With 42 days left until the general election, the contest and the
political attacks are getting more heated by the day. Governor Mitt Romney recently came under fire for remarks he made on the campaign trail that were secretly recorded and subsequently published by Mother Jones, a liberal magazine.
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” Romney said. “There are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that 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.”
Democrats immediately leapt on the statements, as did several Republicans who were eager to distance themselves from Romney’s remarks. Susana Martinez, the Republican governor of New Mexico, said, “We have a lot of people that are at the poverty level in New Mexico, but they count just as much as anybody else.” She was just one of many Republicans who were quick to try and create some distance between Romney’s vision of the poor electorate and their own.
Now the Democrats’ reaction is to be expected, but the Republican response has been somewhat disappointing to me. Like Martinez, many Republicans do not feel that Romney’s sentiments echoed their own. Few Republicans were willing to write off such a large chunk of the electorate as gone to the left. In addition, Romney’s sentiment was not well-worded. Even his running mate, Paul Ryan, called it “obviously inarticulate.” Despite all of these shortcomings, it is naïve not to recognize the grain of truth in Romney’s words.
Of the 47 percent that do not pay income tax, about 90 percent earn around $30,000 or below. And Obama owns this demographic comfortably – 61 percent to Romney’s 32, according to the latest New York Times and CBS News polls. This group of Americans gives Obama’s chances at reelection a hefty boost. And it is unlikely that those looking to benefit from higher taxes on the wealthy and Obama’s bigger government policies, suchas ObamaCare, will ever come over to the right, let alone join the GOP come this November.
On the other hand, this entire group is not lost to the Republicans. Some non income-tax payers are over the age of 65, a demographic often sympathetic to the right. There are also some people making well over $100,000, another Republican demographic, who pay no income taxes. So has Romney made a mistake in writing off an entire group as lost, when there are still supporters to be found? Perhaps. A survey done by the Vanderbilt/YouGov Ad Rating Project found that Romney’s words had done little to shift where anyone stood on either side. He did not lose many Republicans, nor did he gain many Democrats. Genuine swing voters were not overly swayed one way or the other.
This lack of reaction points back to why I feel that Romney, while “inarticulate,” was not really at fault.
We live and vote in a country that has never been more polarized, according to the Pew Research Center’s American Values survey. In the past 25 years, the average disparity by party has almost doubled, mainly in the past ten years under the Bush and Obama administrations. Polarization characterizes modern American politics. So what Romney said points to the larger, cold truth that, come November, we as Americans simply want two very different things.
The left generally believes larger government is good, and that it is the government’s job to provide for its people. And the left will tax the wealthy in order to fund the programs to which they believe people are entitled. The right, again in general, believes in the ability of the individual to succeed or fail on his or her own. Government plays a reduced role, and success is not held in check by a government waiting to spread the wealth around.
I think it is fairly plain where Mr. Jefferson stood, and I will leave you with his words:
“To take from one, because it is thought his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, the guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.”
_Sam Novack’s column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily.
He can be reached at s.novack@cavalierdaily.com_
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