Romney: Democrat Mothers Are Closeted Welfare Mothers

That 47% of people “who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it” would have to include my mother, include all working mothers who vote Democrat hell or high water.

My mother was always a Democrat. Maybe that was because she lived during the Depression and World War II and loved Franklin D. Roosevelt because she believed he saved the country and most of all care about ordinary people.

Well of course the one big exception would be Dwight Eisenhower. I'm sure she voted for the great man who helped to save America and the world from the tyranny of the Nazis. He was larger than either political party. As a president he was less perfect than he was as a general. To his credit he warned America about the tyranny of the military-industrial complex, though no president contributed more to its growth, most unfortunately to development and multiplication of nuclear weapons. He also warned about getting bog down in land wars in Asia. He was and continues to be ignored by militarists, which do not believe Ike was. So Ike was not a great president but was a great man before he became president. And compared to him, all presidents since have been Lilliputian.

My mother was brought up dirt poor on a Texas farm. Her father was a tenant farmer. It was a time before irrigation when scary dust storms swept across the land like tsunamis. It was like drowning in dust. There were a lot of kids to feed and not a lot of money. Her mother died when she was just a young teenager. At the age of 17 she went off to work in New Mexico. Eventually she ended up working in California as a welder in a factory that made airplanes for the war. Then she started working as a waitress, helping to put her ex-sailor husband through college. She would work in restaurants the rest of her life.

The husband she helped through college abandoned her to raise her children alone. He never paid child support or alimony. She worked double shifts, and when she could she paid for babysitters to take care of her children. The boys would usually get into trouble if left alone, like setting off fireworks inside the house.

Eventually she bought a small house and remarried. Her new husband drank too much. During that time she took care of three of her brothers who were alcoholics. Two had fought in the war. One had spent the war in a Japanese prison camp. Those two eventually committed suicide. She and her husband divorced and she moved back to Texas.

There, she once again worked as a waitress, then managed the restaurant. She bought two little cheap houses (both for about $20,000), lived in one and rented the other. In West Texas they use the N word a lot. My mother never did. In fact she upset some of the townsfolk by hiring black girls to work in the kitchen. When she started them waiting tables some of the men told her that if she didn’t get rid of the black girls they wouldn’t come back. She didn’t get rid of the black girls and the men came back.

My mother worked until she got too old to work. She hated not being able to work. Retirement never suited her. She retired on less than $1000 a month from Social Security (another socialist entitlement program). Those were my mother’s first government checks. Until then she never received any form of assistance from the government, well except that she did send her children to public (socialist) schools. I’m sure Romney would prefer citizens to send their children to private schools like Cranbrook where he and his wife went to school. And, his running mate, Paul Ryan, would prefer either home schooling or Catholic schools to protect children from godless humanism.

I guess when my mother started collecting those Social Security checks is when she started thinking that she was a victim, that the government owed her a living, and that the government had the responsibility for caring for her. I had always thought that she had earned those checks.

Of course she should have had an additional retirement plan like a 401(k). But when she worked in California, I know she had two jobs, one at a restaurant and one at a cocktail lounge. I assume that was because like today the food industry prefers part-time employees in order to avoid paying for benefits such as health coverage—certainly that’s an employer’s god-given right, though Jesus was all about healing others.

As a waitress my mother’s main income was her tips, not her hourly income, which most likely was minimum wage (another socialist entitlement program). Like many Democrat working single mothers or even Democrat working married mothers, there was no extra money left over for investments, blind trusts, or offshore accounts. She didn’t have fancy accountants and lawyers to offer sophisticated tax planning techniques that would enable to avoid paying taxes. Fancy lawyers and accountants, like the people at Bain Capital, would not have been interested in her.

My mother’s life consisted of hard labor at low wages (yes being a waitress is hard labor, especially given waitresses have to put up with obnoxious male customers), raising her children, and paying taxes. Even when she managed a restaurant, which meant she did the accounting, the buying, the hiring and firing, and was the chef, she made no more than $25,000 a year. She never bought a new car except for a VW van she bought my brother when he came back from the Vietnam War.

I suppose Romney would think that after fifty years plus of hard work my mother had finally become a welfare mother. I say fifty years plus because growing up the child of a poor famer she didn’t have much of a childhood. She loved school because that’s were she could be with other children. Her family went to town once a week. Farm life then was a life of chores.

My mother liked Bill Clinton (I stopped liking the man after the M.L. affair) because she believed that he cared about regular people. I believe he did, though now that he’s royalty he seems to care most about fame and fortune. He’s no Jimmy Carter that's for sure (whom my mother also liked, and Carter never dirtied himself). My mother liked Clinton because he was a regular guy who had to work hard to make his way in life. She would have thought that Mitt Romney, born into a wealthy family, could never understand what it was like to be dirt poor and to struggle all of one’s life.

My mother had no chance to go to college. She was lucky to finish high school. My stepfather, who served ten years in the navy, including the World War II, didn’t graduate from high school. His parents had died and he was raised by his brother. After the war he became a bartender and died on the job in his fifties. He didn’t live long enough to benefit from government welfare. Romney has never had to experience that kind of hardship. He spent thirty months in France as a Mormon missionary. Come on, that not being a missionary but a tourist! Albert Schweitzer was a missionary.

And like George Bush junior, Romney loves saber rattling (actually Obama does too). But he never served in the military, nor has his sons (nor did the Bushian neocon Paul Ryan). During the Vietnam War, Romney received five-and-a-half years of draft deferments, as a “minister of religion” and as a student. My biological father was an orphan who was raised by aunt. He served in the military. His ship was sunk somewhere in the pacific. He survived. My mother never cared much for saber rattling. Maybe that was because she knew what war did to men and the women who loved them.

When my mother became very sick, my brother brought her into his house. She didn’t like feeling dependent. So my brother and I found her an apartment in a HUD facility, for which she had to wait a year. She loved being independent again. But now she really was a welfare mother, HUD being a federal entitlement program. She died there.

My mother would have voted for Obama, perhaps because he is black but mostly because he cares about regular people, even welfare mothers like mine.