In this election, pick your elite

I don’t know whether this was the intention — one certainly assumes so — but the handful of new investigations into Mitt Romney’s investment arrangements in Switzerland, Bermuda and the British Virgin Islands have come at a particularly interesting moment in the US electoral cycle. With four months to go, both presidential candidates are frantically drawing lines in the sand: Each is arguing that he offers American voters a clear and distinct choice on health care, immigration, taxation — and that his opponent offers something quite different.

On purpose or otherwise, the tales of the Cayman Islands make clear that Romney and President Barack Obama are offering American voters another kind of choice as well. One of the words most frequently deployed during the midterm elections and the now-forgotten Republican primaries was “elite,” usually as a term of opprobrium and usually by Republicans — but sometimes by Democrats, too.