Ari Kohen, a former professor of mine, chides the Romneys for playing up the idea of Mitt as an everyman. Kohen wishes Romney would acknowledge his privileged circumstances in life.
[W]here I part ways with the Romneys, and where their rhetoric really sticks in my craw, is the idea that they’re promulgating: That if you scrimp and save and work really, really hard, you can do what they’ve done. Their experience stands in sharp contrast with the “We Built This” rhetoric of the Republican National Convention … and they seem unwilling or unable to recognize this fact.
It’s not that Mitt Romney didn’t build his fortune or accomplish a great deal by his talent and hard work. It’s that his experience — of barely getting by through the sale of stock given to him by his father and then buying his first house with his father’s assistance — simply isn’t the experience of the vast, vast majority of Americans. Most people don’t have the help that Romney and I had when we were younger. For me, this is something I think about pretty much every day. For Romney, it’s like a dark secret that’s best kept under wraps or ignored entirely because it doesn’t fit into the Republican rhetoric that needing (and God forbit accepting) the assistance of others is an obvious sign of moral weakness.
