Via Political Wire, what’s the most depressing thing about this? The fact that it grossly distorts support for a lower long-term capital-gains rate generally into some sort of sinister plutocratic carve-out for millionaires specifically? (Contra the ad, you too can avail yourselves of the magical “millionaire rate” by buying stock and then selling it after a year, kids.) Or the fact that it reminds us we’ll be spending most of 2012, in all likelihood, doggedly riding to the defense of … Mitt Romney? Fully 52 percent of tea partiers already say they’ll vote for him if he’s the nominee. More of you will come around in due time. Assimilation is inevitable.

The group responsible for this Occupy-esque populist pander is Priorities USA, which was founded by former White House staffers Bill Burton and Sean Sweeney. Which means, if you’re wondering how the Plouffe/Axelrod brain trust is planning to target Romney in a general election campaign, you need wonder no longer. Remember, in fact, when the big attack line against McCain for a week in 2008 was that his wife owned six homes? Now that Team Hopenchange has helped ruin the economy, the class resentment they were trying to jumpstart three years ago is ironically an even more viable campaign weapon. Imagine how many sweet “Romney’s too damned rich” ads they’ll be ready to crank out if the economy falls back into recession and unemployment climbs above double digits again.

If you missed it last month, now’s the time to revisit The Atlantic’s chart showing how much revenue the “Buffett Rule” would — or rather, wouldn’t — bring in. It’d be one thing if they wanted extra revenue as part of a comprehensive plan to eliminate deficits, but we know from the Democrats’ attitude on entitlement reform how serious they are about that. What you’re seeing here isn’t part of any meaningful “solution” to the country’s budget crisis. It’s simple resentment aimed at getting the blue-collar voters they’ve alienated excited to turn out. Desperate, but what choice do they have?