Why did Mitt Romney lose the 2012 election
he was so certain he could win by appealing almost entirely to angry,
aging white men?
America, it turns out, isn’t nearly as uniformly white as its white
residents have long imagined it to be. Women, African-Americans,
Latinos, and Asians (as well as young voters of both genders and all
ethnic groups) had a much larger say in this election than the Romney
campaign calculated. Barack Obama’s “noisy, messy, complicated”
democracy of 300 million people bears what he called, in his brilliant
victory speech, “a mark of our liberty” in the very contentiousness that
so polarizes us.
“The story of this election is that the Republican Party has not kept
up with the changing face of America,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd proclaimed
just after the nation’s first black president won reelection.
The improving economy played a part in Obama’s stunning victory, as
did the success in Midwestern states of his auto bailout, his
foreign-policy experience, and his quick, effective, and compassionate
response to Hurricane Sandy. Romney’s consistently high negative ratings
(over everything from his obvious mendacity and persistent
flip-flopping to his unsavory “vulture capitalist” career, obsessive
secrecy about both his wealth and his taxes, refusal to provide any
substantive details about the policies he might pursue as president, and
repellent, robotic personality) certainly made voters less likely to
trust him or view him as “presidential.”
“But make no mistake,” Todd opined. “What happened last night was a
demographic time bomb that had been ticking and that blew up in GOP
faces.” The white portion of the electorate dropped to 72 percent, Todd
noted, and the president won only 39 percent of that vote. Among other
demographic groups, however, Obama rode the crest of an unstoppable wave
of change.
Obama carried 93 percent of black voters (now 13 percent of the electorate).
Obama won 71 percent of Latinos (10 percent)
nationwide; about 70 percent of the Latino vote in Colorado and Nevada;
and 60 percent in Florida, despite the large number of Cuban-American
Republicans in the state’s population.
The president won 73 percent of Asians (3 percent of the electorate).
Despite predictions that youth turnout would be depressed because
young voters were believed to have become disillusioned with the
president’s policies, voters in the 18-29 demographic represented 19 percent of the 2012 electorate (up from 18 percent in 2008); Obama won 60 percent of that age group.
The American people won this election, fair and square. Despite a GOP
strategy of blatant racism and xenophobia, a broad-based voter
suppression machine that put Jim Crow to shame, the “caging” of targeted
groups from voter rolls, actual election fraud committed by a shady
voter-registration firm used repeatedly (and under different names) by
the Republican National Committee and various GOP candidates (including
Romney) since the 2004 election, and a coordinated voter intimidation
effort in swing states, Democrats and left-leaning independents toughed
out enough attempts to thwart their votes that they were able to
outnumber Republicans in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia,
Nevada, and, thus far, Florida — every other battleground state but
Indiana and North Carolina.
There simply weren’t enough white voters remaining in the electorate
to dominate the vote in the nine swing states. A working coalition of
single women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and young voters
collaborated to defeat Romney and Republican Senate candidates in state
after state.
Twenty years ago, said Fox’s Bill O’Reilly in a desperate attempt to save face, “an establishment
candidate like Mitt Romney would have trounced Obama.” As bigoted and
uncharitable as O’Reilly was about the black, Latino, and female voters
who “feel that the economic system is stacked against them” and “feel
they are entitled to things,” O’Reilly had a point.
Romney won 61 percent of the white vote last night, said Todd. The
last candidate to win with that high a percentage of the white vote was
George H.W. Bush in 1988. Since then, the share of the white vote in the
general electorate has shrunk, and 61 percent of a shrinking slice of
the electoral pie no longer puts GOP candidates in the White House.
“The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly lamented.
“The demographics of the country have changed. It’s not a traditional
America any more.”
An anonymous comment following the Daily Beast’s story about Mitt Romney’s “bust” of a “victory party” elaborated on the point:
“The most telling aspect of Romney’s election night
gathering is (that) just about every single person in the audience was
white. The GOP is going to have to learn that they will not win if they
do not court our racial minorities, and to court them means to give up
on their racial bias. It’s politics, people; you are supposed to
represent your constituency, and if you do not do that, you are going to
continue to fail.”
This country’s been way too white for way too long. It was engendered
as a melting pot, but an unequal one. Now, with the reelection of
America’s first black president, the path that leads away from a
government of, by, and for old, wealthy white men is well on its way to
being leveled. This societal upheaval has inspired a great, ragged cry
of protest from the privileged few who are being inexorably replaced —
not by revolution or the “reparations” they’ve imagined being expected
to pay, but by the births of “non-white” children (whose “right to life”
remains the near-universal obsession of the very people who most resist
immigration, integration, and assimilation).
I call them “world children.” The urban block I live on is a virtual
“United Nations” of racial and ethnic backgrounds. My neighbors’ son,
Sir William, 7, is French-Canadian and African-American. Becky, 8, who
adores my dog, Zoe, and dresses her up in costumes, has a Mexican
mother, Remedios, and a Honduran father, Jesus. Amanda, 10, is
Afro-Caribbean and Dominican. MacKenzie, 6, and Natalia, 4, are Irish,
Portuguese, Cherokee, and black. Jovaughan, 9, and his little sisters,
are Haitian; while Elijah, 5, and Joelle, 2, have an African-American
father and an Irish mother.
My baby grandaughter, Dulcinea,1, is Italian, Scotch-Irish,
Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Palestinian. My husband’s two grown children,
Kailey, 26, and Alexander, 23, are French-Canadian, Irish, and Jewish.
These children are the future of an electorate that, by 2040, will
cross the invisible threshhold from “majority white” to “majority other.”
No longer “illegal” or “alien,” their varied and blended ethnicities
may one day succeed in eradicating the scourge of racism from a country
where everyone, after all, is originally from somewhere else.
