It started with the most important speech of his career being overshadowed by an aged actor delusionally berating furniture. The wildly uninspiring Democratic convention produced an unexpected bounce for the incumbent, which threw the GOP into a panic. Romney then humiliated himself with a premature and almost unpatriotic response to the North African conflagration. And then his own campaign started cannibalizing itself for the good folks at Politico.
Then a secretly recorded tape of the candidate at a fundraiser started making the rounds last night. If you haven't seen it already, here you go.
This precipitated another crisis in the campaign. A presidential candidate doesn't schedule a press conference at 10 PM because things are going well.
This should have been the easiest thing in the world for Romney to smooth over, especially given his notable dexterity with principle. All he had to do was say, "Look, it was a private event with sophisticated donors who are generally well-versed in tax policy. In such situations, I often use shorthand and in no way was I actually writing off half of the fucking country, nor would those donors have tolerated it for a second if I did, if only because it would have been epically dumb politics."
Nobody would have been thrilled with that kind of damage control, but it would have contained it to maybe a two-day story. Instead, he went before the press and doubled-down on his remarks, thereby walking directly into the Obama campaign's (and, to be fair, Romney's Republican primary opponents) carefully crafted narrative of Mitt as an aloof, plutocratic asshole.
To the extent that anyone remembers anything at all about the Republican convention that doesn't involve Clint Eastwood, it was their mighty attempts to paint the nominee as a caring, giving man - a good guy who has strived to do right by friends and strangers alike and now wants to do right by America.
This tape, and Romney's response to it, effectively negates that. The GOP wasted tens of millions of dollars in Tampa. Worse, the Left's caricature of him has been reinforced in ways that they could never have pulled off on their own.
It might be the most fantastic and public suicide note in the history of presidential politics. I've never seen a losing campaign say that half the electorate are cunty layabouts, let alone a winning one. As a general rule, politics is an exercise in making as many friends as you can while cultivating only the enemies who best serve your own narrative. Mitt Romney either doesn't get that or he's the single most ineffective communicator in all of Christendom.
I follow any number of prominent Republican partisans on twitter, and their response to this tape last night was hilarious. It seems to consist of two parts;
- Obama's "bitter clingers" remark during the 2008 Pennsylvania primary
- "Why should Mitt be punished for telling the truth?"
The "bitter clingers" comment didn't hurt Obama as badly as it should have for a few reasons.
First, the quote was contrary enough to Obama's image at the time that it was seen as an isolated incident.
Second, it's important to remember that he was running against Hillary Clinton at the time, who had far higher public negatives than he did. In the spring of 2008, 50% of America believed that she might have actually been the Antichrist.
Third, Republicans wanted to run against Obama in the general because they thought that he would be easier to beat than the Clintons, who terrified them. At a minimum, they wanted the Democratic primaries to last as long as possible in the hope that it would split the party. That being the case, the McCain campaign, the RNC and conservative media waited months before highlighting "bitter clingers" in any significant way. The drawback of that was that they looked desperate when they finally got around to it.
The "47% narrative" that has built up over the last three years is a much bigger deal and I'm not at all surprised that liberals, who think that they're much smarter than they actually are, didn't put that one to bed as soon as it popped up. It was invented by Erick Erickson of Red State and CNN, and like most of his inventions, it's only partially true and the parts that aren't fiction speak ill of Republicans more than anyone else.
In fairness, Mr. Erickson is actually a better than average writer and would probably be a pretty good novelist. It's only where facts come up that he falls down, making him a sub par propagandist at best.
Republicans are most successful when they're cheery optimists. Look at the three most politically successful Republican presidential candidates of the 20th century: Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. What all three of them had in common was their belief that America was great and could only get greater. They sure as shit didn't actively run against half of the population. By watching them, you knew that they actually liked America and Americans. For all of his faults (and his faults were legion,) that was also true of George W. Bush.
Modern Republicans seem more comfortable running on the Goldwater-Nixon model, which is being indignant at the country. As Nixon proved, that can work, but only under a very specific set of circumstances. For it to be successful, you need to convince people that the "silent majority" is being victimized by both "the elites" and their own fellow citizens. It also helps if you're running against an opponent more pessimistic about America and generally unlikable than you are, and three years worth of polling shows that that just isn't true in this race.
There's none of that optimism in modern conservatism, especially in the GOP-Tea Party. Not only are they constantly whining, they're perceived as pretending that they're victims of those less fortunate than themselves. They were declaring the end of America within three months of losing an election and openly blaming their fellow citizens for it. They're bitchy in ways that make even Perez Hilton blush and that they've done as well as they have speaks more to the communications failures of the Democrats than it does their own stupid message.
More importantly, the narrative of the "53%" is counter-factual nonsense. Actually, it's worse than that. It's blatantly dishonest.
Very few Americans "pay no federal taxes." Almost all of them pay a shitload in payroll taxes, which are far more regressive and broadly applied than the income tax. Payroll taxes were also helpfully doubled by President Reagan and Alan Greenspan in 1983 in a effort to save Social Security.
