Romney: 47% of Americans are victims

[dirk digler]

I guess this maybe the kill shot for his campaign. I know some of you believe you this and won't find a problem with what he said but as a person running for POTUS you probably shouldn't write off 1/2 the country especially in a disparaging way.

A hidden camera video of Mitt Romney at a fundraiser shows him talking disparagingly of people who will vote for President Obama.

Said Romney: "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the 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. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what...These are people who pay no income tax."

He adds: "My job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

[SNR]

Originally Posted by Literature

Scare tactics. I think that's a good marketing move for the Romney campaign.

Video of Greece/London-like riots. Camera falls on a child roaming the streets in ragged clothes amidst the violence. Child turns head and stares back at camera, slowly zooming into face. In a fade, there's a flashback. The camera is focused on a younger child being held in his mother's arms (it's the roaming child, a couple years earlier). Camera shot of mother in voting booth. Cut to mother's ballot, we see her check "Barack Obama," and slide the ballot into the voting slot. Mother walks out. Camera follows, then is still, watches the mother and child walk out, and child turns head and stares back at camera.

Cut to black screen. Then the words: The future is in your hands. Still screen. A sober voice. "I'm Mitt Romney, and I approve this message."

[La literatura]

Originally Posted by BIG_DADDY

You think our debt/spending is a scare tactic? This is where these discussions end. YOu obviously have a serious issue in dealing with reality.

No, I think debt/spending is a serious discussion. I think "He will bring the whole system down" is a scare tactic.

[DoucheMcCloud]

Originally Posted by BIG_DADDY

You think our debt/spending is a scare tactic? This is where these discussions end. YOu obviously have a serious issue in dealing with reality.

I think the debt issue is a bunch of political nonsense.

90% of the debt is to ourselves. In addition to that, we have so many countries that owe us trillions of dollars that it really is a scare tactic.

Now, do I think there should be a Balanced Budget? Absolutely. Do I think we need a strong debt reduction plan? You bet your ass. But I think "The Debt" has been overly politicized.

[Direckshun]

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/09...plutocrat.html

The Real Romney Captured On Tape Turns Out To Be A Sneering Plutocrat
By Jonathan Chait
Yesterday at 10:26 PM

Presidential campaigns wallow so tediously in pseudo-events and manufactured outrage that our senses can be numbed to the appearance of something genuinely momentous. Mitt Romney’s secretly recorded comments at a fundraiser are such an event – they reveal something vital about Romney, and they disqualify his claim to the presidency.

To think of Romney’s leaked discourse as a “gaffe” grossly misdescribes its importance. Indeed the comments’ direct impact on the outcome of the election will probably be small. Romney repeated the wildly misleading but increasingly popular conservative talking point that 47% of Americans pay no income taxes. The federal income tax is, by design, one of the most progressive elements of the American tax system, but well over 80% of non-retired adults pay federal taxes. But most people hear “income taxes” and think “taxes,” which is why the trick of using one phrase to make audiences think of the other is a standard GOP trick when discussing taxes. For that very reason, it won’t strike many voters as an insult: Most people who don’t pay income taxes do pay other taxes, and fail to distinguish between them, and thus don’t consider themselves among the 47% scorned by Romney.

Instead the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)

It is possible to cling to some version of this dogma and still believe, or to convince yourself, that cutting taxes for the rich or reducing benefits for the poor will eventually help the latter, by teaching them personal responsibility or freeing up Job Creators to favor them with opportunity. Instead Romney regards them as something akin to a permanent enemy class – “I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Romney explained to reporters tonight that his remarks were not "elegantly stated," but did not repudiate them as his true beliefs. In fact, it was quite eloquently stated. The Romney speaking to fundraisers was not the halting, smarmy figure so frequently on public display but an eloquent and passionate orator. He had no reason to believe his donors needed to hear him denounce the poor — they would have been perfectly satisfied with a bromide about how cutting taxes on the rich will create opportunity for one and all. Instead he put himself forward as the hopeful president of the top half of America against the bottom.

Some pundits have likened Romney’s comments to Barack Obama’s 2008 monologue, also secretly recorded at a fundraiser, about his difficulties with white working class voters in rural Pennsylvania. But the spirit of Obama’s remarks was precisely the opposite of Romney’s. While Obama couched his beliefs in condescending sociological analysis about how poor small town residents vote on the basis of guns and religion rather than economics, the thrust of Obama’s argument was that he believed his policies would help them, and to urge his supporters to make common cause with them:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background -- there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.

