The Affirmative-Action Candidate

"No one wonders what advantages accrued to Mitt Romney, a man who spent his early life ensconced in the preserve of malignant and absolutist affirmative action that was metropolitan Detroit. Romney's Detroit (like most of the country) prohibited black people from the best jobs, the best schools, the best neighborhoods, and the best of everything else. The exclusive Detroit Golf Club, a short walk from one of Romney's childhood homes, didn't integrate until 1986. No one is skeptical of Mitt Romney because of the broader systemic advantages he enjoyed, advantages erected largely to ensure that this country would ever be run by men who looked like him."

Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic calls attention to Mitt Romney's privilege.


"It’s part and parcel of the Right’s general inability to make a case against Obama based on what he actually says and does, which is pretty remarkable. He can’t be what he appears to be to most liberals: a center-left politician who is very much in the Clinton tradition, who really would prefer to attract some Republican support, and often compromises his own positions before he offers them. No, he’s a secret Alinskyite who dreams of turning America into Sweden, hates Christianity, and despises the private sector (which is why, no doubt, he chose to make private insurance companies the vehicle for his 'socialist' health care plan, rejected calls for nationalization of big banks at the height of the financial crisis, and preferred a market-based cap-and-trade system for dealing with carbon emissions instead of command-and-control regulation)."

Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly backs up Coates.