The Real Romney: A Sneering Plutocrat

By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine

18 September 12

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnB0NZzl5HA

residential campaigns wallow so tediously in pseudo-events and manufactured outrage that our senses can be numbed to the appearance of something genuinely momentous. Mitt Romney's secretly recorded comments at a fund-raiser are such an event - they reveal something vital about Romney, and they disqualify his claim to the presidency.

To think of Romney's leaked discourse as a "gaffe" grossly misdescribes its importance. Indeed the comments' direct impact on the outcome of the election will probably be small. Romney repeated the wildly misleading but increasingly popular conservative talking point that 47 percent of Americans pay no income taxes. The federal income tax is, by design, one of the most progressive elements of the American tax system, but well over 80 percent of non-retired adults pay federal taxes. But most people hear "income taxes" and think "taxes," which is why the trick of using one phrase to make audiences think of the other is a standard GOP trick when discussing taxes. For that very reason, it won't strike many voters as an insult: Most people who don't pay income taxes do pay other taxes, and fail to distinguish between them, and thus don't consider themselves among the 47 percent scorned by Romney.

Instead the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. ("I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.")

It is possible to cling to some version of this dogma and still believe, or to convince yourself, that cutting taxes for the rich or reducing benefits for the poor will eventually help the latter, by teaching them personal responsibility or freeing up Job Creators to favor them with opportunity. Instead Romney regards them as something akin to a permanent enemy class - "I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

Romney explained to reporters tonight that his remarks were not "elegantly stated," but did not repudiate them as his true beliefs. In fact, it was quite eloquently stated. The Romney speaking to fund-raisers was not the halting, smarmy figure so frequently on public display but an eloquent and passionate orator. He had no reason to believe his donors needed to hear him denounce the poor - they would have been perfectly satisfied with a bromide about how cutting taxes on the rich will create opportunity for one and all. Instead he put himself forward as the hopeful president of the top half of America against the bottom.

Some pundits have likened Romney's comments to Barack Obama's 2008 monologue, also secretly recorded at a fund-raiser, about his difficulties with white working class voters in rural Pennsylvania. But the spirit of Obama's remarks was precisely the opposite of Romney's. While Obama couched his beliefs in condescending sociological analysis about how poor small town residents vote on the basis of guns and religion rather than economics, the thrust of Obama's argument was that he believed his policies would help them, and to urge his supporters to make common cause with them:

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they 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.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background - there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing.

Obama was aspiring to become president of all of America, even that part most hostile to him, in the belief that what they shared mattered more than what divided them. Romney genuinely seems to conceive of the lowest-earning half of the population as implacably hostile parasites.

The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he'd come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney's embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.

Romney's Apology Frame

By George Lakoff, Elisabeth Wehling, Reader Supported News

17 September 12

itt Romney responded to the recent Cairo events with an apology frame. America, he said, must never apologize for its values, and he claimed that the Obama administration was apologizing when it pointed out a moral constraint on free speech.

One of the things Americans are taught in grammar school about free speech is that there are legal and moral limits to it. The example usually given is: "You don't shout 'Fire!' in a crowded theater." There are legal and moral constraints on incendiary free speech.

In the case of the recent anti-Islamic video, The Innocence of Islam, which was certainly incendiary, the legal framework doesn't apply. However, the moral framework does. The video not only violated the American principle of freedom of religion, it was intended to incite violence in the Islamic world. It did, and the chain of causation led to the killing of our Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, as well as the death of at least two demonstrators in Tunisia, three in Sudan and one in Lebanon.

The American legal principle of free speech does not cover such cases of immoral incendiary speech. We have no laws against them. Indeed, our laws protect even immoral cases like the present one, lest too tight a line be drawn around our freedom of speech.

The Cairo embassy, President Obama, and Secretary of State Clinton responded appropriately to the events. They rightly condemned the content and intention of the video on the grounds of the American principle of freedom of religion, and they rightly condemned the violence against our embassies. Clinton drew a clear line between verbal and physical attacks, saying that violence is never sanctioned as a response to verbal attack. And she pointed out that, in America, freedom of speech is so fundamental a value that it extends even to such immoral cases.

Mitt Romney used the occasion of the Cairo and Libyan events to attack President Obama and the Administration for what he called "apologizing" for American principles and thereby showing weakness. Other conservatives, especially Fox News commentators, backed him up and adopted the apology frame. Here is the sequence of events that led to Romney's first use of that frame.

