Look, David Corn pretty much had to rebut Mitt Romney in exactly that way he did, by pointing out that Romney’s explanation of his 47% comments is totally at odds with the historical record. But something important is missed as long as we continue to look at the 47% remarks literally. Yes, those statements were incredibly callous and revealing, but they were also indicative of a failure of analysis on a massive scale. Romney wasn’t just saying that Obama was going to be pretty much guaranteed 47% of the vote, which was correct. Romney was attempting to explain why Obama was guaranteed 47% of the vote and who the 47% were on the socioeconomic scale. And that’s where he was way off.
Flip it around. Remember four years earlier when Barack Obama was asked at a private San Francisco fundraiser about how to appeal to white working class folks? Here’s what he said:
“We’ve got a couple of folks who are heading out to Pennsylvania to go door to door with us. And the question was: What kinds of questions should I expect them to get? … The places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are misapprehend—I think they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our—in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to “white working-class don’t want to work—don’t want to vote for the black guy.” That’s—there were intimations of that, there was an article in the Sunday New York Times today that kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing. …
“Here’s what it is: In a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, they feel so betrayed by government, that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, there’s a part of them that just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by—it is true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism. (Audience laughs.)
“But—so the questions you’re most likely to get are going to be: ‘Well, you know, what’s this guy going to do for me? What’s the concrete thing?’ And what they want to hear is—you know, so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing: to close tax loopholes and roll back, you know, the top—the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama’s going to give tax breaks to middle-class folks, and we’re going to provide health care for every American. You know, we’ll have a series of talking points.
“But the truth is that our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s no evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio—like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration. And each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate. And they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or, you know, anti-trade sentiment [as] a way to explain their frustrations.
“Now, these are in some communities. You know, I think what you’ll find is that people of every background—there are going to be a mix of people. You can go in the toughest neighborhood, you know, working-class lunch-pail folks, and you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you’d think that I’d be very strong, and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.”
That’s a completely different way of looking at the electorate. Obama knew that there were areas of the country where he wasn’t going to do very well, but he also knew that he could finds votes in every community. He didn’t think that every person who was getting public assistance was going to vote for him; he knew, in fact, that whole regions where most people get assistance were going to mainly vote against him. These devastated communities in the Rust Belt and Appalachia where the government had let the people down were not going to be all that receptive to his message of hope. And, yeah, his race and funny name were not going to be helpful, either. But he rejected that as the main obstacle.
Obama also knew, because many of them were flooding his campaign with money, that plenty of people in the top 1% were very supportive of his campaign. He had a realistic picture of the electorate, and that made it possible for him to do a very good job of going out and getting votes.
Romney probably wasn’t as stupid as he sounded. He was, after all, responding to a first-rate penis of a man who was bitching about all the non-productive takers in our country who just want handouts. Romney was pandering when he accepted that man’s premises. But the truth was that Romney was going to get the vast bulk of the evangelical vote and the southern vote and the white working class vote, most of whom were in the 47% he was deriding. So, an intelligent answer to the man’s question would have included some explanation of how he was actually going to win over voters who were not yet sold on his campaign, and it would have had nothing to do with their income level.
Even the 47% number was deeply misleading, because it included everyone on Medicare and Social Security who had already worked their whole lives and were enjoying retirement. It included the disabled who couldn’t work. He was basically saying that most people over 65 would never vote for him and that he’d never get the support from a single disabled vet. He was including people who had been laid off in the Great Recession.
Romney’s comments were incredibly insulting, but they weren’t just insulting to the 47%. They were insulting to every politically knowledgable person’s intelligence.
And Romney’s new defense of those comments did nothing to improve the situation.
