Did Mitt Romney Just Lose the Election?

Obama's characterisation of Romney being the kind of person to "shoot first, aim later" appears to be something of an understatement, and in no time at all the selection of an Ayn Rand fanatic for a VP nominee begins to make political and ideological sense. From someone wanting to be president, this is unbe-fucking-lievable:



And it doesn't stop there. This just one of the clips released by Mother Jones, for whose staff this kind of a scoop is a big deal. Already, I can hear the cries of liberal conspiracy. But there's no getting around this: in May at a private fundraiser Mitt Romney told his financier supporters that half of Americans — the ones who voted for Barack Obama — are freeloaders who pay no income tax, who take no responsibility for their own lives, and who think that they are entitled to every conceivable basic need and amenity under the federal government. His job, he intoned, "is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Well, at least this unseen Romney has the candor that has been so lacking in his campaign. I hope Romney has a sufficiently strong grasp on irony to fathom the hypocrisy of being bitched to about entitlement by rich Republicans in hotel ballrooms. And maybe that's unfair of me, but Americans — even Republicans — should be livid about this. Did Mitt Romney just lose the election? I have absolutely no idea. But it isn't good.

The whole thing got awkward when Romney was faced with the opportunity to respond to leak of the video the video, which he did:

So it’s a question and answer as I recall about the process of the campaign and how I’m going to get the 51 or 52 percent I need and I point out it’s by focusing on those folks that are neither in his camp nor in my camp. Of course there’s a very different approach of the two different campaigns, as I point out I recognize that among those that pay no tax, approximately 47 percent of Americans, I’m not likely to be highly successful with the message of lowering taxes. That’s not as attractive to those who don’t pay income taxes as it is to those who do. And likewise those who are reliant on government are not as attracted to my message of slimming down the size of government. And so I then focus on those individuals who I believe are most likely to be able to be pulled into my camp and help me win the 51 or 50.1 percent that I need to become the next President.

So I take it that we can count Willard himself among that 47 per cent? Apart from anything else, the figure is hugely misrepresented:

Mr. Romney’s figure of 47 percent comes from the Tax Policy Center, which found that 46.4 percent of households paid no federal income tax in 2011. But most households did pay payroll taxes. Of the 18.1 percent of households that paid neither income taxes nor payroll taxes, the center found that more than half were elderly and more than a third were not elderly but had income under $20,000. Roberton Williams, a senior fellow at the center, wrote in a blog post last summer that about half of those were off the rolls because they had low incomes.

Romney and Ryan, in their own ways, have expressed this in some form or another for some time: the outright lie that half of America take no responsibility for their lives, which of course is inconsistent with the assertion that they pay no income tax, which is true. In Romney's mind, apparently, these two ideas are inseparable. It's just the latest in a long run of public failures on his part to display empathy, or even a basic understanding of what it even means to be poor. The difference between Romney's own lack of contributions to the federal government and those of the 47 percent, however, is simple. They can't, he won't.

This is what he really thinks. No matter what you make of it, I'm sure we can agree that it's nice to finally know what he and the other people who are prepared to take "responsibility" for their own lives really think of everyone else.