Mayor Rybak: We built it together: a hand up for Mitt Romney’s family, Paul Ryan’s family, and mine

From Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak:

http://twitter.com/MayorRTRybak/status/248591672890499072

http://rtrybak.tumblr.com/post/31894420969/we-built-it-together-a-hand-up-for-mitt-romneys

The tape that really blew my mind is actually 50 years old. In it, Lenore Romney, Mitt’s mom, talks about her husband George, who in 1962 was running for governor of Michigan for the first time. As she talked with rightful pride about George’s successful personal story, she casually disclosed that the Romney family was on public assistance when George first came to this country.

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Now let’s bring this story back to Minneapolis, where we see George Romney’s story repeated literally every day. Immigrants who escape war come to Minneapolis from places like Somalia, Liberia, Burma and Syria. Like Romney’s father, a lot of people come from Mexico, and other parts of Latin America, too. Some go on public assistance. Some live in public housing. But when I listen to Mitt Romney, I realize that he thinks the story ends there, with generations of dependence, with people assuming the government owes them and doing nothing to help themselves.

I wish I could show him what I’ve seen in Minneapolis, because if I could, he would know how deeply, deeply wrong he is. I have met hundreds of young people doing just what George Romney did: using a hand up in tough times to become part of the American Dream. I know so many young people and young immigrants who are thriving in school, getting STEP-UP jobs, getting into college, starting their careers and beginning to pay back the country that gave them a fair shot.

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Mitt Romney has every reason to be tremendously proud of all that his father accomplished. But in his position, he has an obligation to understand how he got where he is, and to give others the same chance. So does Paul Ryan.

I raise Ryan because of a part of his biography that I also just learned shows again why Romney’s comments — and the politics that Romney and Ryan practice — are so wrong. When Paul Ryan’s father died when Paul was 16, his widowed mother went back to college herself and used her Social Security survivor benefits to put Paul through college.

That rang very true to me, because that is exactly the same situation that my mother found herself in when my father died, when I was 10.

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But this latest Romney screed is more than that. It is a window into the soul of a man who wants to lead this entire country, a man who strangely sounds more comfortable talking on that tape than almost any other time I’ve heard him in this campaign.

This sure seems to be a guy saying what he truly believes. Fair enough. We’re all entitled to our opinions.

But we aren’t entitled to rewrite our own family histories and pretend that we build this alone. Because we built it together.