(Fred Weinberg/The Penny Press) – Dear Mr. President:
I suppose one of the problems with living in what Harry Truman once called “the crown jewel of the Federal Prison System” is that you fall out of touch with a group of people Bill O’Reilly likes to call “the folks.”
By way of definition, “the folks” are not those people who are members of occupy Wall Street nor are they the people who staff the White House or Congress.
They are me and my middle class neighbors.
Frankly, Mr. President, the reason your exhortations to tax millionaires and billionaires has not and won’t work is that even the poorest among us wants someday to be rich.
And when we make it, we don’t want to pay the government half of what we worked so hard to earn.
Your problem is that you make the assumption that someone who starts poor cannot ever become rich despite millions of stories over that past 236 years to the contrary. Therefore, you assume anybody who is in the middle class is stuck there. And anybody who lives below the poverty line is stuck there.
That being the case, you assume that they want your handouts. And that they are sympathetic to you when you make these asinine comments about Mitt Romney being out of touch.
Frankly, sir, the only people who are sympathetic to that viewpoint are people like that lady in front of the White House who told the TV interviewers that “I want me some of that Obama money!” (Go ahead, sir, call me a racist. I dare you.)
This is America. Where, as you have proven, ANYBODY can grow up to become President.
Nobody really wants to be dependent on the government for anything. Given the opportunity, most of the folks want to work hard and get rich. And most of the folks don’t resent others who have.
Frankly, Jon Lovitz is much more in tune with what the average guy thinks than you are.
The actor says he’s a Democrat and voted for you, but now he’s mad as hell at your plan to raise taxes on the rich.
He called you a “[bleep]ing a-hole for saying the rich don’t pay their taxes.” He assured us “I voted for the guy” and even expressed admiration for your rise from “nothing.” “He had no father — he is mixed-race, which is a burden, and the guy ends up going to Harvard, and he’s the president of the United States.”
Lovitz cut you no slack for turning against your fellow millionaires. “This whole thing with Obama saying the rich don’t pay their taxes is f—ing bulls—,” he said. “First they say to you ‘The United States of America, you can do anything you want — go for it! So then you go for it and you make it and everyone’s like, ‘[Bleep] you!’”
Now I know he used some language which, I’m sure, hasn’t been used at the White House since the Nixon administration, but, that is sometimes how we folks talk—especially when you treat us like three-year-olds who need you more than you need us.
I’ll be honest with you.
Mitt Romney is a little on the boring side. I don’t mean that in the pejorative. If he’s out of touch, as you allege in your ads, then at least he’s smart enough to hire people who are not and will listen to them.
Your track record in that regard is, to put it mildly, not stellar.
Frankly, sir, most of the folks—the vast majority of independent voters who swing elections—would rather identify with Mitt Romney these days than you.
He, after all, has a solid record of achievement in business.
You’ve never even had a real job.
Sincerely: