There are so many ways I could approach Mitt Romney’s recently revealed secret speech. People will snark it to death. We can have hours of fun with this thing. If we’re feeling really mischievous, we can even torture it a little bit before we kill it, like a cat playing with a shrew. But I want to be serious for a moment. Will it matter?
The first thing that came to mind when I read the transcript was Obama’s famous comments about people clinging to their guns and their religion. Those comments were also made at a private fundraiser. And I thought to myself that the “clinging” comments must not have hurt too badly because Obama went on to win the nomination and the presidency. But when I thought a little harder, I changed my mind. Obama had already won the nomination from a statistical point of view by the time the “clinging” comments became public. By the time November came along, not only were those comments old news, but the financial sector had collapsed. Obama overcame those comments but they still exacted a price. Even today, I’d argue that people wouldn’t so readily buy the idea that Obama has a secret plan to take away their guns if he hadn’t secretly expressed a degree of disdain for gun owners. And people might not so readily suspect that he isn’t a Christian if he hadn’t secretly disparaged people who cling to their religion.
In any case, I believe that Obama’s comments hurt him and that he is still paying a small price for them. People don’t like to be psychoanalyzed by egghead Harvard lawyers and they don’t like to be disrespected. And that’s precisely why Romney’s comments will hurt him. And I suspect the damage will be greater in this case for several reasons.
First, as indelicate as Obama’s comments were, he was trying to explain to the Napa Valley Chablis Set why people in the Rust Belt feel alienated and pissed off. He was trying to induce empathy, not disdain. His intent, as opposed to his effect, was absolutely not to talk down to or make fun of the religious gun owners of Pennsylvania. He was saying that their communities have been destroyed by deindustrialization. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, was saying that everyone who voted for Obama in 2008 is just looking for a handout from the government and refuses to take any personal responsibility for their own lives. He was talking down to and making fun of the 53% of the people who put Obama in office.
Which leads to the second problem. Elsewhere in the speech, Mitt Romney makes the point that the only undecided people in the country are people who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and are disappointed. They still like Barack Obama. They don’t necessarily regret voting for him. And they are seriously considering voting for him again. That is why, Mitt Romney explains to his audience, it doesn’t do him any good to attack Obama personally or repeat a bunch of Tea Party lines about birth certificates or Marxism or whatever. If he tries to make people feel stupid for voting for Obama, they’ll just get defensive. If he’s attacks him unfairly, they’ll just get protective. Romney bases this opinion on careful research about undecided voters.
And the problem is that these are precisely the people who he just insulted. It’s true that he tried a create a special carve-out for the people who voted for Obama and are not sure that they want to do so again. But there are still two problems. First, he insulted all Obama voters, whether he wants to gift retroactive immunities or not. Second, he insulted undecided voters, too.
He said, “What I have to do is convince the 5-10% of independents, who are in the middle, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.”
The irony is that the millionaire attendees of this secret speech should have gotten up and left right there, since it was obvious that Romney was not going to emotionally connect with these “thoughtful” independents and make them like him more than the president. But, regardless, Romney basically said that the voters he is after are voting on the basis of their emotions, not their reasoning capabilities. And he made the point more explicit later on when he explained why he isn’t discussing his policy goals.
“Well, I wrote a book that lays out my view for what has to happen in the country, and people who are fascinated by policy will read the book. We have a website that lays out white papers on a whole series of issues that I care about. I have to tell you, I don’t think this will have a significant impact on my electability. I wish it did. I think our ads will have a much bigger impact. I think the debates will have a big impact….My dad used to say, “Being right early is not good in politics.” And in a setting like this, a highly intellectual subject—discussion on a whole series of important topics typically doesn’t win elections. And there are, there are, there are—for instance, this president won because of “hope and change.””
We can now safely predict that Romney will not be treating the debates as an opportunity to talk about a “whole series of important topics” because he doesn’t believe that that is what wins elections.
Even if he is right about that, his comments are contemptuous of the American voter, and especially the undecided voter. He believes they will make their decision emotionally based on trivialities like how much they like the candidates and how they respond to being saturation-bombed with substance-free advertisements.
So, Romney’s comments are worse than Obama’s were because the offense isn’t inadvertent. Romney has real contempt for undecided voters and anyone who voted for Obama in 2008 or who plans to vote for him in 2012. Obama had empathy for the people he was talking about. Romney’s comments also offend a much wider percentage of the voting public than Obama’s did. Romney insulted the key demographic that he needs to win, while Obama insulted a demographic he ultimately didn’t (and doesn’t) need.
But, worst of all for the Mitt-Man, Obama’s comments were revealed in April, and Romney’s were revealed in mid-September. People will still be talking about Romney’s comments when early voting starts just a few weeks from now.
So, will these comments matter? You bet your ass they will. Romney just had an atom bomb dropped on his campaign.
And, remember, today was supposed to be the launch date for Romney 3.0. He was going to reset his campaign and go negative on the president. All his research said that going negative would drive away the only undecided voters in the country, but his base was crumbling and he had to do something. Instead, he had something done to him. Without even wanting to, he just went negative on the only people in the country who might have still made him president.
1.) He had a press conference at 10 pm eastern. He then decided to walk away from questions.
2.) “Romney video: I think Obama just won the election. When was the last time a president fighting for re-election was handed such a gift? Remind me, someone: how did the GOP end up with this idiot as their candidate?”~Damian Thompson
3.) “Instead of running from it, should embrace chance to talk about ownership society vs dependency society.”~Matt Lewis
“EXACTLY. That’s how I close my piece. Let’s have this debate. We can win on ideological lines. HUGE opportunity here.”
~John Nolte
“Dammit! I’m just now seeing these Romney secret videos. We need that guy on the campaign trail!”
~Erick Erickson
So thoughts…conservatives and radical right wingers elsewhere say, “Wow, what a fucking moron.” Ours? They believe their own shit doesn’t stink. Oh please, Mitt, take Erick’s advice.
You thought of Obama’s remarks, here’s what my first thought was:
As goes Al, so goes most of America in a Romney administration.
Everything about that clip is more or less what Romney’s said. From, “Why don’t you get a job, Al?” to “I can help you…” to “Do you know what a fucking loser you are?”…and especially his attempt at a joke with, “What? Did you lose your job from insider trading? Haha, just kidding.”
The MittBateman.
I’m admittedly absolutely awful at knowing what will/won’t matter to the public, but um, isn’t this the exact same thing he said to the faces of the NAACP like a couple of months ago?
Actually, wasn’t that
a) Worse, given the context of the whole NAACP thing?
b) Immediately forgotten?
He’s been pulling the Randian moocher act for a while now. Why would it suddenly cause independents to flee? Because white people might get the impression he’s including them in his contempt and dismissal?
it’s exactly what he said about NAACP. But he was talking to “blah” people so of course he didn’t mean the white folk.
This time is literally says that 47% of the country don’t pay taxes and are dependent on the government.
Now even low-info white can add right. If whites are say 60-70% of the country, then guess what some part of that 47% is gonna include white people/
At the presser Romney did not deny it was him and actually doubled down on what he said. So the ads write themselves and it’s now guaranteed that a question will be asked in the debates.
i’m not so sanguine about the intelligence and education of the low info white voter as you are.
What primary factoid has been pounded into the ground for the last 6 months (including BOTH conventions)? Hispanics are changing the political landscape. They are becoming increasingly more influential in places like GA, TX, AZ and CO.
I’m not sure the low info white voter will not make the implicit jump to the factoid: White people are only about 53% of the current population.
You do the math.
I sort of feel the same way – not real clear to me how this is all that different from what RMoney’s been spouting all year. But like you, I don’t have a good sense about how non-political junkies take this kind of things.
I guess this just seems like another nail in Romney’s very solidly built coffin. I’ve thought he was gonna lose for a long time, and… now still think he is. So my watchwordabout this, and the conventions, and the debates, and everything else that will happen in the next few weeks is downticket, downticket, downticket.
How will these Romney comments affect our Congressional margins? I have no idea, but it seems like the whole ballgame at this point.
Watched Romney presser.
watched it on Lawerence O’Donnell’s show.
First of all, no denial that the video was him.
Second, Romney appeared mussed and wired. Mitts hair is all mussed up and his face was damn near Boehner colored.
It was NOT a good look.
Thirdly, he doubled down on his remarks.
Zeke Miller @ZekeJMiller
RT @hollybdc: Romney: “This is the same message i give to people” in public
@hollybdc
Romney says his argument wasn’t “elegantly stated” but suggests he stands by the jist of his message in the video
Matt Y weighs in:
Matt Yglesias @mattyglesias
What’s the elegant way of saying 47% of the population refuses to take responsibility for their lives and you don’t care about them?
