Who are these people? Who are these new Republicans in tired old faces who -- after years of claiming that America's poor and middle class are takers while the rich are givers and creators -- suddenly say the needy should be lifted?
Who is this man in the Mitt Romney mask -- the man once caught on tape saying 47 percent of Americans didn't pay taxes and were deadbeats dependent on "entitlements" -- now claiming to be the new champion of Americans who are "struggling to make ends meet?"
There Romney was last Friday acting like an income-inequality avenger, blaming a failure to close the wage gap between the rich and poor on the president -- the American leader whose call for raising the minimum wage brought jeers and dismissals from the GOP just over a year ago. And remember, Romney is the same former presidential candidate who in 2011 said "corporations are people," and "I'm not concerned about the very poor."
(And yes, Romney's brush-stroke "47 percent don't pay taxes" comment was malarkey: In 2011, 46.4 percent of Americans paid no federal income tax, but two-thirds of that 47 percent did pay federal payroll taxes, along with some combination of state, local, sales, gas and property taxes. That means they were the working poor -- more than half with incomes of less than $16,812 per year. It's also important to note that more than 100,000 Americans with incomes above $211,000 also paid no federal income taxes. Perhaps they were just on corporate welfare.)
So why the about-face? Did that infamous hot place below us sometimes known as Hades suddenly freeze over?
No.
But there has been a disturbance in the force.
It happened one day in November when the GOP woke up and realized it had what it had wished for: Congressional control. But now, to let their presidential candidates have a ghost of chance in 2016, Republicans will actually now have to listen to the collective condition of Americans and act accordingly. They will actually have to govern, because one-at-a-time votes -- not just rich people's donations -- are what is actually needed to win the big prize.
The realization gave the GOP a new dilemma, and now Republicans must decide whether they are with the top tenth of the nation's 1 percenters or whether they are with the rest off us.
Tuesday night, as President Barack Obama ticked through the points of his tax reform proposal in his State of the Union Address, this message became clearer and clearer.
Those who really should have sticker shock over the president's plan to raise $320 billion over the next 10 years are the very rich who would see their capital gains and dividend tax rates rise to the 28 percent bracket. That 28 percent will apply only to people making about $500,000 a year or more, according to David Cay Johnston, a former journalist and tax expert who now is a distinguished visiting lecturer at Syracuse University in New York.
Romney's conversion is less spiritual (try downright disingenuous) and more epiphany. The flicker of a light bulb has gone off in his and many another Republicans' heads: Income inequality is a real and defining issue in the 2016 political campaigns.
The fact that the American dream is slipping has been real to Americans for some time now. Middle-class incomes have shrunk nearly 10 percent since 2000.
Over the last quarter century, buying power and the cost of living also took a bite: In Chattanooga, the 1989 median family income of $29,700 rose to $53,100 in that time. But in today's dollars, we actually have 5.6 percent less buying power, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Meanwhile, average middle-class debt has doubled.
Politicians rarely look at such data with an analytic lens. They are men and women of the moment, changing more with the winds of polls than with American lives.
They are -- after all -- not the brightest candles in the cupboard. But you could say they are the ones with the slickest wax.