Wednesday, September 19, 2012

The ‘47 Percent’ Flap

“Here was Romney raw and unplugged — sort of unscripted,” writes David Corn of Mother Jones about the newly released video of Mitt Romney at a Boca Raton fundraising event in May. “With this crowd of fellow millionaires, he apparently felt free to utter what he really believes and would never dare say out in the open.”
It’s not that simple. As citizens become more interested in what our prospective presidents really believe, politicians become more guarded about sharing their beliefs. If everyone wants to look behind the mask, the incentives lead hyper-ambitious but hyper-cautious politicians to wear layers of masks. Corn’s idea that a presidential candidate at a fundraising event is baring his soul is either tendentious, since it helps Corn condemn Romney as a callous plutocrat, or naïve. A more plausible interpretation is that the video finds Romney giving one more speech to one more audience, calibrating, as all politicians must: the message he wants to deliver; the message that particular audience desires and is capable of hearing; and the result he’s hoping for, which is usually votes, but sometimes the investment of money, effort, or enthusiasm.
The contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney now features symmetrical embarrassing, surreptitious tapes from fundraisers. Barack Obama’s remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser in April 2008 about the “bitter” people in the small towns of Pennsylvania and the Midwest who “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” is one bookend. Romney’s discourse on the “47 percent who are with [Obama], 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” is the other.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/327800/47-percent-flap-william-voegeli

No comments: