When I was staying at the Chicago hostel for IMTS last week there was this super loud American at breakfast that just wouldn’t shut up.

You could hear him across the entire room telling international people about how he learned Spanish in high school. His wife lived in upstate New York, near Quebec, had a French last name, and never spoke a word of French. “Can you believe that??”

It’s embarrassing to no end.

I think one of the difficulties with stereotypes is everybody else knows them but you.

I think Americans continue to interact with the rest of the world in a loud, obnoxious way because they don’t know that the rest of the world views them as loud and obnoxious.

This is all very apparent this week with Mitt Romney’s video where he says, among other things, ”My job is not to worry about those people,” referring to the 47% of Americans who, as he says, consider themselves “victims” and are dependent on the government for their needs.

The biggest problem he has here is this is something we’ve all suspected all along.

Mitt Romney is a multi-millionaire who gives the impression of being out of touch with most people.

I believe he hit a stereotype that many people had of him. Once you do that it’s really hard to recover.

Stereotypes are like that for everyone.

And of course they are unfair.

It would be ridiculous to think a President Romney isn’t going to concern himself with the 47% of the poorest people in America. Or is it? It’s also possible that he might let poor people suffer for quite some time as he tests his theory of lowering taxes on people at the top of the food chain.

Stereotypes are your brand.

For example, Cleveland can’t shake the “Mistake on the Lake” stereotype (brand). And you can oftentimes sense it with Clevelanders’ views of Cleveland. They are not very proud of their city. It’s very obvious when you compare how people feel living in Milwaukee. They love it there.

There’s a pretty interesting list of stereotypes here: Can anyone list some Stereotypes?? – Yahoo! Answers

Do stereotypes suck? Hell yes they do!

But what are you going to do? Tell people not to think the very first thing that comes into their mind?

I don’t think you can make that happen.

The only thing I think you can do is to change the brand. Change the stereotype.

The Compassionate Conservative is an example of trying that.

Compassionate conservatism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And [Doug] Wead declared himself to be “a bleeding heart conservative,” meaning that he cared for people and sincerely believed that a free marketplace was better for the poor.

But then you can’t just say it. You have to act on it.

Being a compassionate conservative doesn’t seem like a popular stance today in the Republican base.

So Mitt Romney, it appears, is going to have to just stick with his brand (aka stereotype) of letting the poor people fend for themselves. And it appears that’s OK with him. He does not seem to be backing down from what he said in the video other than saying it was “inarticulate.”

He sees nothing wrong with what he said. Just like the loud-mouth guy at the Chicago hostel I stayed at. He feels like he’s doing the right thing.

But to the rest of the world you look out of touch and obviously who we thought you were all along.