Ssshh! A moment of silence, please. Turn down that racket from
incessant campaign ads and warring TV pundits (if you didn’t already
lose your cable service to a gargantuan maple tree toppled by Hurricane
Sandy, as I did Monday afternoon).
You wouldn’t want to miss the sound of one hand clapping, a paradox
that developed when poor Mittens had no one to play partisan patty-cake
with. His good buddy from New Jersey abandoned the Tea Party games that
MittWit had talked him into playing. The frivolity got too preposterous
and infantile for Mitt’s BFF to stomach, so he ran off to join the grown-ups who had finally reached across the aisle to begin solving the country’s problems.
In the eerie hush of an early Halloween twilight — without lights,
heat, and background noise in the millions of households without power —
you could almost hear Mitt Romney fuming, all the way from Ohio, over
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s treachery.
Obama & Christie: emerging ‘power couple’
NJ Gov. Chris Christie & President Barack Obama after the storm.
The news teemed with post-disaster anecdotes about “Sandy’s political odd couple,”
Christie and his unlikely ally President Barack Obama, who worked in
tandem to coordinate the relief effort and flew together in Marine One
to tour parts of New Jersey devastated when the hurricane made landfall
there. And just look who’s green with “envy” now, absorbing the
spectacle of political polar opposites patting each other on the back, a
freaking mutual admiration society!
“Seeing him with Chris Christie is tearing me apart,” satirist Andy Borowitz
imagined a steamed Mittster venting. (The nerve of Mitt’s own
convention keynote speaker, defecting to the enemy camp just one week
before Election Day to call a truce in electoral hostilities over a
freaking windstorm!)
Storm of the century sidelines Mitt from headlines
Mitt Romney
“Frankenstorm” is over, leaving a grim tally of casualties and destruction in its wake: 94 reported dead thus far, millions without power, countless families homeless, 9 out of 23 subway lines still closed in New York City, and as much as $50 billion
in property damage, extra living expenses, and lost business. The
president admirably rose to the challenge to oversee disaster relief
endeavors by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Christie, doing
likewise, even signed an executive order “rescheduling Halloween” because the streets in his state weren’t yet safe for trick-or-treaters.
Marooned in my silent living room sans Internet access, I
could still easily discern from my cell phone connection that Mitt
Romney didn’t have a lot to say about how he would handle disaster relief if he were in the president’s coveted shoes.
Granted, Mitt’s got several tough acts to follow. Even though Obama was bashed for reacting “prematurely”
to the hurricane threat by stunningly inept Katrina-era FEMA head
Michael Brown (of “Heckuva Job, Brownie” fame), the president smoothly
coordinated a truly bipartisan storm response with fellow executives
like Christie, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, New York City Mayor Michael
Bloomberg, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker.
The GOP contender, as New Yorker columnist John Cassidy
opined, “has a FEMA problem and a Chris Christie problem.” The
“unemployed” multimillionaire challenger finds himself cast in the
unenviable position of odd man out in a venue tailor-made for
incumbents. Obama shines by simply doing his job (and gleans a 77 percent approval rating
among likely voters on his overall response to the storm). Romney, on
the other hand, has no official tasks to perform and doesn’t feign
empathy very well. He’s limited to phony photo ops that reveal him to be
the cynical, calculating, and purely political android that he really
is.
In the aftermath of the superstorm that flooded city streets, swamped
the New York City subway system, and flattened homes, businesses,
amusement parks, and boardwalks along the Jersey Shore, the sidelined
Romney campaign staged a bogus “storm relief event” offering faux
“donations” of granola bars, diapers, and canned goods purchased by
staffers from an Ohio Walmart for $5,000. People who showed up for what
was originally billed as a “victory rally” were encouraged to pick up
Walmart merchandise and hand it to Romney in front of the cameras. When
skeptical reporters began questioning him about whether he would ax
FEMA, as he had suggested during a 2011 primary debate, Mitt clammed up and ignored them as if they were a bothersome swarm of gnats.
2010 Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle (Photo: AP)
Like Tea Party whack job Sharron Angle,
who ran for Harry Reid’s Nevada Senate seat in 2010, Mitt traded his
mirthless, chiseled mug for a Halloween mask just days before the 2012
election, dodging questions he didn’t want to answer by pretending the
people asking them were as ephemeral as “Invisible Obama.”
Mitt vetoed flood prevention bill in Massachusetts
After watching Barack Obama “palling around” for days with Christie,
Romney was finally goaded by his campaign staff to respond to the
anti-FEMA rap that his own past positions had pinned on him. The craftily constructed switcheroo issued by the Romney campaign late Halloween night read as follows:
“I believe that FEMA plays a key role in working with
states and localities to prepare for and respond to natural disasters.
As president, I will ensure FEMA has the funding it needs to fulfill its
mission, while directing maximum resources to the first responders who
work tirelessly to help those in need, because states and localities are
in the best position to get aid to the individuals and communities
affected by natural disasters.”
While insisting that Romney doesn’t intend to eliminate or defund
FEMA outright, this “Mitticism” relegates the federal agency to
“play(ing) a key role” in working with states and localities. Like every
other vague policy proposal that the GOP’s Obfuscator-in-Chief has
released to date, this statement is as flimsy and mutable as Mitt
Romney’s word. He could change it tomorrow, next month, or next year.
If he wins next week’s election, what would Romney really do? His
record as governor of Massachusetts offers an ominous prologue. In
2004, after Peabody’s downtown had been repeatedly flooded by heavy
spring rains, Romney vetoed a $5.7 million flood control bill.
His longtime spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, claimed that Romney had asked
Peabody officials for more information but “none was forthcoming” — a
charge that local residents vehemently disputed.
Downtown Peabody, Mass., flooded by heavy rains in 2004
Two years later, the area flooded again. “Massachusetts is sitting on
millions in unspent emergency funds from Hurricane Katrina and more
than $1 billion in cash reserves, yet Romney has failed to even respond
to the Lowell delegation’s requests to discuss additional aid for
victims,” the “conservative-leaning” Lowell Sun commented.
