Conservatives are upset with Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry for
their criticisms of Mitt Romney and his work at Bain Capital. Some
of the statements smack of classic left-wing class warfare —
heretofore the domain of liberals, Wall Street Occupiers, Barack
Obama.
And yet, as some observers have noted, there may be a
possible silver lining in this criticism: If Romney gets the GOP
nomination, the harsh statements from Gingrich and Perry may be
preparing him for the fusillade to come from Team Obama. This is
truer than I think anyone realizes.
Here’s the reality: Not only has Obama been pushing class
warfare unceasingly for three years now, but his chief strategist,
David Axelrod, has been employing precisely this tactic against
Romney, well before Newt and Perry said anything.
Axelrod, of course, is the Chicago-based consultant who
got Obama elected. He was the chief architect of Obama ‘08, right
down to the very words “hope and change.” The Los Angeles
Times correctly called him the “keeper” of the message in an
image-based campaign in which “message is everything.” The New
York Times dubbed him “Obama’s Narrator.” Axelrod honed the
Obama image, got him elected president, and changed this nation.
Then, after two years as a presidential adviser, he went back to
Chicago to strategize on reelecting Obama. “I have one campaign
left,” Axelrod told a reporter recently, “and it is going to be to
try to elect a guy who I think is a great president.”
Which dastardly Republican stands in the way? The leading
candidate is Mitt Romney, who happens to be the candidate Axelrod
and Obama want. Ax is slicing up Mitt for an Occupy Wall Street
feast. He sees Mitt as a hunk of red meat for the Occupy movement,
as the poster-boy for Wall Street greed.
This has been the plan for months.
“Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very
picture of greed in the great recession — a sort of political
Gordon Gekko,” reported Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin in an August
2011 Politico piece titled,
“Obama plan: Destroy Romney.” The piece quoted Axelrod: “He
[Romney] was very, very good at making a profit for himself and his
partners but not nearly as good [at] saving jobs for communities.
He is very much the profile of what we’ve seen in the last decade
on Wall Street.”
This, mind you, was still before Occupy Wall Street
exploded in September and October. The Obama class campaign was
already underway.
The Politico quoted what it called a “prominent
Democratic strategist” close to the White House: “Unless things
change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill
Romney.”
Well, Obama has no accomplishments to run on, which means
Obama and Axelrod will run on Romney — tire-tracks and
all.
Axelrod has steadily maintained this caricature of Romney.
“He [Romney] says he represents business,” Axelrod told MSNBC in
October, “but he really represents the Wall Street side of
business.”
Last Sunday, Axelrod told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that
Romney is “rooting” for economic decline. He described Romney as a
nefarious outsourcer of “tens of thousands of jobs,” as someone who
“closed down more than 1,000 plants, stores, and offices” and “took
12 companies to bankruptcy.” As this rapacious profiteer cheerfully
destroyed companies and businesses and shops and shop-owners and
the poor and the meek and the downtrodden and the crippled and the
lame, “he and his partners made hundreds of millions of
dollars.”
“He is not a job creator,” scowled Axelrod. “He is a
corporate raider.”
Axelrod frames this Romney way as the sinister
“Bain mentality.”
None of this is a surprise given the roots of Axelrod and
Obama. Not appreciated is that fact that Axelrod, like Obama, is
the product of radical mentors with literal communist roots.
Axelrod got his first major job, at the Chicago Tribune,
with crucial recommendations from Don Rose and David Canter, two
self-described mentors with far-left roots in Chicago politics.
Canter and his father, Harry Canter, were closely monitored by
(Democrat-run) Congressional committees because of their work for
Moscow, with David Canter actually called to testify before
Congress in heated hearings in July 1962. Their home base, Chicago,
was second only to New York in communist activity; in fact, the
Party was founded there in September 1919.
In the late 1940s, Harry Canter actually worked with
Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, at the communist publication,
the Chicago Star. The Star was run by Davis, who
was its editor-in-chief. These men were not only class-warfare
specialists, but heartily believed what they preached. They were
true believers.
My point isn’t that David Axelrod and Barack Obama are
closet members of Communist Party USA. The point is that the
class-warfare they parrot so naturally is in the marrow of their
political bones and ancestry.
If Mitt Romney gets the 2012 GOP nomination, prepare
yourself for a season of class warfare in America unlike anything
our generation has ever heard. You’ll need to go back to the Cold
War for rhetoric like this — to Chicago in the 1940s.
And if you thought the Occupy movement was worked up last
fall, you haven’t seen nothing yet. If Romney is the GOP nominee,
the Occupiers will go absolutely bananas this coming fall,
especially if prodded by Team Obama. Wall Street might literally
burn this time. The rich are going to be demonized in a
frighteningly shameless way by professional agitators.
Before, Obama’s pals simply wanted the Occupy-istas to
rise up against Republicans in Congress. This time, they’ll be
battling for Obama’s political life — for nothing less than the
revolution itself. It could get really ugly.
With Barack Obama at the helm, and David Axelrod charting
the course against Mitt Romney, this nation is about to set sail
into a poisonous sea of class envy and hatred. “Bain” Capital will
be “Bane” Capital, as in evil. “Venture capital”
will be “vulture capital.”
This November’s election might boil down to a fundamental
debate between the merits of markets vs. central planning and
wealth redistribution; at the least, that’s where the rhetoric is
taking us.
If I were advising Mitt Romney, I’d tell him to bone up
not only on the good he did at Bain Capital — explaining to
Americans what venture capital is, and why someone with such
economic experience is arguably perfect for the White House right
now — but on Hayek, Friedman, Hazlitt, Mises, Laffer, and, most of
all, Marx. He might Google the word “agitprop,” since he will be
precisely such a target. And if Romney does this right, he has
chance not only to win Americans’ vote but to educate them about
the wondrous free-market system that has made their nation the
greatest marvel in human history — and which they won’t learn
about from Obama and Axelrod.
