Editor’s Note: In the interest of balance, I reached out to GMP writer Mark Ellis in order to get a more politically conservative take on the video that Mother Jones released of Presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaking about “The 47%” at a private fundraiser. We are grateful for his take and willingness to open up the conversation further. -Joanna
When the Good Feed editors asked me to offer a perspective on the secret video of Mitt Romney talking about the 47% of the electorate who will not vote for him, I was heavily obligated, and could not immediately respond.
Now, a few days later, two or three news-cycles have passed, and the right has unearthed a counter-video showing President Obama waxing philosophic about his affinity for the dreaded “redistribution.”
In other words, it’s back to politics as usual.
With the Good Feed prompt, I was obliged to visit a site I’d heard of, but had never read, Mother Jones. For opposition research, my site of choice is Common Dreams, because there I won’t have to get past any dubious allusion as to the concept of matriarchy.
Once at Mother Jones I must say I was underwhelmed by David Corn’s smoking-gun footage.
This is what they’ve got?
As a long time coverer of the conservative beat, I can honestly say that there isn’t one meet-up, rally, or damn garden party at which Mitt Romney’s exact words to his supporters at the private event are not reiterated as a matter of course.
Not more than an hour after watching the video, I heard Washington Examiner columnist Byron York say the same thing to Greta Van Susteren on Fox’s On the Record.
Yes, conservatives, even working-class conservatives like me, worry that our country has reached a tipping point from the standpoint of the ratio of the citizens who’ve grown evermore dependent upon the state. And we know that those people will always vote for more government.
Beyond that, there is the Governor’s mistake of forgetting contemporary society’s cardinal rule: there’s always a recording device of some kind everywhere. While I don’t think there was anything wrong with what Romney said, he obviously needs to be more careful, apparently even when within his party’s inner circles.
In the wake of the secret video’s release, conservative pundits like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others lauded the statement about the unreachable 47%, saying that Romney should fully own it, and that bankruptcy looms for the nation if the imbalance of “takers to makers” is not righted. I agree.
“There’s no more money,” opined Bill O’ Reilly.
Another thought occurred to me, an unfortunate one. The outcry over Romney’s comment presupposes that we still believe that any president represents all of the American people. Do we really buy anymore that leaders elected by razor-thin margins in such polarized times, do?
It’s a wonderful precept, but give me a break.
More problematic for me in the secret video was Governor Romney’s answer to some of his supporters who asked him why he was not floating more specific policy proposals. Romney seemed to indicate that the majority of our nation’s voters were more motivated by vapid, bumper-sticker concepts like “Hope and Change.”
We can’t blame that on Romney or Obama; that’s our problem.
Along those lines, the absolute worst Romney optic of last week had nothing to do with any ostensibly game-changing but in reality painfully obvious comments on a secret video.
It was the spectacle of the Governor on a mainstream daytime talk show discussing Snooki of Jersey Shore and something called Honey Boo Boo.
I’ve gotten to where it doesn’t surprise me when the president appears on something as egregiously beneath the dignity of the office as a show called Pimp with a Limp.
Watching my candidate pretend to care about the most God-awful, lowest-common-denominator programming on television is the bell I wish I could unring.
Photo: AP/Charles Dharapak
About Mark Ellis
I think there are two problems with the message Romney conveys.
1) The “47%” that he talks about are predominately from so-called red states. Romney is talking about his own supporters, the elderly, military families, the poor, and – ironically – the super rich who are able to shield their money from income taxes.
2) A president should always assume he is being recorded. This isn’t amateur hour; being able to lead in public and private while staying on message and not appearing to take a cynical dig at the less fortunate is one of the characteristics I expect of a president.
Other than that, I don’t think it was a terrible message; simply one that crystalizes that at our cores Romney and I have very different values. Perhaps it is my upbringing as a Christian, taking to heart the teachings that we should help the poor, not criticize them as being freeloaders.
The Bible never specified that the only way to help the poor was via government. We can agree about problems, but that doesn’t mean there is only one solution. To assume that the opposite of totally putting poverty, etc issues under the purview of Washington is to let people die in the streets is a bad faith argument.
What bad-faith argument? Who said anything about letting people die in the streets? Did you actually read what I wrote, or were you replying to some other comment?
There are alot of things the gov. could do differently to enable poor folks to succeed. For example why not guide students towards working a trade if they don’t want to go to college. I know this has been done but lately it seems education-teachers are not being funded.
Another issue is the homeless mentally ill…. Everyone needs food, shelter, money (nowadays) and safely in order to say get a job or education. (Maslow) Society and MI people are all at risk when people become desperate and don’t get the meds (or sleep) they need to be stable. Affordable Housing is hard or impossible to find. There are people living on the streets (for all or part of each month) who get a check from SS but cannot afford the smallest apartment. Here in TX there are sign ups for service (for low income housing) that can take over a year. Section 8 Housing used to help alot of Veterans and Disabled but has been closed down for years now in Texas..
No one seems to really care aboout the poor and homeless. I would like to make a difference with my art. If I could get it published I could donate alot of money to helping the mentally ill.
And the Group Homes need to be outlawed… on and on.
SylviAnn Murray
@Mark Ellis:
Speaking as someone who falls on the liberal-pragmatic end of the spectrum (that is, I’m inclined to be financially supportive of the less fortunate, but only if it’s practical), I can’t help but acknowledge the legitimacy of your worry regarding the number of citizens who are wholly dependent on government.
That said, I don’t think Romney’s comments are quite that simple.
First, he dismissed the so-called “lower-47%” as not only dependent on the government, but also lacking a sense of personal responsibility and/or feeling entitled to aid. I find this statement egregious and problematic: I’ve met my fair share of people who aren’t self-sufficient, and not a single one of them felt entitled. If anything, they resented the fact that circumstances had placed them in this position, and would have taken just about any opportunity to dig themselves out.
For this reason, Romney’s statement felt like victim-blaming, because it did not acknowledge that some percentage — perhaps even a significant percentage — of “the lower 47%” exist on federal aid because they have no choice. They don’t like it, and they certainly don’t feel entitled to it, but they need it — because life has dealt them a bad hand. This isn’t a matter of them being unable to “pull themselves up by their boot straps” or being unable to “take responsibility for themselves” — believe me, they’re doing the best they can!
A second point, with regard to people who “don’t pay taxes:”
First, there are taxes besides income tax, including sales tax. To my knowledge, everybody pays sales tax, and there are other taxes that some folks pay that outweigh the amount they provide via income tax.
Second: even those folks who receive an income tax refund still (temporarily) forfeit a share of their income, which the government withholds and (if I recall correctly) uses to do things like build roads and drop bombs. The only difference is, the government must then pay these folks back.
From an electoral standpoint, it’s a nonissue. Regardless of what subsequent polls show, given such questions are addressed in a binary more likely/less likely format and not addressed as definitely will/will not, voters who were going to vote for Romney still will just as Obama voters will remain unperturbed by his newly unearthed video.
From a policy standpoint, the problem is the math is wrong. If we’re going to talk about whether or not we want to become a social democracy with lavish entitlements, we need to start from the truth. Ramesh Ponnuru and several others at National Review broke down the problems with the 47% figure and for the progressives in the crowd, they didn’t revise it upward. Romney is smart to not embrace W and he could have pointed out that W was fond of redistribution via child tax credits and Medicare Part D. But, as Mark wrote, it’s politics as usual.
@Ulysses:
It’s not only the math that’s wrong (from a policy perspective), it’s also the CONCEPT.
Regardless of whether or not 47% of the American people are wholly dependent on the government for their daily bread, and regardless of whether or not they feel entitled to that, let’s look at it from a larger perspective: what does government do for EVERYONE?
In a word: any project bigger than painting your neighbor’s house.
Ahem.
In a small-town environment, if your neighbor needs his house painted, all he needs to do is call you some Sunday afternoon and say, “Ulysses, I need to paint my house. Do you mind giving me a hand? We’ll cook dinner for you.” Done! You, and maybe some of your friends, come over and paint your neighbor’s house, and you get a meal out of it.
But what if your neighbor wants to build a bridge? Or a road? Or a skyscraper? Or a nuclear reactor? Or supply food and medical assistance to a foreign country that has just been hit by an earthquake?
That’s not exactly something you can accomplish by bringing a couple of friends over on a Sunday afternoon! It takes specialists, advanced knowledge in a variety of fields to make it work, and, often, exotic materials. Furthermore, people who have tried it before have learned that there are also RULES you need to follow.
Hence: taxes and government regulation. The taxes pay for the specialists and the exotic materials. The regulations are (ideally) in place to prevent us from making the same mistakes twice.
So, the problem with Mr. Romney’s statement is not merely mathematical, it’s conceptual. The government does a lot more for us than pay for people who can’t support themselves, and there’s no shame in that — in fact, it’s the point. The government supports us every day by enabling us to do the continental-scale equivalent of painting our house, and taxes make that possible.
Roads, schools, skyscrapers, water, power — these are things that are quite simply difficult to manage properly when you are motivated purely by profit margins.
It’s a shame no one makes these arguments.
A. The government should not be this abstract foreign entity that does things for us or to us. It’s supposed to be us; the money is ours. Of course, my statement isn’t true, but in an ideal world, the one the framers intended…
B. You’d likely see your argument made more often if the debates featured an anarchist. Despite rhetorical flourishes from opponents, Republicans, conservatives, not even libertarians, are promoting anarchy.
Actually, I think President Obama did make this argument, albeit clumsily, when he said, “You didn’t build that.” Look, nobody asserts that we don’t need any government. But a lot of what is green-lighted by government, Solyndra being just one example, has eroded the faith of many taxpayers that government is spending our money wisely. The reaction then is to withdraw support for governmental largess generally.
ie the painting analogy, which is my stock and trade. I don’t mind working hard to earn a living, but when the painter down the block–all things being equal–is subsidized by the government and makes as much as me for half the work, there’s a problem with that, known as crony capitalism and socialism.
I was only addressing your final paragraph, but you did specify not belittling people, so my bad on that count. My problem is that appeals to Christianity to support whatever government program usually carry an implicit charge of indifference or hostility rather than starting on neutral ground to discuss possible policy solutions. If that isn’t your position, sorry, but it is an appeal to authority many use to try to discount opposing views as uncaring.
The notion that anyone who wants government to act in the public interest is “dependent on a nanny state” is a cornerstone conservative argument in the modern GOP. Romney knows his audience, and even those right-wingers who really ARE dependent on government for their survival in one fashion or another can be relied on to pretend that it’s everyone else who’s an anti-American freeloader.
When your voting base is dumb, you talk dumb to them. And it works!