By
John Kass
Chicago Tribune
April 22, 2012
Mitt Romney isn't exactly my cup of tea, and loyal readers know this. But my readers are quite civilized and know that tea is served properly with silver spoons.
Not wooden spoons. And not earthenware spoons fit for turnips and onions. But silver spoons. Order afternoon tea at any fine hotel and you will see that they bring you silver spoons.
The silver spoon is for stirring, lightly, without clanking against the wall of the thin china cup. It is not a battle-ax to dismember your enemy, leaving his bones and meat upon the ground as you make speeches about civility. It is not a stiletto, for quick work unrecognized until it is too late.
It is a spoon.
But President Barack Obama, cruelly and foolishly, wielded a silver spoon in an attack on Romney. His was a thrusting motion, and that lunge revealed something desperate about our president, something unseemly. I remember Obama as a younger man who said he wanted to transcend the broken politics of the past. Now what he wants is a second term.
"I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth," said Obama at a campaign speech in Ohio last week. "Michelle wasn't. But somebody gave us a chance — just like these fine folks up here are looking for a chance."
Silver spoon? More like dining at the trough of Affirmative Action.
Silver spoon? More like dining at the trough of Affirmative Action.
Who did pay for Obama to attend Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard? When you start digging into Obama's background, you turn up more questions than answers.
By the age of 20 the average American has had their picture taken hundreds of times at various events, holidays, weddings, vacations, etc.
You ever wonder why there are so few of Obama?
The spoon flashed as he stepped forward and tried to slip it somewhere between Romney's political ribs, the message unmistakable: Romney is the rich man, caring only for the rich, and I am the anti-Romney, born poor and guardian of the people.
Naturally, the class warrior didn't mention charging regular folks $1,000 for a handshake at a fundraiser, but class warfare is the theme of the Democrats in 2012.
The Republican is of the equestrian class that rides over the poor, leaving hoof prints on their necks. And Obama is of the people, so please forget that presidential media guru David Axelrod just dropped $1.7 million on a gorgeous Chicago condo.
In America, only snobs and fools look down upon someone born poor. It's un-American. But if your father's poverty isn't your fault, then why should your father's wealth be a sin?
The opportunity to seek wealth is why our people came here, why they left their villages overseas to ride in steerage, seasick, eating black bread and spooning out the stew with wooden spoons, just on the chance that their grandchildren might hold a silver one someday.
My father plowed his fields with a mule named Truman. Does that make me more virtuous than the daughters of a president who attend the finest schools in the country? Of course it doesn't.
White House press secretary Jay Carney insisted that Obama wasn't talking about Romney. He said that anyone who thought Obama was referring to him might "be a little oversensitive."
But then I haven't really believed a thing Carney has said since he was a correspondent and wrote a revolting CNN; Time puff piece on the Daley machine. Chicago was drowning in debt and outright corruption, but you wouldn't know it from Mr. Carney.
Carney is the biggest Wuss in Washington
Carney is the biggest Wuss in Washington
That awkward monthly moment for Jay
He gushed over Daley, and said that Daley watches over Chicago the way Andy watches over Mayberry. Yes. Chicago as Mayberry. Dig it.
Romney, of course, took great umbrage at Obama's silver spoon crack, saying it was aimed at his father, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, a former president of American Motors.
"The president likes to attack fellow Americans," said Romney on Fox News. "He's always looking for a scapegoat, particularly (those who) have been successful like my dad, and I'm not going to rise to that."
I find both of them flawed, Romney as the ring bearer for all that's wrong with the corporatist Republican smothering of the conservative spirit, Obama as the keeper of the federal leviathan, feeding it as it grows larger, squeezing the life out of entrepreneurship.
There are two kinds of politicians: those without personal wealth, and those with personal wealth. Those with money don't need politics to make more. Those without money need friends as they climb the ladder of public service.
Michelle Obama had such friends. She was making $121,910 a year in 2004 as a lobbyist for the University of Chicago hospitals. But two months after her husband took office as a U.S. senator, she was promoted. Her income zoomed to $316,962 a year.
(Interestingly... after she left her vacancy was never filled)
And the president had friends. One is named Tony Rezko. He's rotting in federal prison, although it was Rezko and his wife who put together the strange deal that helped Barack and Michelle buy their dream house in Kenwood that they never seem to visit anymore.
In prison, Tony Rezko doesn't use a silver spoon. He uses a plastic spork.
