Mitt Romney Reads the Margin Notes
Rob Long wrote a fantastic piece in 2010 about George H.W. Bush's "Message: I care" moment in the 1992 campaign which came to mind this week in relation to Mitt Romney's "I'm not concerned with the very poor" line, sure to be aired again and again in the fall's negative ad apocalypse.
The full quote from Romney's response to a followup query about his initial line (clear? clear!) is the problem for me:
“I said I’m not concerned about the very poor that have a safety net, but if it has holes in it, I will repair them. We will hear from the Democratic party the plight of the poor, and there’s no question it’s not good being poor, and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor. But my campaign is focused on middle-income Americans. My campaign — you can choose on where to focus. You can focus on the rich — that’s not my focus. You can focus on the very poor, that’s not my focus. …We have a very ample safety net and we can talk about whether it needs to be strengthened or whether it has holes in it. We have food stamps, we have Medicaid, we have housing vouchers, we have programs to help the poor…”
There are three ways, as I see it, to read Romney's words. One is as a misstatement, a subroutine error - like 57 states, "oops", or any other typical politician gaffe. This is not true here - Romney repeated the statement again in the same interview, and followed it up by defending the idea.
Another is as poor phrasing - a statement that makes sense, but taken out of context, can be tone-deaf or damaging (Romney's "I like to fire people" line is one of these). Romney seems to be indicating that his comment was one of these two - saying that he "misspoke".
But a third possibility, and one that is more concerning here, is a statement of unintentional honesty - one that reveals or illustrates an unpopular but accurate depiction of a candidate's views. These often occur when a candidate reads the liner notes, as Rob describes, sharing what they really think about a situation in unfortunately blunt language. Here was how Romney defended it yesterday:
“No, no, no, no,” Romney protested when asked about his statement. “I’ve said throughout the campaign my focus, my concern, my energy is going to be devoted to helping middle- income people, all right?” He said poor people have an “ample safety net,” including Medicaid, housing vouchers, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.
“If there are people that are falling through the cracks, I want to fix that,” Romney said. “Wealthy people are doing fine. But my focus in the campaign is on middle-income people.”
I believe Romney's statement falls into this third category. It's the sort of thing a consultant could frame in a back room or note in the margins of a speech - that a candidate should remember to focus on middle class concerns to win an election. Romney's policies already are focused on this approach - it's why, for instance, that he doesn't don't cut the capital gains for people making more than $200,000 on the high end, or talk about food stamps (he cites them as a positive above) or education policy on the low end.
Here's the problem: shared publicly, the comment doesn't just seem tone deaf and heartless (who, even non-politicians, ever says they don't care about the poor?). It indicates, as Charles Krauthammer notes, that Romney has no ability to defend conservative arguments when it comes to poor Americans. Plugging the holes in the nationwide safety net with taxpayer money is his solution, just as subsidies and Medicaid expansion was his solution in Massachusetts.
Given that President Obama has added so many to this category, this is yet another area where Romney seems particularly ill-equipped to make the case for conservative values. We are a far cry from the moment when Ronald Reagan - whose liner note reading was rare indeed - said that "Welfare's purpose should be to eliminate, as far as possible, the need for its own existence."
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Comments :
Aug '11
Re: Mitt Romney Reads the Margin Notes
Franco:
But if this guy is going to go around talking like this, and make everyone else have to explain what he really meant, he's not the right candidate at all.
Actually, that's one thing that really bothers me. The guy is making a lot of clumsy, tone-deaf statements, and it's left to his supporters to explain what he really meant.
That is not a good place for a candidate to be.
Dec '11
Re: Mitt Romney Reads the Margin Notes
Romney's deficiency is in the way he understands the current disorder. He thinks in terms of government taking care of different sectors.
Reagan, and even JFK, understood that restoring good order produces healthy, robust economic growth and prosperity. Thus, the proper remedy benefits everybody. During robust economic growth there is always a shortage of quality labor. Then, businesses have to hire and train the less qualified and unskilled.
Romney's margin notes should read, "A RISING TIDE LIFTS ALL BOATS" ...on every page AND between every paragraph.
May '10
Re: Mitt Romney Reads the Margin Notes
Romney may be mildly tone-deaf on the "feeling" and melancholic temperament scales, everyone has weaknesses.
Ben needs to get used to it, though, because he is going to lose his bet on "the field", apparently for the very first time.
Oct '10
Re: Mitt Romney Reads the Margin Notes
Jon Stewart reaction to Romney's CLARIFICATION of the 'safety net' remark:
Sep '10
Re: Mitt Romney Reads the Margin Notes
Stop calling me a Racist, Please
Is this from his book, "After America" ? · 6 hours ago
That is from a post at The Corner this week. He went on to say:
Sep '10
Re: Mitt Romney Reads the Margin Notes
A lot of people misinterpreted Newt's big moment with Juan Williams in SC as another "I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take this anymore" moment with the media. I don't think it's why the response drew cheers. It was because Newt argued without any guilt a full-throated case for the conservative ideal of giving someone the tools to work their way out from the bottom and not accept the status quo.
Whether he meant it or not, Romney sounded like a big government liberal and guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations.