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Let Them Eat Crab Cake
by Maureen Dowd
SEPT. 18, 2012
Oh, for the days when we
thought Mitt Romney didn’t stand for anything.
As a secret video from a Boca
Raton fund-raiser with high rollers in May shows, Romney in private stands for
so many bizarre things that it’s hard to tell what’s crazier — his domestic
policy or his foreign policy.
Less than 50 days before the
election, we learn that Romney may have given up on half of America and on Mideast
peace.
In a reply to a fat cat at
the $50,000-a-plate dinner, he wrote off 47 percent of the country as
deadbeats, freeloaders and “victims” who feel they’re entitled to stuff — stuff
like basic sustenance.
“Well, there are 47 percent
of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” he said. “All
right? There are 47 percent who are with him. Who are dependent upon
government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has
a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they’re entitled to health
care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
The candidate, who pays so
little in taxes relative to his income that he has to hide tax returns and
money in Switzerland and the
Cayman Islands, then added, condescendingly:
“These are people who pay no income tax.”
“So my job is not to worry
about those people,” he blithely concluded. “I’ll never convince them that they
should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” What kind of
presidential candidate shrugs off wooing whole groups — we’re talking many
seniors and white-working-class voters in battleground states who are, if he
actually knew what he was talking about, his own natural constituencies?
A “stupid and arrogant” one,
as Bill Kristol, the editor of The
Weekly Standard, put it.
Conservatives knew that
Romney was no Reagan, but the tape left many Republicans and Obama strategists
gobsmacked. One top Democrat called it “a treasure trove of stupid answers.”
On Fox News Tuesday, Neil
Cavuto gently asked Romney if he had “prematurely” presumed that he couldn’t
get all of those voters. Mitt’s rambles to the donors, released by Mother Jones
magazine and, in a bit of poetic justice, unearthed by Jimmy Carter’s grandson,
were a stunning combination of wrong facts, callous sentiments and dumb
politics.
He seemed to have bought into
the warped canard that some conservatives inside and outside of Congress have
pushed: that the president and Nancy Pelosi were nefariously hooking people on
unemployment benefits so they’d get addicted and vote Democratic to keep the
unemployment bucks flowing like crack.
It’s literally rich: Willard,
born on third base and acting self-made, whining to the rich about what a great
deal in life the poor have.
We thought Romney was secretly moderate, but it turns
out that he’s secretly cruel, a social Darwinist just like his running mate. [emphasis added]
You’d assume that it would be
hard now for Romney to resume bashing President Obama for demonizing and
pandering on class warfare, with lines like he’s been using on the trail: “he
and his allies are pushing us all even further apart by dividing us into
groups.”
But, even as Mitt was
spitefully demonizing and dividing in Boca, he remained cardboard-cutout
un-self-aware, musing: “The thing which I find most disappointing about this
president is his attack of one America
against another America.”
This is the absolute height of cluelessness.
At another point in the
video, Romney once more showed his foreign policy jejuneness, questioning the
workability of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, which
is U.S. policy endorsed by W.
Mr. Sunshine said he
sometimes felt “that the Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in
establishing peace — and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to
accomplish.”
He continued: “You hope for
some degree of stability, but you recognize this is going to remain an unsolved
problem,” adding, “And we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately
somehow, something will happen to resolve it.”
Wow. That’s leadership. He
said a former secretary of state had called him to suggest that after the
Palestinian elections there might be a prospect for a settlement, but that “I
didn’t delve into it.”
After months of doggedly
trying to seem more likable, sharing his guilty pleasures like Reese’s Peanut
Butter Cups and Snooki, Romney came across as a mean geek, a Cranbrook kid at the country club smugly
swaddled in class disdain. He thinks being president is his manifest destiny.
His father didn’t make it, so he will — no matter what far-out conservative
positions he must graft on to in order to do it.
We’re in search of the real
Romney. But, disturbingly, so is he.
One thing we have to give
Mitt, though: He is, as advertised, a brilliant manager. He’s managed to ensure
that President Obama has a much better chance of re-election.
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