and who fucking cares? It's NOT YOUR money.
threads like this amaze me. it start of bitching because romney is rich. when people point out so is Obama they then bring this up.
who cares how he got it or spends it. long as everything is legal i don't give a shit if he puts it in his mattress.
It matters because that person is trying to entice me to cast my vote for them to be President of the United States. If someone has spent their lifetime hiding and sheltering money so that it can't be taxed, that does affect me, because it's less money coming into the system, and a greater burden is being placed on everybody else (granted, at a microscopic scale). That, to me personally, is extremely unpatriotic, and that's a valid reason for me to not want that person placed in charge of the country. If you want to run America, I feel it's your patriotic duty to pay taxes, not hide money in other countries to avoid them. So while it may not matter to you, it does matter to me, as I find it very telling about a person's character (which I find Romney overwhelmingly lacking in).
As far as the attempted pandering, it doesn't bother me that Anne Romney is saying she buys Kirkland brand shirts. But what OrByte said absolutely nails it; I don't want to feel like a politician is pandering to me. "Oh, I know just what it's like to walk in the shoes of an ordinary American, despite having the net worth of a combined 5,000 people..." No, you don't. There's nothing wrong with being elite, but thinking that you have to mask that by acting like money means nothing in our society is just fucking ridiculous. "I'm just like everyone else in this country... I wake up wondering just how I'm going to offshore another $10,000,000 so that it won't end up in the hands of the government that I'm now trying to run." Everything about Romney's persona is crafted, it just isn't crafted terribly convincingly, and things like this come across more as shameless pandering than an actual window into the Romney household.