[This is a one minute Obama campaign ad, asking people to respond to Romney's comments.]
The entire video of Romney at a fundraiser among his fellow richies was released Tuesday, as reaction to the first excerpts on Monday continued to come in, fast and furious. Some of the most damning language came from GOPer talkers and writers like David Brooks, William Kristol (who called it "arrogant and stupid") and Peggy Noonan.
With some time to digest it, there are a couple of specific points to make about that first statement I quoted in a previous post. Here it is again:
"There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...These are people who pay no income tax....My job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."
Mitt Romney is roughly my age, so I know where some of this language comes from, because we've been hearing it for some time. People who "believe government has a responsibility to care for them" but take no "personal responsibility" are black people on welfare. That's what that has always meant. It was upped by Reagan's mythical "welfare queens."
The language of "who believe that they are victims" refers to people who believe they were victimized by racism and discrimination--the people who get Affirmative Action. Black people. It stokes racial resentment, one of the few things that actually unites the Romney richies, the white country club set, with working class and poor whites: the idea that black people get extra stuff from the government that they don't get. And that is especially "logical" when there's a black President.
The white people who hold these views (writes conservative David Frum) are also likely to overestimate the percentage of African Americans (plus Latinos, these days) so that 47% sounds right to them. And so this is not an unusual formulation in the Rabid Right--which is why there's some support there for what Romney said.
The political problem for Romney, Andrew Sullivan writes, is that a lot of people are going to see themselves in that 47% regardless of their race. And it is the words "who see themselves as victims" that is going to come back to haunt him. "Or to put it bluntly: the real crime of 47 percent of Americans is their laziness - and then they have the gall to whine about the One Percent. He is using the key argument of racists against African-Americans through the ages against 47 percent of the country. That's the equivalent of calling a lot of old white people the n-word."
A lot of ink was spilled on Tuesday to parse who exactly doesn't pay federal income tax (besides, apparently, Mitt Romney, who Rachel Maddow astutely reminded us, said during a primary debate that he only paid capital gains tax for the past two years) but the story is pretty much told in this one chart (and I'm not normally a chart kind of guy.)
What the chart shows is that 80% of Americans pay federal taxes in their prime earning years, after being students and before being retired. Moreover, most of those (apart from millionaires who, as Romney has said in the past, are doing their patriotic duty by paying the least amount of taxes their lawyers can determine that the tax code requires) who don't pay federal income tax are getting deductions because of low incomes. Others are receiving benefits because they are sick, disabled, unemployed or too poor to feed their children, or because they earned benefits for retirement, or they are receiving incentives to get the schooling that prepares them to be productive citizens.
Romney's plan is to cut taxes for the wealthy as a way (he says) to boost the economy. Despite the fact that yet another study shows that cutting taxes for the wealthy doesn't boost the economy--it only adds to income inequality, which is a way of saying that the rich get richer while the middle class and the poor get poorer.
Other studies have shown that in order to pay for Romney's tax cuts, the middle class will have to pay more in federal taxes as a byproduct. What Romney implied in this video is that it's not a byproduct--it's part of the deal. Other GOPers--and arguably Romney himself--have stated that the poor need to pay more in taxes (and the GOPer government in Kansas has enacted just such a Robin Hood tax law.)
This is the biggest reason that Romney's video statement is scary. Sure, he couches it as political analysis. But his scorn for people who may need temporary help from the government at some point in their lives tends to support the idea that destroying the safety net is his intention. People in trouble turn to their fellow citizens through the resources they provide together--the government--to get through their bad times, to help them address their difficulties and mend them.
That's part of what it means to be President of the whole country. Romney was signaling that there is half of the country he doesn't care about. And anybody, except perhaps his billionaire friends, might find themselves in that half. Moreover, in this video we don't see the public Romney--his halting delivery, his goofy mannerisms, his ridiculous attempts to seem folksy and warm. He is talking fast, clearly, confidently--and it sounds that he means every word he is saying. It looks and sounds like the real Romney.
What Romney has revealed this summer makes me wonder--even if he were elected, how in the world will he govern? He's thoroughly alienated the UK, Russia and China. His Middle East views are incoherent (as this video shows.) Despite his braying about increasing the military budget, the Pentagon must be wary of his ignorance and bluster. He's definitely alienated the entire foreign service. Now he's insulted half the electorate. The internals of the polls show that he's not trusted, believed or liked. As a candidate he's a disaster. But as President he's catastrophe.
No comments:
Post a Comment