“When you’re dealing with a candidate as sketchy and shifty as
Romney, his brief record as an elected leader is perhaps the most
telling guide you have,” wrote Paul Constant
in Seattle’s Slog blog. “Romney has demonstrated an inability to
prepare for the future, and then an inability to face the consequences
of his actions when the future arrives.”
Privatized disaster relief: profits before victims
The day after Hurricane Sandy decimated the East Coast, The New York Times
published an editorial titled, “A Big Storm Requires Big Government.”
Without FEMA’s “war room,” the National Response Coordination Center,
the Times argued, relief efforts for a multistate emergency would be
virtually impossible to coordinate. When Romney expressed his position du jour
at the September 2011 New Hampshire GOP primary debate, he went beyond
saying that disaster management should be “returned to the states. … If
you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.”
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush
Romney the “vulture capitalist” has given us no reason to doubt that
he really does believe privatization of many government functions would
be optimal. Privatizing disaster relief, however, would be, well —
“disastrous.” If Romney wins the election, private disaster response
companies (including one headed by Dubya’s brother, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush) are waiting in the wings to profit from disaster victims’ misery. Stephen D. Foster Jr. of the blog Addicting Info calls
this playbook “a recipe for fraud,” as for-profit response companies
could hold both disaster areas and individual victims hostage until
their asking price is met. Foster cites a frightening recent example:
“Remember the home in Tennessee a couple years ago that
was allowed to burn down by the local for-profit firehouse because the
residents failed to pay the fee? Well, you can bet that same scenario
will play out across the country and on a more sickening scale.”
Christie doesn’t ‘give a damn’ about Election Day Pundits have speculated
about whether Christie is simply sucking up to Obama because he won’t
be able to run for president as the GOP candidate in 2016 if Romney wins
in 2012. Democrats, however, aren’t about to look a gift horse in the
mouth, so most are taking Christie at his word.
That word, as usual, is devastatingly blunt when you’re on the
receiving end of it, as Fox flunky Steve Doocy found out after wondering
aloud when Romney “was going to get some of the same benefits from the
hurricane with a photo op in disaster-stricken New Jersey towns,” in the
words of the blog Raw Story’s David Edwards.
“[W]e hear that perhaps Mr. Romney may do some storm-related events. Is
there any possibility that Gov. Romney may go to New Jersey to tour
some of the damage with you?”
Christie minced no words in his response:
“I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or
interested. I’ve got a job to do here in New Jersey that’s much bigger
than presidential politics and I could [sic] care less about any of that
stuff. … I’ve got 2.4 million people out of power, I’ve got devastation
on the shore, I’ve got floods in the northern part of my state. If you
think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you
don’t know me.”
That nonpartisan approach could be just
the ticket for an Election Day rejection of the mendacious, divisive
politics embodied by the Mitt Romney wing of the Republican Party.
Above, 'the picture of the night,' according to the website I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists. 'I think
this picture sums it up,' wrote blogger Icarus. 'Romney interrupting
Obama in the debate again, with no respect or deference for the
president. This picture is a perfect caricature of Romney during his
entire campaign. 10k bet?'
By Emily Theroux
After watching the second Obama/Romney debate, a town-hall brawl
staged at Hofstra University in Hempstead, Long Island, I felt as if I’d
disappeared down Alice in Wonderland‘s rabbit hole into the “sea of tears” and come up gasping for air in Orwell’s 1984.
Nothing the Republican standard-bearer said made sense. Up was down.
Black was white. Truth and lies were indistinct, mutable, virtually
interchangeable, because that’s how Mitt likes it. Chaos and dissension
permit him to dominate the conversation, manipulate the viewers’
perceptions of his rival, and falsely cast himself as upholder of
righteousness, captain of industry, foreign policy virtuoso, and
champion of the middle class — which bamboozles the unwary as long as
the debate moderator buckles like a doormat and Romney’s opponent
remains loath to call a flip-flop a dirty, deliberate lie.
Moderator Candy Crowley
(Pool/AFP/Getty Images)
This time, however, no one — with the possible exception of the 82
absurdly indecisive and largely uninformed town-hall questioners — was
taking Mitt the Impaler’s smug, derisive nonsense lying down.
The moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, fought back valiantly against
Mitt’s dizzying displays of entitlement, pique, condescension,
disrespect, and refusal to observe the rules of the debate.
President Obama showed up this time firing on all cylinders — the
actual 2008 campaigner, come back to life. While Willard “Myth” Romney
kept coming at him — throwing hissy-fits of petulance when Crowley or
Obama had the temerity to stand up to him, ominously stalking the stage
while alternately seething and smirking, hurling contempt, and flinging
invective — it was clear that Mitt wasn’t quite sure what hit him.
Obama was present, engaged, wry, witty, assertive, even
aggressive when necessary, without relying on Joe Biden’s fallback
posture during last week’s vice-presidential debate with Paul “Lyin’ ”
Ryan — laughing in his opponent’s face every time he lied. From the moment when Obama first said, “Candy, what Governor Romney said just isn’t true,” I knew it was only a matter of time before Mitt the Wazzock
(a name which shall live in infamy Across the Pond) lost his loosely
corralled marbles and launched into the primary-tested “Mitt the Twit”
arrogant-bully persona taken viral by tweeting Londoners last summer.
The Mittster, by contrast, was defensive and offensive in
turn, rattled, domineering, snappish, pouty, and a complete churl. My
relatives in South Carolina have an expression for such boorish
behavior: Mitt acted, as my mother used to say, “like something on a
stick.”
Fox ‘questioned the questions’ undecided voters asked
Not that you could tell Obama trounced Romney from the wingnut drivel
that inevitably followed the debate. The fools on Faux News were
spinning Romney’s embarrassing performance so furiously that some
actually concluded that the sorest of sore losers won the debate!
You could have set your alarm clock by Fox’s — and, I’m afraid, CNN’s — escalating paint-by-numbers idiocy.
Brit Hume, Fox News
Color #1: Brit Hume, the Fox “straight news guy,”
observed, “I thought Mitt Romney was the same Mitt Romney we saw in
Denver two weeks ago” (no mention of the cold, unalterable fact that
Mittens was lying like a used-car salesman and insolently hectoring the
sitting President of the United States — nor that he was devastated by
the president’s comebacks to his preposterous lies, and Crowley’s
“fact-checking” of Romney’s mischaracterizations of Obama’s reaction to
the Sept. 11 attack on the American consulate in Libya). Hume did
conclude, however, that Obama ” will probably be declared the winner of
this, on most cards.”
John King, CNN
Color #2: John King of CNN fell into the
predictable mainstream trap of trying so hard to keep from being accused
of “liberal media bias” that such journalists end up creating a “false
equivalency” between the comparatively rational Democrats and the
extremist “insurgent outlier party”
that the GOP has devolved into. “I think Gov. Romney did a very good
job prosecuting against the incumbent’s record,” King proclaimed. (That
assessment becomes meaningless when you’ve delved into Romney’s
symptomatic pattern of deceipt long enough to realize that what appears
to the uninitiated as “a very good job” is merely a very thorough pack
of lies.)
Sean Hannity, Fox News
Color #3:Sean Hannity raved
about Romney’s debate “win,” calling Romney’s performance “the
most-devastating indictment of the Obama economy that we’ve seen. CBS
snap poll 65-34 Romney tonight.” (This was not what other journalists said about the CBS poll. The Washington Post
said Obama won 37 percent to 30 percent, while 33 percent described it
as a tie; they also reported that a “snap CNN/ORC poll” said Obama won,
47 percent to 39 percent. Other mainstream sources agreed.) Hannity also
called Romney’s failure to make the case that Obama “didn’t call the
attack in Libya an act of terrorism” (when he clearly did) the debate’s
“best moment.”
Romney retaliates with imperious, hit-and-run debating style
“Romney came across as a kind of irritating know-it-all who doesn’t
operate well when he’s challenged,” said Jonathan Alter to Chris
Matthews, in what had to be the understatement of the evening.
At one point, Romney charged Obama
with a 14 percent drop in oil production and a 9 percent reduction in
gas production this year on federal land — because, he said, the
president halved the number of licenses and permits for drilling on
federal lands and in federal waters. “This has not been Mr. Oil or Mr.
Gas or Mr. Coal,” he snarked.
Then, after Obama called Mitt’s attack “not true,” the Republican
started in on Obama with a manic, rapid-fire inquisition that astonished
viewers with its sheer impertinence, as well as by Mitt’s absolute
refusal to let Obama finish a response or get a word in edgewise.
“So how much did you cut ‘em by?” (Obama, again: “It’s not true.”) “By how much did you cut ‘em by, then? (Obama: “Governor, we’ve actually produced more oil on —”)
“No-no,” Mitt snapped, as if shushing an impudent child or dismissing
an “illegal” Mexican gardener. “How much have you cut on licenses and
permits on federal land and federal waters?” (Obama: “Governor Romney, here is what we did. There are were a bunch of oil companies —”) “No, I had a — I had a — I had a question —” (Obama: “No, you — no, you — you — you want —”) “— and the question was, how much did you cut them by?” (Obama: “— you want me to answer a question, I’m —”) “How much did you cut them by?” (Obama: “I’m happy to answer the question.”) “All right, and it is?”
OMG, MittWit! I nearly cried out. Did you remember to take your meds today?!!?!
Obama actually managed to articulate a paragraph about refusing to
let oil companies squat for 20 to 30 years without drilling on public
lands. Then more crossfire ensued over whether oil production was up
(Obama) or down (Romney) on federal land. Finally, Mitt bashed Obama
with this doozy: “I don’t think anyone believes that you’re a person
who’s going to be pushing for oil and gas and coal. You’ll get your
chance in a moment,” the challenger informed the incumbent, “because I’m
still speaking.”(Obama: “Well, Governor, if — if you’re asking me a question, I’m going to answer it.”) “My — and the answer is I don’t believe people think that’s the case, because I — I’m — that wasn’t a question.” (Obama: “Okay. All right.”) “That was a statement.”
Photo by Getty Images
Un-freaking-believable! Mitt Romney was just as testy,
disdainful, and disrespectful toward President Obama as he was to Rick
Perry, Newt Gingrich, or Rick Santorum — “swatting him away,” as Chris
Matthews put it. Noblesse, in Romney’s case, does not oblige. (“Excuse me; I’m still speaking … I’m not finished … Anderson? Anderson? … Let me complete!”)
The baby of George and Lenore Romney’s family, MittForBrains can be
insufferably whiny and demanding when he doesn’t immediately get his
way.
“Candy, I’m used to being interrupted,” joked Barack Obama, Leader of the Free World.
And dissed. A “white pride” voter was allowed to attend a Romney
campaign event over the weekend wearing a navy-blue T-shirt emblazoned
with the following legend: “Put the White Back in the White House.”
Sadly, ever since Obama’s first State of the Union address, when the
execrable South Carolina congressman, Joe Wilson, shouted out, “You
lie!” to the first black president of the United States, such staggering
effrontery has precipitously eclipsed the audacity of hope.
Debate results indisputable: Mitt slept in doghouse last night
After the fireworks ended with Obama’s “47 percent” grand finale, Ann
Romney’s subdued behavior was telling: No congratulatory kiss and hug
for hubby.
