The piece to which I link this morning is, I think, an important one to read and reflect upon after Ann Romney’s stirring speech at the Republican’s “We Built This” national convention. So, first an excerpt from the piece, then my reflections:

I was living in Massachusetts when Romney first ran for the Senate, and remembered this interview with Ann Romney in the Boston Globe (by Jack Thomas, October 20, 1994; the abstract is here; the full text costs $4.95). Of her student days with Mitt at BYU, Ann said:

“They were not easy years. You have to understand, I was raised in a lovely neighborhood, as was Mitt, and at BYU, we moved into a $62-a-month basement apartment with a cement floor and lived there two years as students with no income.

[…]

“We were happy, studying hard. Neither one of us had a job, because Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time.

“The stock came from Mitt’s father. When he took over American Motors, the stock was worth nothing. But he invested Mitt’s birthday money year to year — it wasn’t much, a few thousand, but he put it into American Motors because he believed in himself. Five years later, stock that had been $6 a share was $96 and Mitt cashed it so we could live and pay for education.

[…]

“The funny thing is that I never expected help. My father had become wealthy through hard work, as did Mitt’s father, but I never expected our parents to take care of us. They’d visit, laugh and say, `We can’t believe you guys are living like this.’ They’d take us out to dinner, have a good time, then leave.

[.. ]

“Remember, we’d been paying $62 a month rent, but [in Massachusetts], rents were $400, and for a dump. This is when we took the now-famous loan that Mitt talks about from his father and bought a $42,000 home in Belmont, and you know? The mortgage payment was less than rent ….

“Another son came along 18 months later, although we waited four years to have the third, because Mitt was still in school and we had no income except the stock we were chipping away at. We were living on the edge, not entertaining. No, I did not work. Mitt thought it was important for me to stay home with the children, and I was delighted.

I don’t begrudge the Romneys their success.

In some ways, I can really identify with their story. I grew up in the Metro Detroit area and I graduated from the same exclusive private high school. When I went to an elite graduate school to get my PhD four years later, my parents helped me buy my first house (where my mortgage payments were commensurate with local rental costs). I could make the monthly payments but — at 21 years old — I couldn’t have afforded the down payment on my own; it was a 900-square-foot, $70,000 townhouse in Durham, North Carolina and I used the proceeds from that sale to buy my next house, a much bigger townhouse in Virginia. I’m now living in suburban Omaha with my growing family in the fourth house I’ve owned … and it’s the biggest one yet by far.

But where I part ways with the Romneys, and where their rhetoric really sticks in my craw, is the idea that they’re promulgating: That if you scrimp and save and work really, really hard, you can do what they’ve done. Their experience stands in sharp contrast with the “We Built This” rhetoric of the Republican National Convention … and they seem unwilling or unable to recognize this fact.

It’s not that Mitt Romney didn’t build his fortune or accomplish a great deal by his talent and hard work. It’s that his experience — of barely getting by through the sale of stock given to him by his father and then buying his first house with his father’s assistance — simply isn’t the experience of the vast, vast majority of Americans. Most people don’t have the help that Romney and I had when we were younger. For me, this is something I think about pretty much every day. For Romney, it’s like a dark secret that’s best kept under wraps or ignored entirely because it doesn’t fit into the Republican rhetoric that needing (and God forbit accepting) the assistance of others is an obvious sign of moral weakness.

I wonder what our country would be like if more people could grow up the way that I did and have the kind of help that I had; Romney, on the other hand, continues to pretend that his young life was more like everyone else’s than it was like mine.