How else can this be explained?
UPDATE: Check out the reaction that is flooding in on this. It seemed like it wouldn’t be possible for Romney to have a worse week than he did last week, but he may just outdo himself. This is from a DNC Rapid Response email.
AP: “Already scrambling to steady a struggling campaign, Republican Mitt Romney confronted a new headache Monday.”
Bloomberg’s Josh Barro: “This is an utter disaster for Romney.”
NY Times’ Paul Krugman: “The idea that half of Americans are just grifters is grotesque. If this is real, it’s very, very ugly.”
Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart: “What the Republican presidential nominee said is reprehensible and unbecoming a man who claims to want to be president of all Americans.”
Slate’s Dave Weigel: “This is Tea Party rhetoric churned into something new and stupid.”
TPM’s Josh Marshall: “ It’s rare when the impact of some gaffe or embarrassment or revelation isn’t overstated on first blush. But this strikes me as possibly that rare exception. This tape strikes me as absolutely devastating.”
Jim Acosta @jimacostacnn Shorter Romney statement… no apologies.
Kasie Hunt @kasie Category of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes: U.S. troops serving in combat zones.
Mark Halperin @MarkHalperin Many of us have seen pols pander to donors in closed events. I’ve heard my share Rs+Ds. Never anything this damaging however.
@HowardKurtz Romney on the 47 percent seems a stereotype of an unsympathetic venture capitalist–going to be hard to overcome among non-base voters.
@JohnJHarwood Ex-GWBush ad-maker McKinnon: Romney fund-raiser tape “potentially crippling”
@JohnJHarwood Dem pollster Garin on Romney fund-raiser tape: “Reinforces impression he’s mistake/prone & arrogant. would be better off if he apologized”
Michael Falcone @michaelpfalcone Note: The Romney camp’s 1st response to the videos comes from comms director Gail Gitcho, not Romney himself
Every single person who’s dependent on the government would trade places with someone who’s working & self-sufficient in a heartbeat. Absolutely no one who’s self-sufficient would trade their job for dependence on a handout. And anyone who’s been welfare-dependent but is now self-sufficient would cold-blooded-murder anyone who tried to tell them they had to go back.
So why does anyone let guys like Romney pretend otherwise?
As long as a “heartbeat” was all it took. Any of the people you mention can become independent of the government, but they have to work for it. We hand out everything and these people do become dependent. It’s sad.
if you were never given a pair of boots. No one wants hand-outs, but people do want a little help along the way to be able to achieve their goals.
Maybe if Mitt Romney weren’t born on third base — and actually had an ounce of empathy programmed into his cyborn brain — he’d understand that kind of stuff. Sadly, he doesn’t.
I do have problems with that help becoming a “way of life”. That doesn’t help either side.
is either a fantasy in your imagination (ie the ‘47%’ lie), or a byproduct of Republican-led policy of the past 30 years that has laid waste to entire segments of the economy, for which well-paying jobs could be had by any willing to work hard (the fact that so many are having such a hard time finding a job).
Having grown up in Dorchester and still having many friends from there, I do have first hand knowledge of many people who have needed help and many of those people are still needing help. I have family members who have been living in public housing for 50+ consecutive years. These are not abstract thoughts by me.
If you don’t think we have created a huge population of Americans who are addicted to public assistance then I think you’re the one living in Fantasyland.
As for jobs, I have five kids with 2 of them in their twenties. I know full well of the difficulties they are having as are so many of their friends int he job market. The ones who are making it and getting by until times get better are the ones who have the most drive, the most talent and the best luck.
Working 2-3 jobs to put food on the table, how are they not ‘taking responsibility’ for themselves.
Another huge chunk are seniors and the disabled. What, exactly, are they supposed to do to take responsibility for themselves? Should an 80 year old go out and get a full-time job? Can someone with downs syndrome earn enough money to pay for all their medical expenses?
The truth of the matter is a large chunk of that 47% are millioniares and billioniares who pay no income taxes. If you want to look at the mooches, look at the people pushing for all that corporate welfare and income redistribution… upwards.
The key word there is luck. All too many people in life were born on third base and think they hit a triple. Emerging adults who were born into the poor and slipping edges of the middle class don’t get to make a mistake and still get by, while the upper class can give their kids chance after chance to get things right.
You have a HUGE problem helping people along the way… If you did not have such a problem, you would not use the corner case to justify your approach to the general case.
The man who will not give to any beggar, on the theory that one in one hundred might be a charlatan, really just doesn’t want to give to any beggar.
