Romney, Republicans, and the poor
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
It’s official. We now have it straight from the horse’s mouth: Mitt Romney, the man whose yearly income over the last two years has averaged $22.5 million, doesn’t care about the very poor. He said so last week in an interview with CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien. Romney told O’Brien he is not worried about poor people because “they have a safety net, and if there are holes in it, I’ll fix them.”
New York Times colunist Paul Krugman wrote recently that to be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination you have to be either clueless or a cynic. Romney, we now know, is both: the perfect candidate for the Republican Party
We already knew that Romney, with his claims of being a “job creator” whereas he made his colossal fortune doing just the opposite and his opportunistic conversion to the hard-right views of GOP primary voters, is a cynic. Mitt’s comments last week provide further evidence of that cynicism. But they also demonstrate just how clueless he is.
The candidate’s subsequent contortions to “clarify” what he really meant lack credibility. No one believes him because there is a ton of video showing him saying essentially the same thing, over and over, albeit with slightly more political words. What he told O’Brien is what he meant and what he feels.
It takes incredible gall for a man as wealthy as Romney – who is not just one of the one percent but one of the .01 percent – to dismiss the truly awful plight of the poor in this country, of whom we now have a record number, as insignificant.
Romney, whose father was the governor of Michigan and a millionaire businessman, has never lived a day of his life in poverty and has neither the interest, the empathy, the conscience, or the imagination to grasp the damage to mind, soul and body that it means to be poor in “the richest country in the world.”
Romney’s excuse for his lack of concern – that the poor have a safety net – is breathtaking in its cynicism. For several decades now Republicans like Romney have attacked, ferociously and mostly successfully, every component of the safety net for the poor, tearing huge holes in what, even before the prolonged GOP assault, was hardly a solid structure guaranteeing minimum social protection to all citizens.
The idea that Romney and Republican members of Congress would work to repair the safety net when they have been the ones shredding it for more than thirty years is so transparently cynical as to qualify as farce. Except that there is nothing funny about it.
Having virtually completed demolishing what passed for a safety net for the poor, Republicans now want to do the same to the middle class’s safety net: Social Security and Medicare. Far from striding to fix anyone’s safety net, Romney supports a budget plan proposed by Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, which would strike lethal blows against these two very successful, efficient and popular programs for the middle class. At the same time, Ryan’s budget would maintain miniscule taxation rates on the very rich and huge subsidies and tax breaks for “persons,” with names such as Exxon and General Electric, whose personhood derives not from God or evolution but by decision of our mostly right-wing Supreme Court.
Romney’s support for Ryan’s plan belies his professed acute concern for the middle class and his alleged lack of concern for the well-being of the rich, who he says are doing “fine,” a laughable understatement or a cruel joke. As Romney knows better than anyone, the very rich are not doing just fine. Since the 1970s, the rich, and the rich alone, have benefitted royally from U.S. economic growth.
Romney’s cluelessness about political appearances has come through repeatedly, but never before so transparently. The man has an utter lack of understanding of how his words, coming from someone from a background of extreme privilege, are taken by a person who has to struggle just to pay monthly bills. There was the time Romney said that he likes to fire people. Before that he suggested he could sympathize with the jobless because he too is unemployed. Yet Romney’s latest confession, his brazen declaration of disregard for the poor, seems to have struck a special chord.
It is not that Romney’s view is an anomaly in the Republican Party: hardly. Since Reagan in the 1980s, the GOP has beggared and demonized the poor. In this primary election season no Republican candidate has shown any empathy for the poor, and several have complained that low-income people pay no taxes or have no work ethic. Newt Gingrich, the only contender other than Romney still (barely) in the game, has called Obama “the best food stamp” president in history, and immediately connected use of food stamps with African Americans.
But there are two things that set Romney apart. He is so insanely rich that his comments about the less fortunate come across as particularly heartless and uninformed. And they are so unveiled and artless that he lets everyone in on the scam that other Republican politicians, including supreme class warrior for the rich George W. Bush, have been able to partially cloak through such fallacies as “compassionate conservatism.”
Instead, Romney functions as a kind of GOP subconscious gone wild, unable to repress the dirty secrets, revealing what he and his party stand for, and who they stand with.
