My sense has been that Mr & Mrs Romney are utterly tone-deaf to regular life. They sound like aliens. [hat tip to dangerousmeta}

THE WEEK IN GREED #6: To Behave Like The Fallen World – The Rumpus.net by Steve Almond

Like George W. Bush, [Romney] was an essentially frightened, unloved young man who came of age under tremendous pressure to live up to a famous father, who failed to distinguish himself as a scholar or an athlete and was relegated to the sidelines, whose desperate jocularity was shot through with a kind of unexamined sadism. Both men have forged a path to success via an alarming absence of self-reflection. …

[T]here is something in his character that I am starting to get frightened about, an unwillingness, or an inability, to feel remorse, to simply own up to a moral failing, to apologize not just if “somebody was hurt” but because you know, deep down, that you hurt someone. …

In a sense, the modern political system selects for this kind of moral amnesia.

But it matters. George W. Bush was a destructive president because he was a deluded man. He made bad policy because he lacked the empathy and humility to think about the human cost of those policies.

THE WEEK IN GREED #6: To Behave Like The Fallen World – The Rumpus.net