By morning, fortunately, cooler heads than the talking ones on Fox
News prevailed. Although they weren’t effusive in their praise, the
Morning Joe team on MSNBC gave Barack Obama some credit for winning the
debate — while ascribing to Mitt Romney a heap of blame for losing it.
Joe Scarborough
Joe Scarborough, who called the debate “Romney’s missed opportunity,”
made it clear that he didn’t like Mitt’s autocratic and dismissive
debate posture (although Scarborough’s condescension toward Candy
Crowley was almost as irksome as Romney’s poised-to-go-viral comment
about the “binders full of women”
that he falsely claimed resulted from his own efforts to recruit
“qualified women candidates” to hold cabinet positions and agency posts
in Massachusetts).
“You don’t run over a female moderator,” said Scarborough. “And you
don’t run over the president of the United States.” The general
consensus, he added, dictated “that you treat the president with
deference.”
About Mitt Romney, Morning Joe sidekick Mike Barnicle opined, “He behaved as if he were a CEO and this was a hostile takeover.”
Let’s hope he doesn’t see dollar signs in American voters’ eyes and decide, once he wins the election, to ship all of our jobs to China.
Barack Obama, then a U.S. senator, spoke at a 2007 ministers' conference
about the LA riots, Hurricane Katrina, and improving the lot of
African-American communities all over the country. Some conservatives
thought he sounded "too black" or "too angry."
By Emily Theroux
"Attacking Obama for Jeremiah Wright Is So 2008."
That was the snappy headline posted in mid-May on Keith Boykin's blog, Fighting Words.
A group of Republican strategists funded by Joe Ricketts, a
conservative billionaire, planned to hire an "extremely literate"
pitchman, Boykin said, "to argue that Obama misled the nation by
presenting himself as a 'metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln'" when he took a
stand in April in support of same-sex marriage. The kicker? Attack ads
relentlessly linking the president with his controversial former pastor.
Word leaked out, however, and a Ricketts aide issued a statement announcing that the scandalous plan had been scrapped.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright
Boykin
was incensed that anyone would admit they found "literate" blacks
unusual — or characterize Obama as "metrosexual." The group wanted to
"do exactly what John McCain would not let us do" in 2008, Boykin noted.
"That is, they plan to lead a campaign of good old-fashioned
race-baiting."
"When asked whether Wright is
off-limits in the 2012 presidential campaign, Romney said he hadn't
'read the papers yet,' according to Los Angeles Times reporter Maeve
Reston. Perhaps that should come as no surprise since the presumptive
GOP nominee has already tried to link Obama to Wright, as he did in a
radio interview with talk show host Sean Hannity in February. And though
the official Wright ad campaign will never see the light of day, the
racist undertone will persist through November. This is part of a
dog-whistle campaign to reach out to those crazy conservatives who think
Obama is a radical socialist Muslim Kenyan with no birth certificate
and no right to be president."
Willard "Mitt" Romney
A fellow BET blogger, Joyce Jones, quoted GOP candidate Mitt Romney's
famous last words on the matter: "I repudiate that effort. I think it’s
the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign. I hope that our campaigns can
respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision
for America," Romney (who said he believed nevertheless that Obama's
campaign had "focused on character assassination") told the press.
Now, Mythological Mitt has repudiated something he’d insisted five
months ago was beneath his stellar standards. Before embarking on a new plan of attack designed
to hit Obama hard with the GOP’s perennial backstop when the going gets
rough — the race card — the Romney campaign issued a preemptive statement denying any involvement with his henchmen’s “October surprise.”
Mitt may have delegated this new hit job to right-wing media mavens,
but the scheme has Willard’s Mitts all over it. He must have been
cracking all kinds of stupid, robotic jokes last night, when The Drudge Report,Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity teamed up to do his dirty work, by going flat-out, race-baiting “Goddamn America!” Jeremiah WRIGHT on his opponent’s unsuspecting a$$.
Drudge: 'Curious tape' will 'ignite accusations of racism'
Matt Drudge
Yesterday afternoon, conservative newsbreaker Matt Drudge dribbled out Twitter-hints
designed to foster a feeding frenzy on the right. “Curious tape
dropping tonight. NOT from MOTHERJONES. Will cause controversy, ignite
accusations of racism — in both directions!” read the first Drudge clue. “Internal debate at news network about airing tape tonight, on eve of debate… MORE” came out an hour or so later. (My guess is this debate was hardly a matter of
professional scruples; Moe, Larry, and Curly were more likely grappling
over which bastion of journalistic integrity got first dibs on
impressing the Twitterati and the international press with it the night before the first Obama/Romney debate.)
Andrew Kirell
of Mediaite chipped away at the teased Drudge story, finding several
edits of what he suspected to be the tape in question, as well as a 2007 blog post by Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times that included a transcript of Obama’s speech. The video, recorded on June 5, 2007, at the Hampton University Annual Ministers’ Conference in Virginia, had been posted online for the past five years.
Then-Senator Obama spoke eloquently and without a teleprompter, using
the metaphor of “a baby born with a bullet in its arm,” to a mother who
had just been shot in the stomach in Compton, to discourse about despair
in the African-American community — over the L.A. riots 15 years
earlier, over second-rate schools, low-paying jobs, and substandard
housing. He riffed about Hurricane Katrina, black prison inmates, and
college students. He cited programs that would create jobs and improve
transportation and health care; about investing in minority-owned
businesses and ending the Iraq War.
Obama spoke with the relaxed “urban” drawl he’s been known to use when speaking to black audiences, but what of it? The longer version of the tape featured powerful, stirring oratory, not anger, and included Obama’s shout-out
to the Rev. Wright, only months before the pastor’s infamous videos
appeared online. Someone going for a “dangerous,” “edgy,” backbeat
failed miserably by adding cheesy boom-box bass effects to the beginning
and end of the tape.
