Oh, for the days when we thought Mitt Romney didn’t stand for anything.
As a secret video from a Boca Raton fund-raiser 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 that Romney may have given up on half of America and on Mideast peace.
In a reply to a fat cat at the $50,000-a-plate dinner, he wrote off 47
percent of the country as deadbeats, freeloaders and “victims” who feel
they’re entitled to stuff — stuff like basic sustenance.
“Well, there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the
president no matter what,” he said. “All right? There are 47 percent 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 health care, 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
actually knew what he was talking about, his own natural constituencies?
A “stupid and arrogant” one, as Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, put it.
Conservatives knew that 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 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.
It’s literally rich: Willard, born on third base and acting self-made,
whining to the rich about what a great deal in life the poor have.
We thought Romney was secretly moderate, but it turns out that he’s
secretly cruel, a social Darwinist just like his running mate.
You’d assume that it would be hard now for Romney to resume bashing
President Obama for demonizing and pandering on class warfare, with
lines like he’s been using on the trail: “he and his allies are pushing
us all even further apart by dividing us into groups.”
But, even as Mitt was spitefully demonizing and dividing in Boca, he
remained cardboard-cutout un-self-aware, musing: “The thing which I find
most disappointing about this president is his attack of one America
against another America.” This is the absolute height of cluelessness.
At another point in the video, Romney once more showed his foreign
policy jejuneness, questioning the workability of a two-state solution
to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which is U.S. policy endorsed by W.
Mr. Sunshine said he sometimes felt “that the Palestinians have no
interest whatsoever in establishing peace — and that the pathway to
peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.”
He continued: “You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize
this is going to remain an unsolved problem,” adding, “And we kick the
ball down the field and hope that ultimately somehow, something will
happen to resolve it.”
Wow. That’s leadership. He said a former secretary of state had called
him to suggest that after the Palestinian elections there might be a
prospect for a settlement, but that “I didn’t delve into it.”
After months of doggedly trying to seem more likable, sharing his guilty
pleasures like Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Snooki, Romney came
across as a mean geek, a Cranbrook kid at the country club smugly
swaddled in class disdain. He thinks being president is his manifest
destiny. His father didn’t make it, so he will — no matter what far-out
conservative positions he must graft on to in order to do it.
We’re in search of the real Romney. But, disturbingly, so is he.
One thing we have to give Mitt, though: He is, as advertised, a
brilliant manager. He’s managed to ensure that President Obama has a
much better chance of re-election.
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