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. Say what you really think, and you are bound to alienate some of the votes that you need to win. But it’s getting harder: even at private gatherings, today’s politicians are likely to be secretly video-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. Most of them doubtless believed that poor Americans are shiftless...
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In Romney’s view, his role “is not to worry about those people [the 47 percent]. 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 about not releasing the past five years, say, if there was nothing to hide in the returns for the preceding years? Like, maybe, the possibility that Romney paid no tax at all in those previous returns.
The people who pay no taxes in the United States are the very poor and the very rich, and Romney certainly falls into the latter category. If he paid no tax at all in 2007, 2008, and 2009, say, he would have fallen into the 47 percent in those years. So should we conclude that he voted for Obama in 2008?
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