My job is not to worry about those people,” Mr Romney said, speaking with a passion that is often missing from his public appearances. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
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It makes you wonder how Mr Romney would actually run a country in which he finds so many people to be so objectionable.
The easy smile that hides a dark soul
By Gary Silverman in New York
This week brought a reminder of how much technology has changed US politics. Secretly recorded video of Mitt Romney was posted online on Monday – and people here have been talking about little else ever since.
But as I watched Mr Romney speak behind closed doors to a group of his supporters in Florida, I couldn’t help but note the irony of the situation. Thanks to some sort of newfangled gadgetry, we were getting a chance to watch the Republican presidential candidate engage in one of the oldest political pastimes in the US: complaining about some sort of minority that is bringing the rest of us down.The group that has gotten Mr Romney’s goat is the 47 per cent of the US population that does not pay federal income taxes (such people often do pay other federal, state and local taxes, but if you start talking about things like that it all gets too complicated for political purposes).
Mr Romney confidently told his friends in Florida that he doesn’t expect any of this 47 per cent to vote for him – not a single one apparently – and his certainty on the nature of his opposition was telling. Mr Romney did not speak of the 47 per cent as people with minds who could be swayed by political appeals to logic or emotion. Rather, he depicted them as the human equivalent of damaged goods.
The 47 per cent folks, in Mr Romney’s estimation, are “dependent on government”, convinced that they are “victims” and possessed by the crazy idea that they are “entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it”. As a result, they are unreachable – and best ignored.
“My job is not to worry about those people,” Mr Romney said, speaking with a passion that is often missing from his public appearances. “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
The language is harsh. But it is not necessarily foreign to someone like myself who came of age during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s in a lily-white Long Island suburb of New York City. I grew up hearing politicians and other folks who crossed my path pointing fingers of blame at all kinds of “other people”– blacks, Hispanics, hippies, yippies and “freaks” with all sorts of real and imagined personal proclivities.
These put-downs, I should add, were delivered not only in English but in the languages of our immigrant forebears, as well. I actually learnt the Italian word for eggplant because so many people in my area used it as a perjorative synonym for African-Americans.
They were only copying a traditional US political style. The practice of disparaging entire groups of people – deemed ill-equipped for leadership or daily life itself – dates back to the early days of our republic. Even our generally beloved founding fathers fell into the trap when they wrote the first version of the US constitution. For the purposes of counting the population for representation, they identified a group of “other persons” who were to be counted as three-fifths of a person – the slaves brought to the US by force from Africa, our first and only official fractional people.
The unusual thing about Mr Romney's formulation comes down to the number, really. It's just too big.
Unless I missed something during those days when I was cutting my political teeth on Long Island, I thought the point of bashing a minority was to win the votes of the majority. Taking on a minority as big as the one Mr Romney has vilified leaves him very little room for manoeuvre. For a guy who is supposedly such a whizz with numbers, it’s a strange tactic.
It makes you wonder how Mr Romney would actually run a country in which he finds so many people to be so objectionable.
It doesn’t even strike me as being particularly conservative. When I was a lad, conservatives were supposed to see the good in the existing order and work to keep things from falling apart. Mr Romney, by contrast, appears to be preparing for a confrontation of some kind. During his appearance in Florida, he looked like he was steeling himself for the day when he was going to take on all these irresponsible people and teach them the right way to live their lives.
As I watched those video clips posted online, I grew thankful that someone had left that little gizmo there in Florida so we could see the real Mr Romney. It makes up for all those months watching that sunny guy with the easy smile on the campaign trail. This week, we looked into Mr Romney’s soul – and boy, it’s dark in there. |
