Latest exposé leaves friend and foe alike gobsmacked
OH, FOR the days when we thought Mitt Romney didn’t stand for anything.
As a secret video from a Boca Raton fundraiser with high rollers in May shows, Romney in private stands for so many bizarre things that it’s hard to tell what’s crazier – his domestic policy or his foreign policy.
Less than 50 days before the election, we learn Romney may have given up on half of America and on Middle East peace.
In a reply to a fat cat at the $50,000-a-plate dinner, he wrote off 47 per cent of the country as deadbeats, freeloaders and “victims” who feel they’re entitled to stuff – stuff like basic sustenance.
“Well, there are 47 per cent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said. “All right? There are 47 per cent who are with him. Who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they’re entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it.”
The candidate, who pays so little in taxes relative to his income that he has to hide tax returns and money in Switzerland and the Cayman Islands, then added, condescendingly: “These are people who pay no income tax. So my job is not to worry about those people,” he blithely concluded. “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
What kind of presidential candidate shrugs off wooing whole groups – we’re talking many seniors and white working-class voters in battleground states who are, if he knew what he was talking about, his own natural constituencies?
A “stupid and arrogant” one, as Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, put it.
Conservatives knew Romney was no Reagan, but the tape left many Republicans and Obama strategists gobsmacked. One top Democrat called it “a treasure trove of stupid answers”.
On Fox News on Tuesday, Neil Cavuto gently asked Romney if he had “prematurely” presumed that he couldn’t get all of those voters. Mitt’s rambles to the donors, released by Mother Jones magazine and, in a bit of poetic justice, unearthed by Jimmy Carter’s grandson, were a stunning combination of wrong facts, callous sentiments and dumb politics.
He seemed to have bought into the warped canard that some conservatives inside and outside of Congress have pushed: that the president and Nancy Pelosi were nefariously hooking people on unemployment benefits so they’d get addicted and vote Democratic to keep the unemployment bucks flowing like crack.
