Guns, Religion, and the 47 Percent

When he thought no media people were listening, Governor Mitt Romney said this:

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. 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect… 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.

Governor Romney’s percentages may be a little low.  Economist Robert Samuelson has suggested during the past year that perhaps as many as 56 percent of Americans receive some kind of “direct support” from the U.S. Government.  That would include all categories of support including food stamps, farm supports, military retirements, veterans benefits, and the like (it is not just welfare).  It might be a higher percentage if one calculates all the forms of tax expense in other areas; and this does not even speak to state and local supports and tax breaks.  I assume a good portion of these “56 percenters” do, in fact, pay income taxes. If there is anything noteworthy about what Mitt Romney said, it is his apparent view that anyone who receives some kind of government benefit check does not pay income taxes.

Of course, what Mitt Romney was doing was playing the old political game of firing up your own base, especially that portion of the base with big money, by trashing the other party’s base.  He is not alone.  We should recall the remarks by Candidate Obama four years ago (also when he thought no media people were listening) about those conservatives who “cling to guns and religion.”  I am sure his remarks got a chuckle from his wealthy supporters, just as Mitt Romney’s remarks did among his own money base.

I am not sure that everyone who makes off-the-cuff remarks should be subject to intense media scrutiny, but then again, not everyone is running for president.  So perhaps presidential candidates ought to be more circumspect.  After all, making these kinds of comments among close friends makes one look a tad immature.  It brings back visions of high school, where a clique of mean girls is glaring down the hall at some poor girl and saying “Oh my God, can you believe she wore THAT?”  The girl who wore THAT might have been hurt at the time, but probably because she did not realize the comment was not truly directed at her.  Instead, it was a tribal ritual designed to keep the clique together—it had nothing to do with her.

Now, we find in the candid remarks of Governor Romney that he is interested, just like President Obama, in the real prize of simply getting elected.  Like Candidate Obama who was caught four years ago snickering about those who “cling to guns and religion,” Candidate Romney is caught ridiculing those “dependent” people who will not vote Republican.  In both cases, we see candidates simply counting votes and states.  They both know they cannot count on wooing what they see as the base of the other party, so they play the sport of making fun of those benighted folks on the other side who could not possibly possess intelligence.  They are only playing this game for their own team.  They know that in team sports, like in mean-girl cliques, getting the fans to denigrate the other team’s players (and fans) is all part of working the crowd. 

Of course, instead of trading barbs about the supporters of the other candidate, one would hope that the candidates might talk about issues.  In a roundabout way, Mitt Romney has opened the door for doing so with his remarks about the “47 percent” of people supposedly living off the government dole.  The Simpson-Bowles Commission, chartered by President Obama, and including membership by Congressman (now VP Candidate) Ryan, had some common-sense, if necessarily simplistic, prescriptions.  However, in spite of that (or perhaps because of it), the Commission report was never officially accepted (Paul Ryan was one of several members who refused to endorse it) and both the President and Congress gave it a polite shove-off.  That was nearly two years ago, in December 2010. 

The next president will face not only the growing crisis that Simpson-Bowles tried to address, but he will face the immediate crisis of working with Congress to avoid the $1.3 trillion “fiscal cliff” of sequestration that resulted from the failure of the “super committee” in Congress to agree on some kind of balance of revenue increases and/or budget cuts.  Even that might not be enough of a crisis.  At some point, probably when our debt becomes much larger and unsustainable, when we cannot sell our bonds without the enticement of high interest rates, when Social Security is crumbling down, leaders from both parties will realize the real issues are obvious and they must act like adults.  Until then, this adolescent bullying is the stuff will be treated to, and we will be asked to believe that some person’s off-the-cuff remarks are really remarkable.  They are not remarkable, but most assuredly, they will be remarked upon.