Tucker '07: 'This isn't a dog-whistle. It's a dog siren.'
Tucker Carlson
“This isn’t a dog-whistle,”
intoned Tucker Carlson, who claims he “broke” the tale of the recycled Obama tape
yesterday on his website, The Daily Caller. “It’s a dog siren.”
"The
racially charged and at times angry speech undermines Obama’s
carefully-crafted image as a leader eager to build bridges between
ethnic groups. For nearly 40 minutes, using an accent he almost never
adopts in public, Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which
the white majority profits by exploiting black America. The mostly black
audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton
rally than a conventional campaign event."
This characterization
is absurd. Calling a speech delivered by a black politician to a black
audience "racially charged" seems like hyperbolic fear-mongering to me —
unless, of course, Carlson is expressing that kind of aggrieved mindset
prevalent in people who cry "racism" whenever a black man raises his
voice.
As
for describing "a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority
profits by exploiting black America," welcome to not-so-distant
American history, a dismal 400-year adolescence during which our white,
European ancestors "settled" an already inhabited continent by virtually annihilating one free people via exposure to Old World infectious disease epidemics, warfare, massacres, broken treaties, mass displacements, and forced assimilation.
European colonizers also "imported" another free people into centuries
of the cruel, inhuman forced labor that is chattel slavery. Follow that
up with another century of Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement,
grinding poverty, horrific and random lynchings of black men and boys,
and an utter lack of recourse to a legal system that permitted white
people to literally get away with murder.
And
then just consider all the ways in which Caucasians have historically
used the power structure of their dominant culture to exploit,
brutalize, disempower, intimidate, humiliate, and dehumanize
African-Americans by codifying such actions into law. This systematic
form of oppression and marginalization is something that so-called black
“reverse racists” (generally, people who say something true that
genuine racists don't want to hear) cannot possibly visit upon white
"resenters."
“THE ACCENT. THE ANGER. THE ACCUSATIONS. THE SHOUT-OUT TO REV. WRIGHT, WHO IS IN THEAUDIENCE“ was emblazoned across the top of Drudge’s site when he posted “The ‘Other’ Obama Race Speech.”
Sean Hannity of Fox News
"Tape
of Obama pushing class warfare surfaces on debate eve," read Hannity's
preposterous headline when he posted the much-maligned video on the Fox
News website last night. "STATE of the RACE" the tape trumpeted in
garish, 172-point crimson type, a proprietary addition from Tucker. The
mainstream media, Hannity noted, had been ignoring this blockbusting
Obama bombshell "for years," yet Tucker was flogging it as "an
exclusive." Tommy Christopher of Mediaite burst the wingnuts' bubble with his withering review:
"The
ultimate punchline in this long comedy bit of a story, though, is that
the speech Hannity says 'so-called unbiased journalists have been trying
to hide for years' was actually aired by Fox News. In
the ultimate act of newsturbation™, you had Sean Hannity exposing the
coverup of a speech his own network aired, interviewing Tucker Carlson
about a speech he had also covered in 2007."
Newt Gingrich’s take on Obama
was already cranked up and ready to roll. (I’ve added italics to the
code words pointed out by Rachel Maddow in this extraordinarily
condescending, openly racist diatribe. This guy needs to retire from
public life. His rhetoric is disgusting.)
"I'm assuming there's some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don't understand — whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play ... basketball for awhile. I don't qu-, you know, watch ESPN; I mean, I don't quite know what his rhythms are. But this is a guy who is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, happens to be a partial, substi- , part-time, uh, president. I mean, he really is like the substitute referees in the sense that he's not a real president.
He doesn't do any of the things presidents do. He doesn't worry about
any of the things presidents do. But he has the White House; he has
enormous power. He'll go down in history as president — and I suspect
he's pretty contemptuous of the rest of us."
It was good old white-boy Newt who originated the term “Food Stamp President” and hatched the brilliant plot to falsely accuse Obama of removing the work requirement from welfare — the same “shiftless parasite” canard suggested by the sleazy Romney slogan “Obama isn’t working.” Obama's lazy, and sleepy, and other.
For all Newt knows, this shiftless, inscrutable man could even be a
zombie. He's not a real president. Everyone knows real presidents ain't
got that rhythm, and they sure can't croon like Al Green.
Rachel Maddow
What do Romney’s hate-mongering surrogates think the tape reveals
about Barack Obama? Surprise! Back in 2007, he was “way more black than
he seems to you now,” said Rachel Maddow. The 2007 Time-Warp Obama went to black churches. He
even talked black sometimes. Fancy that: He is more than a
figment of Sean Hannity’s delusional imagination; he doesn’t always
follow Insannity’s black-socialist-president script. He cares what happens in poor black
communities still ricocheting from the effects of generations of
discrimination that may never end (and he cares more about black people than he has ever been able to get away with exhibiting since he became president of all the people — even Tucker Carlson).
"This
will be remembered as the day Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge, Tucker
Carlson, and much of the right wing prepared to board their white
resentment mothership, only to have it crash and burn," said Mediaite's Christopher.
As it turned out, the October surprise flopped badly, even on the right. A crack team of leftish bloggers and journalists helped the DNC tweet the race tape down as "lame" before it even went live. RNC chairman Reince Priebus declined to plunge right in and mix it up with Democrats. Christopher's conservative colleague Noah Rothman pronounced it "The Obama Tape Dud" and said it only served to indict
the 2008 press corps, which Rothman believes failed to adequately vet
Obama.
"What do conservatives think they will
accomplish in 2012 by consistently and incessantly submitting evidence
which proves the press failed in their jobs in 2008? The tape in
question is newsworthy. It should have been covered in 2008. But it was
not and that election is behind us. Republicans would do well to focus
on the issues of 2012, because the Democrats, the media and persuadable
voters have moved on long ago."
Quin Hillyer of The American Spectator's Spectacle
blog offered his conservative perspective: "(C)ertain allowances for
edginess always have been allowed to black speakers before black
audiences — a slight double standard, to be sure, but one that slavery
and Jim Crow provide at least semi-reasonable excuses for, and one that
is less damaging than actual policies (quotas, etc.) that enshrine
discrimination into law."
The MittWit's life of desperation as the walls close in
Three months ago, Romney campaign spokesman Lenny Alcivar boasted that the Romney campaign would remain in what journalist Ben Smith dubbed "the Mittness Protection Program"
by continuing to avoid vital questions about his policies or "core
beliefs." Instead, Mitt would filter his utterances through conservative
conspiracy websites like Drudge and Breitbart.com, the memorial website of the late, great Andrew Breitbart, once a Drudge protege.
"When
this election is over, one of the lessons that will be learned by the
mainstream media is that they no longer have a toe-hold on how Americans
receive their news. Never before – in a way that has taken Democrats
off stride – have we seen the confluence of an aggressive online
community, led by Breitbart, and an aggressive campaign team not willing
to cede an inch of ground to Democrats. This combination has created a
new political reality. We no longer allow the mainstream media to define
the political realities in America. The rise of Breitbart, Drudge and
others, combined with an aggressive Romney campaign, is a powerful tool
in the arsenal of the conservative movement."
So how’s that Drudgy/Techie thing goin’ for ya, Mitt? Whoops! It’s almost debate time. Download a few more of those pre-programmed zingers, and do try to hide your desperation. It’s going to be a long, tetchy hour-and-a-half.
On May 17, a videotape was surreptitiously
recorded of Romney addressing a $150-a-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton,
Fla. Mother Jones acquired the tape months later and released it in its entirety several days after breaking the story. To hear the full speech, click on the links to part 1 and part 2. MJ also published a complete transcript.
By Emily Theroux
“Depart from me, you cursed, into the
eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was
hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me
nothing to drink,I was a stranger and you did not invite me
in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in
prison and you did not look after me. … Truly I tell you, whatever you
did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.”
— Matthew 25: 41-45, The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats
* * *
Malingerers, moochers, freeloaders … the ugly, racially
charged words roll in with the wholesome manure-reek of Mitt Romney’s
imagined heartland, where the bounteous harvest is in, “the 53 percent” pay their taxes, and true patriots don’t take nothin’ from nobody. Unemployed bottom-feeders who don’t want to work for a living —
that’s how the “severe conservatives” Mitt emulates have characterized
the “least of these,” the poor, sick, hungry, and downtrodden whom
Christ taught his followers to care for.
Almost half the American populace “are dependent upon government,”
Mitt tells an audience of fellow zillionaires. The objects of his
derision are folks who, he asserts, “believe they are victims” or
“believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing” and
other perks of deliberate parasitism on the taxpayers’ dime.
If you voted for Barack Obama for president in the 2008 election, that’s how “Willard of Oz”, as Chris Matthews crowned him, perceives you.
____________________________________________
"You
name it," Mad Dog Mitt said about how much largesse he thinks
professional victims expect the government to give them in the form of
free handouts. His fundraiser rant, delivered to 150 truly "entitled"
people, dismissed out-of-hand some 150 million people whom he had
already decided to cut loose — purportedly because they would never vote
for him, but in reality, because he despises their weakness, their
"lack of incentive," their abject neediness.
____________________________________________
During the months after May 17, when a videotape was surreptitiously
recorded of Romney addressing a $150-a-plate fundraiser in Boca Raton,
Fla., bits and pieces of it surfaced on YouTube without attracting much
attention. Then James Carter IV, former President Jimmy Carter’s
activist grandson, gave a copy to investigative reporter David Corn, who posted a salient snippet of it on the website of Mother Jones magazine. (Several days later, the full speech was posted in two parts — part 1 and part 2 — as well as a complete transcript.)
Viewers were astonished to hear the GOP candidate speaking in a
straightforward but glib and cynical tone of voice — a total departure
from the practiced, artificial wheedle he employs on camera or the
sanctimonious platitudes he dishes out at campaign rallies. You may
notice that he sounds slicker (and, if possible, even more
calculating and ruthless) than you previously imagined. After listening
for a moment, you realize that this new, no-nonsense tone is something
you’ve never heard before: the unaccustomed sound of Mitt Romney telling
the truth — to people he doesn’t look down on, about people he does.
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the
president no matter what, all right? There are 47 percent who are with
him, 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. That it’s an entitlement. And the government
should give it to them. … And they will vote for this president no
matter what. These are people who pay no income tax. My job is not to
worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take
personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
Mitt thinks his job, I repeat, is “not to worry about those people.”
(Shades of Lady Ann, Rafalca the Austrian warmblood, and #YouPeople!)
Willard Romney had written off 47 percent of the public — a stupendous
number of people to hold in utter contempt — with the sole purpose of
pandering to a handful of rich donors. The gobsmacking “tale of the
tape” went viral within hours, ricocheting around cyberspace. Two days
out, the one-minute video had been viewed 7.1 million times, the
second-highest number of YouTube hits ever on a political story. (Katie
Couric’s 2008 interview of Sarah Palin topped the list, with 24.4
million views.)