A man who claims not to fear spiders, except the poisonous ones, yet who recoils at the presences of any arachnid for fear of poison really fears all spiders.
The man who will not go outside, for fear of rain, really fears the outside.
The man who refuses to adopt a sane perspective, is not sane.
And I won’t say anything else for fear of my comment being deleted.
Almost 1/4 of those who pay no Fed Income tax are elderly, as in retired. You object to their receiving Social Security? Another 28% of those who pay no Fed Income tax do pay payroll taxes – you know, the taxes that fund Medicare, Medicaid, and SS? So they’re not freeloaders, they’re paying their way.
Have a look:
Tax Policy Center, by way of the Washington Post.
I’m not to happy with the way Mitt just lumped me in to his out of touch delusion of America’s working class.
At least, now, his staff can show him this clip and say, “See, it’s you! Not us.”
http://crooksandliars.com/jon-perr/debunking-47-pay-no-taxes-talking-point
It isn’t surprising to see Bishop Romney peddling that snake-oil to his low-information targets.
the truth about the taxes paid by 47 percent. Most of them do pay federal payroll taxes, and even more (mostly the elderly) did pay federal taxes during their working years.
And the graph doesn’t even include the state and local taxes the 47 percent continue to pay, including very regressive sales taxes.
But I think it’s time to discuss when M. Willard lost this race…was it picking Paul Ryan and scaring every senior in America, or the lackluster convention dominated by a chair; or the craven attempt to grab a news cycle and suggest the President is sympathetic to terrorists when a US Ambassador is killed; or is it now when it was revealed that Romney has distain for anyone who would vote for his opponent, basically calling everyone of them (us) welfare queens.
We’ve already reached the point that the Romney camp is “relaunching” him just 3 weeks after the GOP convention which was meant to relaunch him again.
But there is still and eternity left. We need to keep focus and run like we’re way behind.
is because he is a Republican, and the Republicans have a terrible reputation: fiscal mismanagement, wars, general misanthropy.
The reason why he’ll get the zombie 45%+ is that he’s a Republican, and that’s about the % of the population that would rather die in a fire than vote Dem.
Still. As you say, no reason to throttle back now.
You pour a flood of money into this takeover/campaign, and the figurehead tells you he’s given up on 47% of the voters from moment one? Sure, you have many voters on your side, but this sets up a need to win a giant majority to win. Any billionaire who’s opened his wallet to Mitt is making an unwise investment decision.
He has said, “I’m not concerned about poor people,” publicly too.
Looking at the actual video, do you see the waiters moving in and out of the frame? More than likely his so-called 47% is in the room! Heeeelloooo… they’re right there and theeey caaaan heeeaaarr yoouuuu!.
[Loggins didn’t return a phone call HI-YO]
That’s coming from a campaign flack, and amazingly, I don’t even think it’s an overstatement.
for voters … this shit doesn’t even make sense, man. As if this chimerical 47% are all on Obama’s side, every last one of them? And practically everyone else, Mitt’s got in his back pocket?
And where are your taxes, Mitt?
I’ve said it before … no satirist has ever or could ever make up anyone as preposterous as Mitt Romney in a million years.
This was from February, right? I think he thought that he had to be some cartoonish Ayn Rand government hater in order to be elected. The indictment of him is that he was game for that, if it gave him a shot.
May is the month he officially reached 1,144 delegates, i.e., clinched the nomination. So even if the fundraiser was a couple of weeks before Texas win that was technically the clincher, the race had been effectively over for a while when this video was shot.
I guess he always had to get his “base” out, and in force, to win. And this is how to do it.
You know, he isn’t that old. He could have spent some effort confronting the craziness in his party, rather than embracing it, even if it meant getting his clock cleaned in the primaries, and then might have been able to wage a winnable campaign in another cycle.
I still don’t think he even believes the junk he says. In my view, that is more of an indictment of him than if he actually does believe it.
The nation is learning what we in Massachusetts learned: the less you know Romney, the more you like him, and vice versa.
First the conventions
Then the intemperate comments on the Middle East
Now denouncing 47% of the country
And the million other things they have done to hand us the election…
Well, not *exactly*, because I believe it’s a dirigible. But I’m splitting hairs.
In any case, I too humbly request that the hangar doors be opened…
The foreign tour. The $10,000 bet offer coupled with the intrusion on Gov Perry’s personal space.
