By now you’ve surely heard that Mitt Romney’s planned all-inclusive beach resort house in La Jolla will include a car elevator, for cars that need to get to the second floor of the garage but are too tired to take the stairs. Between that and the indelible story about Romney keeping his dog on the roof rack, we’re forced to come to the obvious conclusion: Mitt — or is it M.I.T.T.? — is just genuinely confused about the difference between organic creatures and vehicles.
I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that Romney’s beach-house blueprints also include a car hot tub, a deluxe car bed, and a jumbo-sized car litterbox. The dude is filthy rich, plus he’s a Republican — which means he likes to nuzzle up to suburbia, buy it a big bouquet of parking lots, and promise he’ll care for it even when it gets debilitatingly car-dependent. And he’s got a proven track record of not knowing the difference between living things and objects. I mean, he has a son named “Tagg,” for crying out loud — a tag is something you put on clothes, or on the front window of the dog you want to sell! (Mitt shares this particular affliction with Sarah Palin.)
The Romney campaign says that the “car elevator” is more of a Wallace and Gromit-style contraption for storing cars in spaces too tight to back out of (the above image, of a “pop-up garage” costing $50,000, was bandied around Twitter by Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski). This seems fishy to me, given that the beach house’s basement alone is going to be large enough to fit my house several times over, and according to Politico the garage will be a split-level dealie with room for four vehicles. But it also doesn’t really change my mind. Clearly, in Mitt’s world, cars are treasured pets that need personal conveyances, and pets are snap-on roof accessories for your station wagon. In a Romney administration, we can surely look forward to the establishment of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Cars.