What’s the elegant way of saying 47% of the population refuses to take responsibility for their lives and you don’t care about them?
Freedom! Patriotism! USA! Democrats BAD!
Boy, you’re right about Romney’s look. The mussed hair really makes him look like a desperate loser.
Must have given his hairdresser the night off before his handlers put him in front of the cameras. All that work over the months of adding another gray hair strand by strand down the drain with all that uncovered gray showing tonight.
He looks as if he’s going to cry. About time he was on the receiving end of his deeds.
Don’t miss Ezra Klein’s excellent writeup on this. His point is that the Feline built the 47%. They built it and now want to abandon it.
Can’t post link-typing from phone.
Frikin phone. Repubs not feline.
You know, the Cat People probably had something to do with it too.
Romney will lose a good 2 weeks trying to get back on message. I think he is going to lose, he offended a lot of people.
It’s going to be a long long night of conference calling and meetings for Romney. But the last call and the last conversation is going to be with Ann. So where’s she going to come down on this?
“So where’s she going to come down on this?”
Who cares what you people think?
I was thinking more along the lines of “Mitt’s the victim”. Since there isn’t an etch a sketch big enough to erase this one, and there’s rumblings of doubling down, will the Erik Erickson’s fumble the rest of his campaign in their rush to cheer him on?
David Corn reporting he has a piece coming out tomorrow.
“Let them eat cake”
yes. exactly. “they feel entitled to food”.
Holy shit. Mitt Antoinette
Also posted in orange if you wanna recommend.
It took forty years, but the shoe finally ended up on the other foot. Mmmmmm… schadenfreude.
Now it’s time for Dems up and down the ballot to tie their opponents to the Great Mormon Boat Anchor, or at least his views. “Do you believe that 47% of the country are freeloading moochers?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/opinion/brooks-thurston-howell-romney.html?ref=opinion
David Brooks is DEVASTATED right now. He sounds like he’s about to cry. I’d like to say his endorsement of the President’s reelection is imminent, but I haven’t seen any flying pigs as of yet.
Don’t forget, Brooks has remarkable recuperative powers. Odds are better than even he rebounds with a column slamming Pres. Obama within a week.
You’re probably right. Still, I was blown away that Brooks wrote the most insightful column so far (in my opinion) on Romney’s comments and what they mean for the election (and, God forbid, beyond).
“You could say that the entitlement state is growing at an unsustainable rate and will bankrupt the country.
“You could also say that America is spending way too much on health care for the elderly and way too little on young families and investments in the future.
“But these are not the sensible arguments that Mitt Romney made at a fund-raiser earlier this year.”
Or, you could say that the assholes who see the world that way need not only to pay a lot more in taxes on income AND on accumulated wealth but do some time in a camp getting re-educated by the Khmer Rouge.
Well, SOMETHING, anyway.
They sure need an attitude adjustment.
My mother collected a government check for 21 yrs and I have collected one for the last 19 so I guess that makes me a 2nd generation moocher. She retired as a Staff Sgt in the Army and I, God willing, will retire as a Major or Lt Col in the Air Force. Anybody know where I can get a “don’t worry about me Mitt!” tee shirts?
I dunno. It seems to me that most undecideds in the middle, knowing that they pay taxes if not income taxes (and they probably do), will just hear the 47% line and think, “what a bunch of moochers. They shouldn’t get away with it.” Not knowing about demograhics and stuff, they’re likely to assume that Romney is talking about someone else, like “blah” people.
Which is why Democrats need to take Bill Clinton’s convention speech as their model: explain to the American people who the “47 percent” really are:
*the elderly, whose Social Security checks aren’t subject to income tax;
*the physically and mentally disabled, who are unable to work;
*parents earning less than $20,000 a year, who still have young children.
That’s who Romney’s talking about.
Not to mention children.
This is 47% of the American people, not 47% of American adults.
Hm. Maybe not. Did Romney get it wrong, or did I? He apparently thinks it’s 47% of voters.
Not sure, but it surely includes stay at home spouses who have a working spouse. There is no way you could get to 47% of adults otherwise.
The man is inept beyond belief.
The haughty contempt toward “the 47%” – retirees, children, the disabled, those too poor to pay federal income taxes – is standard right-wing fare and bad enough, revealed to the country.
But he also displays contempt for the people whose votes he says he must court!
