The GOP’s Class-Warfare Hypocrisy

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/07/09/the-gop-s-class-warfare-hypocrisy-from-nixon-to-romney.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Fpolitics+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Politics%29


The GOP’s Class-Warfare Hypocrisy, From Nixon to Romney
by Peter Beinart
Jul 9, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Romney in the Hamptons, Romney on a Jet Ski at his N.H. estate—conservatives may be crying foul at the Obama campaign playing up these stories, but they’re masters at running on class resentment, says Peter Beinart.



“A woman in a blue chiffon dress poked her head out of a black Range Rover here on Sunday afternoon and yelled to an aide to Mitt Romney, ‘Is there a V.I.P. entrance. We are V.I.P.’

Thus began yesterday’s nasty little New York Times story entitled, “Romney Donors Out in Force in Hamptons.” It follows snarky coverage of Romney’s Jet Ski-filled vacation at his multi-million dollar New Hampshire estate. Which follows a flurry of reports suggesting that the Obama campaign’s assault on Romney’s record at Bain Capital is hurting him in key states like Ohio.

Conservatives are livid. “The Obama campaign has made it clear that they will run this whole election on class warfare,” declared the website The Right Sphere. “Instead of focusing on Obama’s dismal record, they want Americans to resent Mitt Romney for being successful.” Luckily, added Commentary, Obama’s Maoist tactics will fail because America remains “an aspirational society that admires rather than resents success.”

Really? If that’s the case, why have Republicans used class resentment so effectively for the last 60 years? Joseph McCarthy, the man whose specter terrified Democrats for a generation, was all about class warfare. “It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out,” he told the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1950, in the speech that catapulted him to stardom, “but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give. This is glaringly true in the State Department. There the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouths are the ones who have been worst.”

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So, yes, America is an “aspirational” country, but it’s also a country where people distrust elites. It’s a country where people with money and pedigree are vastly overrepresented in government yet risk their careers if they can’t connect to ordinary voters. Mitt Romney will be judged by those same rules: Do middle class Americans find him personally appealing? Do they believe his success has benefited the nation as a whole?

For much of the last half-century, Republicans have understood these rules better than Democrats. If Mitt Romney doesn’t, he has no one to blame but himself.