Is the Smart Money on Romney Actually Being Dumb?

There’s an old saying, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” When it comes to the children of the wealthy, perhaps the saying should be, “If your parents are so rich, why ain’t you smart?”

Many Americans mistakenly connect being wealthy with being smart but George W. Bush and now Mitt Romney have proven that conventional thinking to be as dead as the dodo…which coincidentally has become the new mascot of the GOP.

Ask yourself, has Mitt Romney exhibited anything resembling cleverness, inventiveness or strategic thinking since he’s been in the public eye running for office? Or…has most every action or comment he’s made that hasn’t been a deception or lie, just plain dumb? And you don’t have to be smart or well educated to lie, just ask Michele Bachmann.

People who aren’t born into wealth need to use their wits, reasoning and vision to deal with problems. Wealthy people can simply throw money at someone to do just that for them, no exercise of intellect is required beyond the challenge of writing a check.

Wealth can cover up the incompetence and lack of intelligence of the wealthy. They can hire “brains”, people who are experts in the financial, legal or political world, to do all the research, preparation and strategizing for them then as the CEO figureheads, they can present it as their own brilliant accomplishment. There are brilliant people who are wealthy but there are also many who use their wealth to exploit the intellect of others to become wealthier and more powerful…while remaining the clueless people that they are. In fact, many of these allegedly “sharp” CEOs spend most of their lives just attending meetings, where those below them have done all the thinking and they sit there like pompous game show contestants, choosing what’s in the box or behind curtain number three based on the colors. Or, they attend meetings with other businesspeople and just regurgitate what others have told them or thought out  for them. A parrot could be just as successful as a CEO in these cases.

It doesn’t take much intelligence to become wealthy like Mitt Romney, you just have to be born…which Mitt probably bumbled anyway (I could imagine him forcing a chuckle when he was born and rolling right off the operating table because he wasn’t tied to the top of it). Though there have been studies, it doesn’t take much imagination to recognize how being a child of the wealthy means the path to success will be swift and easy, requiring less intellectual prowess than having to work for it would demand.

Children of the wealthy are born into connections and circles of political and financial power, they are brought into the most prestigious and expensive schools as legacies. When they graduate college, they are swept up into top, fast-rising positions at wealthy and powerful businesses of their parents’ or their parents’ financial peers.

Mitt Romney may have leveraged his silver spoon to get a wealthy friend of his father’s hand him the startup of Bain Capital but how much of Bain’s growth and operations was Romney himself directly responsible for? After seeing him in action, are we to believe that Romney is a remarkable genius who devised all of Bain’s strategies? Or are we more likely to assume that a man this incompetent and this ignorant of so much just rode the backs of people who were actually smart and claimed their accomplishes as his own?

Following are a list of items that I propose prove that despite the wealth and career success that was guaranteed to Romney upon his birth, regardless of his actual capabilities or intellect as a human being (just as was the case with George W. Bush). Mitt Romney is dumb.

PROOF THAT MITT ROMNEY IS DUMB

1. Despite planning for and running for the Presidency for 10 years, he never thought he needed a strategy for dealing with attacks on his anti-American financial dealings…even though he was attacked for them in his Senatorial and Gubernatorial campaigns.

2. He routinely and obliviously insults entire countries, ethnicities, states, supporters and his own acts as Governor.

3. He has been wholly unsuccessful in fooling the GOP base that he is one of them and independent voters that he is likeable, not to mention his ignorance about how his constant phony chuckling comes across as dishonest to most people.

4. The only semblance of policies he presents are either just promising to reverse everything Obama has accomplished or making the wealthy wealthier, never able to give details on any position.

5. He lies so avidly and freely about even the most obvious things without any concern about how being seen as a liar might impact him. He has even claimed to have lied on official SEC documents where he claimed to be the sole manager of Bain Capital but denies he was.

6. The people with whom he has surrounded himself as his campaign team, come off as feckless and incompetent, often delivering gaffes that send him off message and undermine his campaign.

7. He actually believes he can win the Presidency by hiding his identity from voters and not offering the public any positive alternative to Obama, focusing his entire campaign only on moaning about whatever numbers are bad about the economy or blatantly lying about how Obama has done something awful that all MSM outlets (except Fox News) routinely expose as being another falsehood from him.

8. He has alienated the majority of women and Latinos whose support will decide the election.

9. His economic proposals, all lacking sufficient details, simply don’t balance out and in fact add hugely to the deficit unless unprecedented slashing to public services, Social Security and Medicare occur…which would likely lead to a new Recession that would send the budget deficit skyrocketing.

10. He tied his family dog to his car roof and responded to criticism by saying, “PETA is not happy that my dog likes fresh air.”, solicited financiers of South American death squads to bankroll Bain Capital, says people play “sport”, insulted a local bakery’s cookies by saying they looked store bought at 7-11, publicly bragged in difficult economic times that he likes to fire people, invented the imaginary and nonsensical theory of “self-deportation” for ridding the country of illegal immigrants, was in London for the Olympics to use them for political advantage and insults the nation which damages him politically…and on and on.

It will take a far more intellectually “generous” person to make a list of items…or even list one or two meaningful things that would argue Romney is smart. Whenever he’s gotten into trouble, which is nearly every week, his only “genius” solution is to throw more money and lies against Obama.

Obama has plenty of money too but he constantly displays strategic thinking and smart political moves. All the dumb rich kid knows to do when attacked, whether by the Obama campaign or through a self-inflicted wound is to pull out the checkbook.

It doesn’t take a genius to have lots of money when it’s handed to you, through inheritance, family connections and an elitist system that rewards even those who fail (See: George W. Bush and those Wall Streeters who lose billions and get billions in bonuses for doing so).

Money can buy a lot of stupid and Mitt Romney seems to be intent on cornering the market.