“Stupid and arrogant,” said one about Mitt Romney’s comments about the “47%.” “The worst presidential-candidate gaffe since Gerald Ford,” said another. A third allowed that it revealed a politician who “really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits.”
Those were the comments, not of Democrats, but of right-of-center pundits reacting to the Republican presidential nominee’s claim that nearly half of Americans prefer to be “victims” who are dependent on the government.
But the thoughts of William Kristol, David Frum and David Brooks represent a moderate strand of the conservative spectrum. Others — including radio titan Rush Limbaugh — argued that the struggling Romney should fully embrace his earlier comments and the notion that the U.S. needs to do more to support the creator class, rather than the taker class.
In his news conference Monday evening following the release of the video by the website for Mother Jones magazine, Romney seemed to be hewing closer to the second course — with no apology for saying that those who support President Obama are the 47% “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 healthcare, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
New York Times columnist Brooks and Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, suggested that Romney’s comments to a group of wealthy donors in Florida last May showed him to be particularly out of touch, because many of the 47% who do not pay federal income taxes are retirees and others who paid federal payroll levees and other taxes. Many are Republicans.
“This comment suggests a few things,” Brooks wrote. “First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?”
Brooks also repudiated the Republican nominee for not knowing much about “American culture,” with his suggestion that citizens are childlike and craving of the support of the state. “America remains one of the hardest working nations on Earth,” Brooks asserted.
Frum called the remarks “the worst presidential candidate gaffe since Gerald Ford announced in 1976 that ‘there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.’ ” Frum added: “More than one-fifth of Romney’s moocher 47% are elderly: people who pay no income taxes because their income takes the form of Social Security —- many of those people are Republican voters (even if they don’t understand “dependency” to apply to them).”
Wrote Frum: “Irreparable? To Romney’s image, yes; to his election chances … we’ll see.”
Read more at BCN
