It has always been hard for people with strong opinions to tolerate the discipline of electoral politics, which demands that they never speak their minds in public for fear of alienating some of the votes that you need. But it's getting harder: even at private gatherings, today's politicians are likely to be secretly recorded, so they must never reveal their true opinions.
The latest victim of this rule is Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for the U.S. presidency. He needed to feed some red meat to the people who had paid $50,000 a head to attend a fundraiser in May in Florida. They were not paying to have their views challenged. Still, he should have been more careful.
Blaming the failure of 19 years of negotiation to bring a peace settlement in the Arab-Israeli dispute entirely on the Palestinians was not going to get him in trouble at home. "The Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace," he said, which would be seen as a distortion of the truth in most parts of the world, but it does no harm to Romney domestically. Indeed, lots of Obama voters think that ,too.
Same goes for the bizarre scenario he drew about the alleged threat from Iran. "If I were Iran — a crazed fanatic — I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we'll just say, 'Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we're going to let off a dirty bomb'." In the United States this sort of discourse is routine. Romney will not get into any trouble with the electorate for this "gaffe".
Where it all went wrong was when he said, "There are 47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what," referring to the Americans who don't pay income tax. "There are 47% 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." The audience obviously believes that, and it's pretty likely Romney believes it himself, but it is not true.
If all of the 47% of Americans who do not pay income tax vote for Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, then the Republicans can never win an election unless everyone who pays income tax votes Republican.
Surely some taxpayers must vote Democratic, even if they are only Latinos, African-Americans, gays, women, Asians, union members and effete Eastern intellectuals. And some non-taxpayers certainly do vote Republican. In fact, the Republican Party's strategy has been to win white, working-class votes.
In Romney's view, his role "is not to worry about those people (the 47%). I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." If this is not outright contempt, it comes very close.
It was especially reckless of Romney to couch the whole discourse in terms of who pay taxes or doesn't. This from a man who has refused to release more than the past two years of his own tax returns. Why endure all the criticism if there was nothing to hide in the returns for the preceding years? Like, maybe, the possibility Romney paid no tax at all in those returns.
We can feel a certain sympathy for a man whose private remarks, shaped to appeal to an ultra-rich audience have been dragged into the public domain. But he should have known better. Almost invisible to him, was another group in that room who were not rich: the people who waited on the tables of the mighty.
It was almost certainly one of those helots who took the video. They are getting in everywhere.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
| 0% 0 votes | Mitt Romney  |
| 0% 0 votes | Barack Obama |
20 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://www.lfpress.com/2012/09/19/dyer-politicians-speak-frankly-at-their-peril
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