It's the Wrong Way

...

Joe Soptic.  Mitt Romney did not actually kill his wife.

The Obama campaign's attack ad on Romney that features the man who's wife died of cancer after Bain Capital eliminated his job and she lost her insurance employs a reasonable line of attack - it just aims it at the wrong target.  You can demonize Bain and the Private Equity industry for a lot of things, but they neither invented nor specialized in layoffs.  Companies have been adjusting the size of their workforce in both directions since time immemorial, and even in the best Union shops layoffs occur.  The thing is, in most civilized nations your access to health care isn't directly tied to your employment, and even if you can't immediately find another position you can still go to the doctor as necessary.  That's just not the case in the capital of heartless capitalism, the USA.

So targeting Bain and private equity for the woman's death is just too great a stretch, a couple bridges too far if you will.  But that doesn't make Mitt Romney roadkill here, just an innocent bystander who's done nothing wrong.  Obama and the Democratic legislature passed a comprehensive health care bill that would prevent this sort of unnecessary death and suffering due to lack of employment or income.  The ACA, known as Obamacare, provides a facility for (near) universal coverage, either under subsidized private insurance or expanded Medicaid services.  Romney has repeatedly vowed to repeal that legislation.

This makes Andrea Saul's rebuttal of that particular political ad even more galling.  By acknowledging that Mrs. Soptic would not have died if she had only had the good fortune to live in Massachusetts, where none other than Mitt Romney passed a health care reform law that protects the unemployed and uninsured, she reveals the brutal cruelty of the Republican position on the ACA.

So the fair and reasonable attack on Romney's policy agenda is not that his rapacious business killed Mrs. Soptic, but that his policies as President would kill thousands that would otherwise live long, productive lives.  The fact that quantitatively, if not qualitatively, this is much, much worse is not lost on Obama's campaign advisers.  It's just a claim they would hesitate to make, for one because they are very cautious about the way they defend the ACA and because, in a sense, it's got a Godwin/genocide quality to it that they believe makes it off limits.

But ultimately, this is going to have to become part of the campaign narrative.  There is a kind of heartless cruelty, a lack of concern for the vast majority of the American population represented by the Romney policy agenda that voters will have to take into account.  They frame it as "reform" and "sacrifice", and even fiscal discipline, but what it is, as always, is nothing but upward redistribution of wealth.  That's what they do, it is their overriding single policy goal, they just try, with varying degrees of success, to hide it from the voters who would not approve.  Certainly there are Americans who want to see the poor and non-white people suffer and even die, and for them these policies are a feature, not a bug, and they will enthusiastically vote to see them implemented.  And part of what this election is about is that very question:  In these dark times, in a referendum on the cruelty and inequality of the system vs. the compassion of the people, what will a plurality of Americans choose?
...