“He said, ‘What I have to do is convince the 5-10% of independents, who are in the middle, that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.‘”
Great finish.
By the way, about his Dad being right too early.
Was that when he said he’d been brainwashed during a junket to Vietnam from which he had returned optimistic about that war?
An optimism he quickly and “too early” abandoned?
Could the ever-inept Mitt have actually been alluding to that in this den of right wingers, wed like the whole tribe of them to the idea that we never lost in Vietnam, the left and the radicals forced us to quit too soon?
And so of course wed to the idea that his Dad was both wrong and at least a major flake for saying that about “brainwashing.”
Romney insulted his base — those older, white Republicans who receive Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, those farmers who receive farm aid, all those folks who feel they are entitled to tax cuts for this, that, or the other. It’s just that those folks will continue to hate the government that gives them so much.
And if you break down that 47% (sic) who don’t pay taxes, the states with the highest proportion of non-taxpayers are in states of the old Confederacy and in Idaho. The states with the highest proportion of taxpayers are in the Pacific Northwest and New England.
The contempt for government is now so common in the Romney class, or those who aspire to it, that it shows up in radio commercials for banks.
Heard one on the radio this morning on the way to work that started out with a lot of whining about government incompetence and hassle, trying to sell banking services to these little Galtlets by convincing them they (the bank) “get it.”
A map of the 47%
From Rude Pundit earlier today:
“Sad image of the day: Old man on Medicare watching Fox “news,” thinking that Romney’s a liberal media victim.”
“Even if he is right about that, his comments are contemptuous of the American voter, and especially the undecided voter. He believes they will make their decision emotionally based on trivialities like how much they like the candidates and how they respond to being saturation-bombed with substance-free advertisements.”
As Dan on Night Court used to ask, “What’s your point?”
It looks like Chuck Todd is trying to bail Romney out, he asked Stephanie Cutter how the President’s reference to clinging to guns & god was different than Romney’s statement.
Good write up Boo. Better perspective than most everything I saw yesterday.
I would only add that Mitt’s comment also piss off a pretty strong segment of voters, mostly independents, who put a premium on bipartisan collaboration and/or want a president to be president of all of the united States and all of it’s people.
The fact that he has outright and overt contempt for 47% of Americans is a real turn off to more than 47% of Americans.
I’d also add that his comments were completely blind to the handouts corporate Americans and wealthy Americans, shit ALL Americans get through the tax codes, special legislation and set asides and the like. Shit even the small businessman running a tattoo parlor in a strip mall benefits from the road and cutout in front of his store that he didn’t have to pay for and that brings customers to his shop.
The fact that he sanctimoniously derides ANYONE for getting help from the community is deeply offensive. The fact that he (and his audience)feel no obligation to contribute to the things that brought their wealth is offensive too and not just to me but to IMO most of the 5% he was looking to convert into votes.
What was revealed most clearly in Mitt’s comments (well, in addition to him truly being an idiot, even when he’s not pandering shamelessly) is what a frickin brat he is. The guy is totally clueless as to the advantages he received by being born into privilege. He also doesn’t get his huge advantage in being white, tall and attractive. Having won the birth lotto, and having had all the advantages, he doesn’t get it. Worse, he sneers at those who weren’t as fortunate.
All right-wingers are like that. Left-wingers look at people less fortunate than themselves and say, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
I doubt the video will repel any voters Romney hasn’t repelled already, but it is always interesting to hear what people say behind our backs.
it was obviously thoughtless and as an undignified way of depriving millions of their dignity as could be made.
as I’ve log argued it — rightwingers are the best witnesses for their own prosecution, and apparently no matter how high profile the case or the sentence for the crime.
At this point, it seems pretty clear that Romney will not win. But I am sure he is being told that
he cannot change his message in any way that will discourage his NutBase from turning out. If the NutBase does not turn out, then the House and the Senate will both be Democratic. The only way
for the Repubs to retain the House, and get the Senate ( though getting the Senate is starting to look unlikely) is to get that NutBase to turn out, so even though it will doom his Presidency, Romney has
to maintain the crazy-talk.
-r
Really, BooMan ! No such thing as Napa Valley Chablis ! As a set, collection or chaotic assemblage. Never has been, never could be. The metaphor is not just mixed, it wars with itself.
I do expect to have a glass or two of something on hand for the debates though. Unless Mitt can find a phone-booth to duck into, and can emerge in blue and red tights and a cape, I expect Obama to reduce him to sushi.