Mitt Romney’s taped remarks at a fundraiser in Boca Raton are not going to disappear before Election Day: between his belief that the economy will magically fix itself if he is elected, “without actually doing anything”; to his hypothetical about how he would threaten the United States with a dirty bomb “if he were a crazed fanatic” (notice how he cites Chicago, the President’s hometown, as his hypothetical target for hypothetical bombing); to his joke on how much easier it’d be for him to win the election if he were Latino… incriminating footage of this scale hasn’t been seen since the Nixon days.
But his comments on “the 47 percent” of Americans—those who pay no federal income taxes—those are the words that continue to haunt the Romney campaign:
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what… 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 are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it… my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
It’s the audio snippet that just keeps giving for the Obama campaign, just-won’t-die for the Romney campaign. The video exposes all of Mitt Romney’s weaknesses as a candidate. (Or perhaps it only accentuates what we’d already been seeing?)
Since this whole Tape-Gate affair began, the Romney campaign has reacted as spastically as ever: first trying to minimize the significance of the leaks, and then embracing them wholeheartedly as audio-visual proof that Mitt Romney is capable of speaking with conviction on an issue, as “inelegant” as his comments may have been.
In my last blog post, I broke down who the 47 percent of Americans actually are: chiefly veterans, active-duty soldiers, and the elderly—people who are exempt from paying federal income taxes, but who have more than contributed to society through their military service or a lifetime of honest taxpaying.
But no one can point out the flaws of Romney’s “47 percent” remarks better than Senator Jim Webb (D-Va.), a Vietnam War veteran and former Secretary of the Navy. At an Obama event in Virginia Beach on Thursday, Sen. Webb eviscerated Romney over his comments on the 47 percent, and for failing to mention the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq or veterans in his acceptance speech in Tampa:
“Those young Marines that I led have grown older now. They’ve lived lives of courage, both in combat and after their return, where many of them were derided by their own peers for having served. That was a long time ago. They are not bitter. They know what they did. But in receiving veterans’ benefits, they are not takers. They were givers, in the ultimate sense of that word. There is a saying among war veterans: All gave some, some gave all.
This is not a culture of dependency. It is a part of a long tradition that gave this country its freedom and independence. They paid, some with their lives, some through wounds and disabilities, some through their emotional scars, some through the lost opportunities and delayed entry into civilian careers which had already begun for many of their peers who did not serve.
And not only did they pay. They will not say this, so I will say it for them. They are owed, if nothing else, at least a mention, some word of thanks and respect, when a presidential candidate who is their generational peer makes a speech accepting his party’s nomination to be commander-in-chief.”
The attack was especially effective considering that Mitt Romney, himself a member of the Vietnam generation, openly supported the war but deferred serving to perform missionary work in France instead (the photo of Romney lounging beside a love letter to his future wife drawn in the sands of a French beach is incriminating in its contrast to the prevailing images of war and trauma from that same era).
Indeed, the 47 percent comment is not going away for Mitt Romney, because the 47 percent of Americans whom Mitt Romney belittled are not victims lacking in personal responsibility or care for their lives: They are Americans, like you and me, and they take issue with being denigrated by the man looking to be their president.
Senator Jim Webb’s speech in Virginia Beach, 9/27/2012.
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Apolitical is a blog that covers current events, politics and culture from a progressive perspective—bringing the world at large to the Malibubble, one post at a time.