A decent chunk of the country believes the lies Mitt Romney has told about welfare and Obama gutting welfare reform, the single biggest policy change that brought the Democratic party back into the White House. The 47% meme isn’t new and was used to great effect by Richard Nixon who won 49 states (save for ours!) with devastating ads like this one
http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/1972/mcgovern-welfare
Between picking the Medicare-killing zombie-eyed grannie-starver as his running mate, and this… I can’t believe anyone over 65 would vote for this trust-fund bully.
He had disdain for double that number of folks in Massachusetts.
America will forget about this in a week. All the fake and minor gaffes that we all try to exploit through the cycle desensitize the public at large to when candidates say truly atrocious things like this statement by Romney.
A week or two from now the only people who will be talking about this are the people like us who already find Mitt Romney to be outrageous and a fraud.
“Macaca” happened in August.
🙂
I should have gone back to link to it, then I would have spotted the mistake.
I’ve just seen too many alleged “nail in the coffin” moments over the last 4 years. I have really lost faith in a large swarth of the electorate to actually take in information and look at it critically – and many who do just don’t care because they are so partisan.
But please, PLEASE let this be the “blimp moment” we all look back to on November 7th.
Romney’s whole narrative in this campaign is that he will be a better steward of the economy because he has worked in the world of business and he is an accomplished and disciplined executive. This film undercuts that because it indicates an incompetency at running a campaign. That was David Brooks’ complaint in the New York Times today. Romney has shown himself to be incompetent at foreign policy: he insulted the British and the Palestinians, the comments on Libya poll quite negatively, and the comments from this video also show he is uninterested in trying to bring about peace in the Middle East. The recent Politico article shows incompetence at running the campaign with the convention speech completely rewritten twice and produced too late to rehearse, and then given after the empty chair episode.
Romney is otherwise quite vulnerable. His plans are vague. His personality comes across as cold. His focus has been on solely Obama’s badness. Even the right is demanding more policy specifics from him. The only, one, unique thing he brings is executive competence. This week that has been evaporating. Soon “what everyone knows” will be that Romney is running a bad campaign — worse perhaps than McCain’s.
This video is going to be chopped up into half a dozen anti-Romney ads. He is going to be asked about it repeatedly over the next couple of weeks and it will probably be featured in a debate question. And the association of the event’s host with sex parties is going to add a titillation factor.
This is also going to provide new ammunition to attack Romney’s own low tax rate (e.g see http://taxfoundation.org/blog/least-90-percent-americans-have-lower-income-tax-rate-romney) and demand that he cough up more years of tax returns. After all, if he is depicting everyone who doesn’t pay federal income tax as “moochers”, then what are multi-millionaires who pay a lower rate than people like you or me.
The only way this goes away is if Romney says something even more boneheaded to give the press something else to talk about.
…the Mother Jones DC bureau chief and MSNBC contributor strongly hinted tonight that there is more where this came from, which will be rolled out soon.
Gotta love it.
that this video has ended Mitt Romney’s presidential hopes. In any event, it has certainly made them more difficult to achieve – as Chris Cillizza at WaPo’s The Fix notes, the video “virtually ensures a second straight week lost to off-message stories that are far afield from the economic focus that the Romney campaign is hoping to lean on in the final weeks of the race…. Wasting two weeks when there are only seven weeks left in a race that even the most loyal Republicans acknowledge they are currently losing — albeit it narrowly — is a major problem for Romney.” What a remarkable commentary all of that is on the changing landscape of politics and the media. Remember when there was no YouTube?
they haven’t ‘wasted weeks’ by badly losing news cycles, including news cycles they created (ie the trip to Europe).
If Romney learned how to close his mouth every once in a while, and let his campaign do his job instead of micromanage (and get a better campaign staff), he’d be tied or winning now. He really can’t help himself.
You know, rewatching the video, not only does he accuse the 47% that they are lazy government-teat-sucking leaches, BUT…he even manages to insult the “5-10% in the middle” voters…
He at first calls them independent and thoughtful, THEN says that they “look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not.”
Sounds like he’s calling them the opposite of thoughtful and independent to me.
(Nevermind that half his constituency falls squarely IN the 47%!)
I’m sure you’re right about that!
See the map:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/where-are-the-47-of-americans-who-pay-no-income-taxes/262499/
In terms of percentage of filers who owed no federal income tax, the top ten states (each with 39% or greater of non-payers) are Idaho and each of the nine states running from New Mexico to South Carolina along the Gulf Coast and Southeast U.S.. Meanwhile, those with the lowest (at 30%) or less include Massachusetts, CT, NJ, MD, DE and DC. MN. ND and WY.
Note, though, this doesn’t mean Mitt is speaking out against his base. As the editors of this article note: