Mitt Romney, hopeless patrician pol
Willard "Mitt" Romney back in his robber barron days
Way to step on your primary win, governor.
Mitt Romney, the 0.1 percenter who has never been middle class a day in his life, let alone poor, wasted no time pooping all over his big Florida victory this morning, telling Soledad O’Brien on CNN that he’s “not concerned about the very poor.” Well, alrighty then.
Redstate’s Jeff Emanuel is not amused.
While Romney’s intent was clearly to reiterate his focus on the middle class, which has suffered greatly in recent years due to economic troubles and rising unemployment, he committed not one but two major fouls in that statement (as well as a third that is only slightly less severe). First, he committed the cardinal sin of saying, in just so many words, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” Context be damned, Romney has now provided a direct quote that can and will be used against him ad nauseumfor the remainder of his participation in this election. Second, and perhaps worse, he said in almost so many words that not only does he not care about the “very poor,” but the Democrat Party does.
Take a minute to let that sink in. The presumptive nominee for the Republican presidential nomination, in a class warfare/economy/jobs election, said on national television that he doesn’t care about the very poor in our country, but that the opposition party does. As @Slublog noted on Twitter, “The only thing that could have made that Romney quote worse is if he ended it by laughing manically and lighting a cigar with a $100 bill.”
The fact he didn’t mean precisely that is immaterial; you simply can’t say that in a political campaign, particularly when you’re (a) already filthy rich (and have never spent a day of your life in the middle class, let alone as a ‘poor’ individual), and (b) running for the top position in a party that is already portrayed by media and opposition as being unconcerned with any Americans outside of the super rich. Again, the fact that (b) is entirely inaccurate is immaterial; just as every possible Rick Perry gaffe contributed to the narrative that he was incoherent, inarticulate, and mentally challenged, every statement by Mitt Romney that could possibly be construed as being out of touch with (and unsupportive of) “the 99%” adds to the narrative that the rich, white, out-of-touch GOP is preparing to nominate a rich, white, out-of-touch automaton to lead its party and the country.
In an election that will be focused on employment and the plight of working (and out-of-work) Americans, neither Romney nor the GOP can afford to provide any additional fuel for that narrative. In this case, all he had to say was something to the effect of, “My focus is on the millions of Americans who are suffering from the Obama economy.” The fact that Romney instead provided direct ammunition for negative advertising, while talking up his opposition’s support for the same poor he disavowed any concern for, is a major issue.
Romney, apparently not realizing that he was in a hole, used a follow-on interview with CNN to dig his hole even deeper:
“No, no, no, no,” Romney said. “You’ve got to take the whole sentence, all right, as opposed to saying, and then change it just a little bit, because then it sounds very different. I’ve said throughout the campaign my focus, my concern, my energy is gonna be devoted to helping middle income people, all right? We have a safety net for the poor in, and if there are holes in it, I will work to repair that. And if there are people that are falling through the cracks I want to fix that.”
Um… how to say this concisely … the entire Republican/conservative platform is predicated on the fact that the safety net IS BROKEN and needs to be reformed! Am I missing something??? It’s so bad, tea partying Senator Jim DeMint staged an intervention, telling Roll Call:
“He needs to address it,” DeMint told Roll Call. “Because I know he does care about the poor. But I think he was trying to make a case that they’re taken care of. But, in fact, I would say I’m worried about the poor because many are trapped in dependency, they need a good job; they don’t need to be on social welfare programs. I think he needs to turn that around because — the middle class is key, and we have to focus on that. And, really, the problem with the middle class is not successful people, it’s politicians — but the key to making our country successful it to get everyone on that economic ladder.
And you know what nobody was talking about today? Mitt Romney winning the Florida primary.
Excellent job, governor.
UPDATE: the New York Times takes on the Ricochet Romney:
Taken in the full context of his remarks, as Mr. Romney urged reporters to do, his statement appears more benign: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs a repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich — they’re doing just fine,”
But for a campaign that has been accused of taking Mr. Obama’s remarks out of context, the sentence about the poor immediately became cataloged in a growing list of comments by Mr. Romney that suggested a distance from the concerns of struggling Americans.
As his tax returns became a growing issue, Mr. Romney said that his speaking fees of more than $370,000 was “not very much” money.
When talking about taxation in August, he said, “corporations are people” — a line that will not go away, despite its context: “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. Where do you think it goes?”
And he said, “I like being able to fire people,” for bad service, just as his leadership at the venture capital firm, Bain Capital, was being questioned.
So, the latest remarks about the poor play into the narrative that his critics like to draw — that of an out-of-touch capitalist. Even conservatives are furious with Mr. Romney.
PunditandPundette.com wrote: “My real point is that a conservative candidate would talk about increasing opportunity for the very poor, about lessening the need for food stamps and housing vouchers by reducing government and invigorating the economy, rather than touting the awesomeness of our massive, dependency-inducing welfare state and suggesting it might need some beefing up.
“But Romney’s no conservative. So this is to be expected. ”
At The Weekly Standard, John McCormack wrote on the magazine’s Web site:
“Romney’s remark isn’t merely tone-deaf, it’s also un-conservative. The standard conservative argument is that a conservative economic agenda will help everyone. For the poor, that means getting as many as possible back on their feet and working rather than languishing as wards of the welfare state.”
And with that, Mitt Romney has managed to do the impossible: solidifying the Democratic narrative about him being a patrician, out of touch one percenter, while simultaneously verifying conservatives’ suspicion that he is only pretending to be one of them. Neither conservatives, nor normal people who have had any experience with, or even minimal contact with, even near-poverty, talk like Mitt Romney. In fact, most Americans don’t know anybody who talks like Mitt Romney. He’s Mr. Cellophane — unknown and unkowable, as Frank Rich pointed out in his NY Magazine piece this past Sunday. And that, at the end of the day, is his problem.
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But of course, the Republicans AREN’T concerned with the very poor, and their idea of reforming the safety net is to dismantle it. It’s not called the safety net for nothing. Anybody can fall, and the safety net is supposed to be there to catch you if you do. But the Republicans say, the safety net is broken because it makes people dependent, so they get dependent and don’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
Let’s look at that safety net metaphor again.
Suppose there were no safety net to depend on. So when a person falls, they hit the pavement instead of the net.
Now, who is going to be better equipped to pull himself or herself up by the bootstraps? Someone who fell and hit the net, then climbed out of the net fallen but essentially unscathed? Or somebody who just hit the pavement and broke every bone in their body?
I wonder if this remark by Romney will have the same nullifying effect on his political career as the remark his father made about having been “brainwashed” into supporting the Vietnam war did on his career.
I see the main problem here, as far as the movers and shakers in the GOP are concerned, as having the truth about a key feature of GOP ideology revealed/confirmed. According to a post at Think Progress that I read today, Tom Coburn let another cat out of the bag by saying that any politician that says that he/she doesn’t want to dismantle Medicare and Social Security is not to be believed. If his comments gain traction, expect him to pull a Newt–you didn’t hear what you thought you heard me say.