When a candidate behaves as badly as Mitt Romney, what can one more voice add to the din?
Probably not much, but I have one thought I want to share: Republicans hate social insurance.
They hate Social Security. They hate Medicare. They really hate Medicaid, Food Stamps, and unemployment insurance. In their hearts, they look at people who collect Social Security retirement--especially the ones who depend on it for most or all of their income--as freeloaders and "failures," people propped up by FDR's pernicious socialist scheme.
It radiates out from there.
That disdain is what Mitt Romney communicated at that fundraiser back in May. Look, Mitt wasn't talking with a bunch of working class Tea Party types. He was talking to uber-rich plutocrats who want our entire social contract system dismantled. Why? Who know? They just do.
This is really not complicated. The Republican Party--who never liked these programs--is now fully controlled by people who honestly believe they can eliminate "the culture of dependence."
But here's the problem. As a society, we long ago made the choice that certain things--old age pensions, health care for the elderly, health care for people in deep poverty, and temporary support for those unemployed through no fault of their own--were costs we shared together. Not as a matter of entitlement, not as a forms of welfare, but as ways to insure all of us against the storms of real life.
These social contracts are not radical--no more radical than believing that public education should be free and available to all.
But Republicans have decided that it's time to turn the clock back to a pre-1937 world.
Will the voters let that happen?