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kalikshama -> RE: Joe Klein on "The Mitt Mirage" (9/26/2012 7:21:16 AM)
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I've been following Joe Klein in Time recently and because you mentioned he's hard to nail down politically, had to wiki him for his political views. I see he is the author of "Primary Colors."
More good Joe Klein articles:
The Imaginary Campaign
On Aug. 31, the night after the Clint Eastwood empty-chair colloquy at the Republican Convention, Jon Stewart identified the radioactive ingredient that would provide the fuel for Mitt Romney's September meltdown. The Republicans, he noted on The Daily Show, were suffering from "cognitive dissonance." Like Eastwood, they were campaigning against a Barack Obama who was a figment of their imagination. "There is a President Obama that only Republicans can see," he said. That Obama--the Muslim socialist foreigner--was "bent on our wholesale destruction." The mad fact is, Stewart was only scratching the surface. We now know that Romney has been running not only against an imaginary President but against an imaginary electorate as well. This is an electorate in which 47% are looking for handouts, don't pay income taxes and won't "take responsibility...for their lives."
How utterly insulting to the legions of hospital workers, restaurant (and country club) employees and security guards who work their butts off servicing the plutocrats Romney was addressing at his now infamous fundraiser in Boca Raton, Fla. These workers barely get by, but they are helped a bit by benefits--like the earned-income and child tax credits invented by Republicans--that limit their exposure to income taxes (although they continue to kick in payroll taxes and pay a host of state and local levies). The great irony is that the vast majority of Romney's 47% would be shocked to learn that they're among the freeloaders, which is why this incident might not, in the end, have all that much impact on the presidential campaign. Romney was right about the larger picture in Boca: this election will be decided by a sliver of middle-class independents, the 6% who can't decide which of these candidates they disdain more.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2125027,00.html#ixzz27aLpVhjD
Bitter, Clinging Moochers
...That’s the biggest difference: Romney was playing to the fantasy prejudices of fat cats; Obama was trying to explain the very real prejudices of the white working class, especially — and this absolutely essential part of the quote was not picked up — their “antipathy toward people not like them.”
There is another difference: Obama’s gaffe was a minor tributary off the main story of the 2008 presidential campaign, which was the economic collapse. Romney’s adoption of the Fox-Rush neolibertarian sensibility, and the remedies that it assumes, is the main story of the 2012 campaign. He will have to defend his fantasy in the debates. He will have to say why he believes that 47% of the American public don’t want to “take responsibility” for their lives. He will have to say why the Republican policies at the heart of this problem — eliminating income taxes for the working class, expanding food stamps (a George W. Bush initiative), expanding Medicare to cover prescription drugs (Bush again) — are bad for the country.
Romney has placed himself in an impossible position, and he’s gotten there the old-fashioned way: he’s earned it by pandering to the worst elements in his party, by embracing a phony narrative that vastly exaggerates what’s happening in this country. (Yes, entitlement programs, including Social Security Disability as well as the middle-class entitlements, do need to be reformed.)
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/09/18/bitter-clinging-moochers/#ixzz27aMhn0xe
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