Obama was aspiring to become president of all of America, even that part most hostile to him, in the belief that what they shared mattered more than what divided them. Romney genuinely seems to conceive of the lowest-earning half of the population as implacably hostile parasites.

The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.

[ChiefsCountry]

Should have used different words but its in a ****ing private meeting. But its pretty true for the most I say 45% on both sides are going to vote one way and then around 10% swing the election either one way or another.

[Iowanian]

I see what he said as significantly less disparaging than essentially calling successful Americans thieves for "not paying their share" when a significant percentage of our population who COULD be pulling their weight aren't trying to do so and take from the very pool of producers Obama and the dems attempt to color as crooks.

Originally Posted by dirk digler

I don't disagree with much of what you posted but he certainly disparaged half the country with him calling people victims and they don't want to take personal responsibility.

There is no question that there is lazy people that try to scam the system and don't want to work but they are part of both parties or no party. They aren't exclusive to Democrats or Obama supporters.

It would be interesting to see some hidden video from Obama, Biden or their lap dogs at fund raisers...............

[Direckshun]

Originally Posted by ChiefsCountry

But its pretty true for the most I say 45% on both sides are going to vote one way and then around 10% swing the election either one way or another.

Nobody's disagreeing with the numbers. Hell, I'd say it's even more narrow than that.

People are disagreeing with the idea that the 47% in the tank for Obama are doing so because they are societal leeches.

That's what's hilarious about Romney's statement: he simultaneously (a.) insults the libruls as pretty much being exclusively teet-suckers, and (b.) insults anybody in society who is not well-off, from those mired in poverty, to the elderly, to a sizable number of folks in the middle class.

That's two nerves with one stone, and it shows a shocking complacency to the plight of the less fortunate Americans among us.

Romney/Ryan 2012: You're on your own.

[Iowanian]

I understand that your heart is in the right place, it's just that your head is in your ass.

[Direckshun]

Originally Posted by Iowanian

I see what he said as significantly less disparaging than essentially calling successful Americans thieves for "not paying their share" when a significant percentage of our population who COULD be pulling their weight aren't trying to do so and take from the very pool of producers Obama and the dems attempt to color as crooks.

Look at what you said earlier.

You saw first hand, as I would imagine many of the folks on this forum who have lived in any sort of poverty, that many people in that class are doing what they can to improve their lives.

The 47% includes those many folks you say you admired in poverty. It also includes the elderly. It also includes a lot of folks in the middle class who just aren't well-off-enough to escape Romney's ire.

If you want to paint half the United States as leeching moochers, you're going to lose in November.

And that's why Romney/Ryan is going to lose in November.

[ChiefsCountry]

Originally Posted by Direckshun

That's what's hilarious about Romney's statement: he simultaneously (a.) insults the libruls as pretty much being exclusively teet-suckers,

Majority of conservatives beleive that.

[DoucheMcCloud]

Originally Posted by ChiefsCountry

Majority of conservatives beleive that.

I think they believe that in certain parts of the country but I don't think they believe that everywhere.

[Direckshun]

Originally Posted by Direckshun

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/index.html

No coverage.

Not even on their blog, "America's Election Headquarters," the "front row seat" to politics.

Still none, by the way.

[Comrade Crapski]

Originally Posted by Dallas Chief

I know it isn't. You have a problem with the truth? Wait... yeah. You are part of that 47% that he wasn't going to get anyway so what the hell does it matter to you. Nothing he could say or do would sway you anyway so why even bother. The only way you vote for him is if Obama turned up on To Catch a Predator, and still maybe not even then.

Why would that stop an O-Bot from voting for him? He's actually done worse already.

[DoucheMcCloud]

There are only seven more weeks until the election and Romney continues to dig himself a bigger and bigger hole with comments like these. If he continues, this could become a Reagan-style beatdown.

I don't dislike the guy but I do believe he's the weakest presidential candidate since Walter Mondale. And yes, that included Dukakis, Gore and Kerry.

[DoucheMcCloud]

Originally Posted by Tom.Jay61

Why would that stop an O-Bot from voting for him? He's actually done worse already.

You don't need to love Obama in order to not like Romney.