During last Friday’s interview on my radio show, I asked former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney what would be his response to the inevitable charge from the Occupy Wall Street people that his time at Bain Consulting and Bain Capital was exactly the wrong sort of training for the presidency. “Well,” he began,” what those folks have to understand is that most people in America work for businesses.”
“They work for companies of one kind or another,” Romney continued. “And, if we want America to have lots of good jobs with rising incomes, we want to see business doing well in America.”
Mitt Romney’s dad, former Michigan Gov. George Romney, had been a businessman most of his life, rising to the top of American Motors. George Romney had begun life with almost nothing, no college education, no skills except an incredible work ethic.
The younger Romney had advantages his father didn’t have, like attending an elite private high school and the opportunity to earn Harvard degrees, but the biggest advantage Romney had was a father who believed in the equation hard work equals success and dignity.
The other businessman in the hunt for the GOP nomination, Herman Cain, had been my guest a week earlier. I asked Cain what he would say if we could send a Hermanator tape to the demonstrators.
“I would want the crowd to hear first,” Cain began, “that your success is not dependent upon wishing that someone else is not successful.”
“Blaming Wall Street and blaming big business, and blaming those who have succeeded in America under our free market system” Cain said, “is never going to make you rich.”
“Secondly,” he added, “if you really want to do something to create jobs in this country, why don’t you go and picket the White House. That’s why we have failed economic policies.”
Cain was just warming up. Citing his parents, he rolled on.
“My mom and dad, they never played the victim card,” he began with a second wind. “That’s what the people on Wall Street are doing. They’re trying to say that ‘We are the victims.’ No, you’re not the victim. They’re playing the victim card.”
To drive home the message he added: “My mom was a domestic worker. My dad worked three jobs. He was a barber, janitor and chauffeur.”
The man many expect to be the GOP’s vice presidential candidate, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has been a guest on my show, and back in December of 2009 we talked about his parents.
“Well, my parents are from Cuba,” he began. “They came here for obvious reasons. I was born in Miami in 1971, working class family. My dad was primarily a bartender, my mom worked in factories, she was a cashier, she was a stock clerk at K-Mart. We lived in Las Vegas for a number of years growing up, from ’79-’85, where my dad was a bartender and my mom was a maid over at the Imperial Palace Hotel.”
If the Occupiers are more than a passing media fascination with the intersection of the remnants of the old, hard left meeting and the slacker chic of today campuses, then the very interesting conversation ahead is about where success comes from.
But if, as the Washington Post’s Peter Wallsten reported Saturday, “President Obama and his team have decided to turn public anger at Wall Street into a central tenet of their reelection strategy,” they will be running into a hard brick wall of common sense.
And, more important by far, they will also slam head-on into the shared experience deeply understood by the American people with able, credentialed candidates willing to speak the truth about the origins of true success.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
