Here’s the thing about privileged characters like Mitt Romney: they’ve never really been vetted, indeed rarely challenged. Say you’re a senior at a posh prep school in Michigan, for example, and you think it’d be fun to pick on the weakest kid in your class. So you get a bunch of guys to hold the gay kid down while you cut off his offensively long hair.

What happens? Well, if your father’s the governor of Michigan, nothing happens. A scholarship student from Detroit might have been expelled, but not somebody whose daddy ran an auto company. Years later, you can’t even recall the event, although none of the others ever forgot. Meanwhile, the tax-deductible endowment funds keep rolling in to the old alma mater.