In response to the video before any violence occurred, the Cairo embassy tried to head off violence with the following statement:

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims -- as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. Today, the 11th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, Americans are honoring our patriots and those who serve our nation as the fitting response to the enemies of democracy. Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.

After the violent breach of the embassy and before the events in Libya, the Cairo embassy released the following on Twitter: "This morning's condemnation (issued before the protest began) still stands. As does our condemnation of unjustified breach of the Embassy."

In short, to head off the violence, the embassy issued a condemnation of the video and of any degradation of religious beliefs, upholding "the universal right of free speech." After the violence, the embassy confirmed the statement and condemned the violence.

Romney framed this embassy statement as "the White House response," accusing Obama and the administration of "apologizing for American values." He called this "a disgraceful statement on the part of our administration to apologize for American values," and said that the embassy statement was "apologizing for the right of free speech."

Here is Romney's logic: The embassy -- and the President -- should have defended the video absolutely on the basis of the American principle of free speech, despite its content and intention, instead of condemning the video with a defense of the American principle of freedom of religion -- even though the content and intention of the video led not only to four American deaths, but also the deaths of protestors and injuries of both protestors and security personnel. In Romney's frame, anything short of a complete defense of the video on free speech grounds is an "apology."

For Romney, this framing is anything but new, given his 2010 book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, which argues at length that greatness is constituted not through diplomacy but through "strong leadership" that amounts to military and economic intimidation. Romney used the exact same framing when he argued that Obama's initial diplomacy tour in 2009 was "an apology tour."

Later on, when the facts about Cairo and Libya came in, Romney switched to the administration's position. But his apology rhetoric is still to be found on Fox News and conservative blog comments. The apology frame is not going away because it fits a general conservative frame for international policy.

For Romney and other conservatives, diplomacy is more often than not a sign of weakness. Anything short of America imposing its will, its interests, and its values on other nations is a "failure of leadership" and weakness. Moreover, the Christian right has been waging an attack on Islam in general, stereotyping it unfairly in extremist terms. To defend the anti-Islamic video as "free speech" without condemning its content is implicitly supporting the right-wing stereotyping of Islam.

The media on the whole has rightly criticized Romney as jumping the gun and using a national tragedy for political purposes.

But Romney's remarks are even worse than that. They violate what legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron has called democracy's "affirmative responsibility for protecting the atmosphere of mutual respect against certain forms of vicious attack."

Romney's use of "apology" for diplomacy will continue to surface. Here is what Romney said in his book: [Obama] "has apologized for what he deems to be American arrogance, dismissiveness, and derision; for dictating solutions, for acting unilaterally, and for acting without regard for others; for treating other countries as mere proxies, for unjustly interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, and for feeding anti-Muslim sentiments; for committing torture, for dragging our feet on global warming and for selectively promoting democracy." A great many other Americans agree with Obama that such an approach to foreign policy must end because it does not lead to peace.

There is a clear division here on what American foreign policy should be. America, Romney suggests, should continue those behaviors that characterize a foreign policy based on force and intimidation as opposed to treating other nations with the respect required for effective diplomacy and the protection of human life around the world.

The Heritage Foundation, when discussing President Obama's diplomacy efforts in 2009, used the apology frame that also Romney adopted: "Apologizing for your own country projects an image of weakness before both allies and enemies. It sends a very clear signal that the U.S. is to blame for some major developments on the world stage. This can be used to the advantage of those who wish to undermine American global leadership."

Romney's statement has to be seen in this larger context. It does not merely reflect Romney's attitude and it is not just about this political moment. The frame he chose reflects a core belief among extreme conservatives about foreign policy, diplomacy, and America's role in the world.

Romney's framing of the events goes far beyond an attempt to score political points in the midst of a national tragedy. It is intended to strengthen extreme conservative beliefs about American foreign policy. Why no apologies? Because America, operating under conservative ideology, is seen as the world's ultimate legitimate authority, whose actions define what is right. Therefore, there should be no need to apologize for doing what is right, and since that authority must be maintained, it would be wrong to apologize even if an apology were warranted. Even operating diplomatically, with real mutual respect, would be showing weakness by giving up the authority that should be maintained in all negotiations. That is a view that poses a real danger to peace both in the US and abroad.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.