The Republican "53%" also ignores that it was their own fiscal policies that created that situation. Reagan's own 1986 Tax Reform Act took 4 million people off of the rolls entirely. The 1981, 2001 and '03 tax cuts removed millions more. And Republicans spent a generation actually bragging about it! Even today, they're hysterically promising not to raise anybody's taxes, while actively running against Americans that they (wrongly) say pay no taxes at all.
If you're going to look at the 47%, you might want to look at seniors, who collect the lion's share of federal benefits and, by virtue of being retired, pay almost nothing in taxes. According to the IRS, "Generally, if Social Security benefits were your only income for 2010, your benefits are not taxable and you probably do not need to file a federal income tax return."
Is the GOP going to go there? I highly doubt it. Retired men are one of the few winning demographics that they have left with any growth potential.
Then there's the matter of where the "47%" actually lives. And trust me, it is decidedly not in Mitt Romney's political interest for you to know this. That's a really, really problematic map for Mitt Romney.
The states in red have the highest percentage of "non-payers." The states in green have the highest percentage of payers. I trust that you'll immediately figure how that might be problematic. Of those ten states, only New Mexico can be counted as a "blue state" and Florida is the only swing state. The remaining eight couldn't be more Republican unless they started actually executing everyone to the left of Rick Perry.
Then there's the states themselves. There's a real disparity in what states send to Washington on taxes and what they receive in benefits and spending. That doesn't look good for Erick Erickson's "53%," either. At least not politically.
Of the bottom ten states (not counting Puerto Rico,) in federal taxes to benefits -New Mexico, Mississippi, West Virginia, Montana, Alabama, North Dakota, Maine, Maryland, Alaska and Virginia - six have been heavily Republican since 1972. Only three (New Mexico, Maine and Maryland) are considered "safe" Democratic states this year.
To adopt the GOP "53%" rhetoric, if you live in the former Confederacy or Idaho, the overwhelming odds are that you're a leech and Mitt Romney doesn't want your fucking vote! You're precisely the kind of people that makes life so miserable for zillionaires like him and the only reason that his effective tax rate is as high as 13%.
The fact that the Democrats, and liberals generally, are too stupid or too afraid to point this out is the only reason that this election is as close as it is. The Tea Party, imbued as they are with every logical fallacy known to man, took over the Republican party without a fight.
His white undershirt and cute handwritten sign aside , Erick Erickson's three jobs are being on the radio, TV and running a blog that's owned by a fairly large publishing house, none of which exactly qualifies as grunt work. He's hardly in the economic hurt locker, but he likes to pretend that he is, just as he's a media elite that likes to piss and moan about media elites. While I doubt that he fits in Mitt Romney's definition of "middle income," I'll bet you that he makes a whole lot more than most of the people reading this are. And, If nothing else, at least Mitt Romney isn't silly enough to portray himself as some kind of working class hero.
I'm mystified by the chronic inability of liberals to demolish this shitty thinking and populist fuckheadery, but I've never thought much of their political skills to begin with. Recent U.S political history shows that liberals win elections because only when conservatives go out of their way to lose them.
Barack Obama is going to win in seven weeks not because he's such a charismatic supernova of a president. Christ, most liberals can barely stand him. Conservatives are going to lose because Mitt Romney is such mealy-mouthed swine. But the overwhelming likelihood is that we're not going to get wiped out. At least not yet.
That's likely to change in the very near future. This "47%" horseshit isn't just counter-intuitive, it's counter-factual, and demonstrably so. Republicans aren't going to be running against nutless wonders like Barack Obama forever. At some point, liberals are going to find themselves another Bill Clinton who will be able to rhetorically demolish the Republican base as not only bitchy welfare queens, addicted to their own self-imagined victimhood, but as ungrateful ones to boot.
If you look at your history, the United States has moved considerably to the right since 1960. Democrats, it should be remembered, were for broad-based tax cuts long before Republicans were. By any realistic measure, Bill Clinton - even at his worst - was more of a fiscal conservative than George Bush and his Republican Congress. Even Obamacare was essentially invented by the Heritage Foundation, the 1994 Republican Senate and Mitt Romney. As, for that matter, was Cap and Trade.
And those old people aren't even the Greatest Generation anymore. Now we're talking about the boomer assholes who did a grand total of nothing for the country. The same folks, including Mitt Romney, who did everything they could to avoid serving their country in Vietnam now couldn't be more determined to perverse the welfare state for their generation, the consequences of their own reckless disregard for everything on their own kids and grandkids be damned.
As I write this, the Occupy Wall Street tools are largely discredited and marginalized. In large part, that's because they don't have a charismatic leadership voice. The Right is making a terrible miscalculation in thinking that they someday won't.
Bill Clinton's demolition speech at the DNC should have been a huge warning sign to thoughtful conservatives. There are giant factual holes in the Tea Party's demagoguery that are going to kill us in the not-too-distant future.
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