While far-right radio talkers didn’t wait for a cue to defend the
standard-bearer they had once conditionally accepted, reviews of
Romney’s “performance” by mainstream pols and pundits were withering:
“A sneering plutocrat” (Jonathan Chait, New York magazine)
“Thurston Howell Romney” (David Brooks, The New York Times)
“Arrogant and stupid remarks” (Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard)
“Not big, not brave, not thoughtfully tackling the issues … An intervention is in order” (Peggy Noonan, WSJ)
“An increasing problem with him being able to connect with voters” (Mark McKinnon, GOP strategist)
“The worst presidential-candidate gaffe since
Gerald Ford announced in 1976 that ‘there is no Soviet domination of
Eastern Europe’” (David Frum, former George W. Bush speechwriter)
“You don’t win an election by disparaging just about half of the electorate” (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, on Fox News)
“Inaccurate, insensitive, almost callous in (his) disregard for the American people ” (Ed Rendell, former governor of Pennsylvania)
“You trashed the very people who are your margin of success” (Chris Matthews, MSNBC)
“A magnetic moral compass that has no true north” (Alex Wagner, MSNBC)
“That’s not the way I view the world. … (B)eing on public assistance is not a spot that anyone wants to be in.” (Scott Brown, GOP senator from Massachusetts, who “grew up in tough circumstances”)
“(T)he vast majority of those who rely on government are not in that situation because they want to be” (Linda McMahon, Connecticut Senate candidate)
“This is what it looks like for the wheels to come off” (Rachel Maddow, MSNBC pundit, Rhodes scholar, national treasure)
“Mitt Romney is not the face of Mormonism” (Dr. Gregory Prince, Mormon historian and author)
“I’d say Romney’s performance will help to determine most of the close Senate contests” (Larry Sabato, University of Virginia political scientist)
“My feeling is maybe you haven’t gotten around a lot” (Barack Obama, President, USA)
Mitt writes off 47% ‘who don’t pay taxes.’ Does he?
Un-freaking-believable! Lord Willard Romney’s blowing off half
the nation because of the GOP’s misleading “new orthodoxy,” popular
during the Republican primary season, which suggests that 47 percent of
Americans “don’t pay any taxes” or don’t pay their “fair share”
of taxes. The way Romney explained it to what Eddie Murphy once termed a
“roomful of rich dummies,” I don’t think even Mitt knew what he meant.
The now-infamous 47 percent statistic (which Mitt mangled into his own inaccurate Obama vote percentage) actually refers to a taxpayer analysis
by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, showing that 46.4 percent of
American households did not pay federal income tax in 2011. “The
households in question consist primarily of the retired, the poor and
low-income families with children,” two New York Times reporters
explained. “Moreover, they do pay taxes, if not income taxes: Just 8
percent of households do not pay payroll or federal income taxes,
discounting the elderly.”
“Many people don’t pay income taxes because
they’re so poor they don’t make enough money to be able to pay income
taxes,” former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland,
a Democrat, told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. “But they pay payroll taxes,
they pay state taxes, they pay excise taxes. This man apparently feels
that if you’re not a part of his social class or you don’t have his
economic status, that somehow you’re a parasite.”
Another reason that a larger percentage of people pay less in taxes
is that Republican fiscal policies have provided tax incentives to
low-income workers — including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)
and the child tax credit, which enable low earners to offset a portion
of their income tax obligation with exemptions similar to the mortgage
interest and property tax deductions that benefit middle-class workers.
Erick Erickson's "We Are the 53%" Tumblr
Since Obama’s inauguration, however, GOP legislators have become so
resentful that they’ve turned against their own policies, including the
EITC, originally passed by Gerald Ford and later expanded by Ronald
Reagan. This deduction was intended to help “lift people out of poverty”
and provide them with an incentive to keep working at tough jobs that
paid very little. But when President Obama’s stimulus bill and other tax
legislation expanded EITC benefits and extended relief from the
“marriage penalty,” Tea Partiers viewed it as providing lazy “moochers”
with unfair advantages. (The right-wing “We Are the 53 Percent” movement was founded to express such sentiments, after the Occupy Wall Street movement caught on nationwide.)
A final question, after slogging through the videotape: Isn’t Mitt
himself one of the 47 percent he dismisses, by his own definition? He
doesn’t have a job. (Translation from Republican: He’s a lazy POS.) He
pays neither income tax nor payroll tax. (In other words, he’s the
paragon of “victimology.”) And because he refuses to release his tax
returns, 100 percent of Americans remain in the dark about whether he
really pays the measly 15 percent capital gains tax on his investment
“income” (already the biggest scam in the annals of tax avoidance — and
yet the wannabe Veepster, Paul Ryan, wants to eliminate this loophole
altogether!).
As it turns out, CNN Money published a story about this very subject
after the “Mittastrophe” tape went viral. “The Tax Policy Center
estimates that 4,000 households
with incomes over $1 million ended up with zero federal income tax
liability in 2011,” Jeanne Sahadi wrote. “Another 14,000 made between
$500,000 and $1 million.” Mitt Romney admitted to his Boca Raton
audience that he is one of them.
Release the tax returns!!!
Colbert: ‘Fancy talk for a black guy’s coming for your stuff’
The Romney campaign has apparently done some tape-sleuthing of its own, digging up another golden oldie: a grainy recording
of then-Illinois State Senator Obama, speaking at a 1998 Loyola
University conference on Chicago city government. Obama had the
misfortune to have uttered the word “redistribution,” albeit in a
completely different context from that of the current GOP “Romneyhood”
feeding frenzy over the designs of the poor on rich people’s’ “rightful”
lucre.
It didn’t matter that Obama was really talking about “fostering
marketplace competition” and business innovation, not rampaging serfs
pillaging the fortunes of their feudal lords. Mitt’s team pounced
anyway, diced and spliced the tape, and excerpted the sliver they wanted
from the part might have resonated with the great unwashed 47 percent.
Bingo! You stay classy, Romney-O!)
Will the scum-suckers, leeches, and other assorted parasites that
Lord Romney so viciously disdained, when surrounded by his “peerage,”
buy the new, improved “Moderate Mitt” who came out last night as the
candidate of “the 100 percent”? No, if you ask me. Will the wingnut
blowhards breaketh wind? Too early to call.
I say let’s Occupy Romneyworld and throw him to the crocodiles
circling the sorry carcass of his candidacy in the moat below the castle
walls.
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