nytimes bullshit....Obama and Romney Face a Tough Fight for Key Group
Both are Harvard-educated millionaires. Both have been criticized as elitist and technocratic. Both have struggled to handle the populist anger coursing through politics.
On Politics
The Times’s political editor on 2012.
In an election climate largely defined by the anxieties of the middle class, working people are now more likely than not to face a choice in November between two candidates who sometimes seem to have trouble relating to them. One is President Obama, who once characterized them as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion.” The other is Mitt Romney, currently defending himself against allegations from within his own party that he is a “vulture” capitalist and who in the last week has suggested that he takes pleasure in firing those who fail to provide good service and that politics might best be practiced by those who have paid off their mortgages.
This may be a grassroots year, but neither one of these candidates is mowing his own lawn. And neither one, analysts say, is likely to have an easy time winning the allegiance of a group that is critical to their electoral prospects: white working-class voters.
There is more to the candidacies and backgrounds of the two men, of course, than the shorthand descriptions of their wealth and personalities. Mr. Obama grew up as the son of a single mother and worked as a community organizer in inner city Chicago. Mr. Romney’s emphasis on getting tough with China is winning him attention from workers, and former workers, in industries turned upside down by global competition.
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/obama-and-romney-face-a-tough-fight-for-key-group/?pagemode=print