the Romneys “live our life,” but that seems if anything an even more arrogant and elitist reaction from Romney.

Ann Romney’s comment about “you people” is particularly fascinating to me because I can’t get over the way the contemporary right has taken insults they once reserved for African-Americans and applied them to a much broader swath of the country, including white folks, who happen to make up 90 percent of their base. The obvious example I’ve written about before is Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” which blames the hard times suffered by the white working class on its own laziness, aversion to marriage, and fondness for the dole – the same personal traits he blamed for African-American poverty in the 1980s.
Ann Romney is too well-bred to call African-Americans “you people” in public, of course, especially after what happened to Ross Perot. But she obviously has no problem referring to other folks she holds in contempt that way. Of course Romney has displayed contempt for certain African-Americans – like when she and her husband told the Obamas to “start packing,” because in Ann’s words, “It’s Mitt’s time. It’s our turn now,” to live in the White House. As if the Obamas were troublesome tenants who’d overstayed their welcome in the home that rightly belongs to the Romneys.