Betty Cracker: Let's Do The Time Warp Again..

[Fumesucker]

http://www.balloon-juice.com/2012/05/10/lets-do-the-time-warp-again-2/

Mrs. Mitt seems like a nice enough person—she comes across as exponentially more human than her husband. Admittedly, that’s a low bar since anyone who seemed less human would be relegated to the cargo hold of a commercial airliner without a notarized document from an anthropologist.

But Mrs. Mitt seems as pleasant as a clueless rich lady could possibly be when she’s trying to sell you an animatronic plutocrat with an anti-99%, anti-woman and anti-gay agenda. Sort of like a defanged Lynne Cheney. So I don’t mean to pick on her. But this passage of a Mothers’ Day op-ed she penned for USA Today struck me as odd:

People often ask me what it was like to raise five boys. I won’t sugarcoat it. There were times I wanted to tear my hair out. I can remember visiting my friends’ houses, seeing their daughters’ manners, the way they helped with the chores. Then I would return home to my boys, hoping only that my house was still intact.

Sweet al dente Flying Spaghetti Monster, is she actually suggesting that daughters are universally better mannered and tidier than boys? I’d disabuse her of that notion by posting a picture of my teenage daughter’s room right now, but that would be invading the kid’s privacy. Trust me, I’d stack that girl’s smart mouth and capacity for generating household-roiling mayhem against all five Little Lord Fontleromneys.

But that’s not all that bugs me about the piece. It illustrates something more broad and disturbing—a weird trapped-in-amber vibe to both Romneys, something that can’t really be explained away as a generational thing. They are about the same age as my parents, and though my parents’ political views differ significantly from the Romneys’ (my dad is way to their right and my mom is way to their left—divorced ages ago, obviously!), you can tell my parents experienced the decades that followed 1959 and took away certain lessons, for good or ill.

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Read the rest of the piece at the link..

[SheilaT]

1. There is something weirdly clueless

about Ann Romney. I am basically the same age as those two (Mitt born 1947, Ann born 1949 and I was born in 1948).

But maybe the most important thing is that she was just twenty, and proceeded to have five children in fairly short order. So what matters more, perhaps, than having been a stay home mom who "never worked a day in her life" is that she never had an independent life before she married and had kids. She never experienced a world outside that of being in her father's home and then being in her mother's home. Yes, she went to college, but according to Wikipedia she and Mitt agreed to marry in 1965, when she was only 16.

I've known other women like that. They didn't come from the kind of privilege Ann Romney comes from, but they've never experienced life on their own. Never rented an apartment of their own. Never gotten a job that wasn't more or less handed to them. What a lot of us here at DU are really expressing when we criticize the Romneys, is not so much that they inhabit a world of wealth and privilege, but that they honestly have no clue that it's a world of wealth and privilege that they inhabit.

Mitt suggesting that kids can easily borrow twenty grand from the parents to start a business. He probably really believes that any parents in the middle class could easily come up with that sum of money. And to him the poor are okay because after all, there's a safety net.

I myself was a stay-home mom and raised two sons. But I didn't get married until I was 32, which means I had over a decade of living on my own, working, renting an apartment, paying my own bills. I didn't stay home because my husband was fabulously wealthy, but because I was determined that I myself be the one to raise my kids, and not a babysitter or day-care site. We made financial sacrifices, and that's not a choice every family would make, but it was ours. In a way, Ann Romney didn't have a choice, because women in her milieu back then did not go to work. For her, going to college would have simply been a way to snag a husband, although in her case she and Mitt were already committed to each other when she went off to college. It's important to understand the huge gulf between her, between them, and most of the rest of us. Not that we can give them a complete pass on their ignorance of the rest of the world, but we can't understand their lives anymore than they can understand ours.

All that sympathy and understanding aside, I cannot imagine how dreadful a president he would make. I'll be voting for Obama myself.

[HockeyMom]

2. Mrs. Romney would not have like my daughters

Actually, my straight daughter was worse than her lesbian sister. She would go on scavenger hunts with the neighborhood boys. She dug up the sketleton of squirrel, glued the parts together, and mounted it on a stick in her room. She then invited all the "girly girls" to come to her house and proceeded to show them her work. They literally ran screaming out of the house. Yes, they always picked on her before, but never again after that. Maybe that was her plan? The boys? They all thought she was very, very COOL. I had boys coming to the house to look at her "project" who I had never seen before in my life.