Quotes of the day

“The last several years you’ve seen greater and greater divisiveness in this country,” said the GOP hopeful. “We had hoped to come back together. But instead you’ve seen us pull apart. And politics has driven us apart in some respects. So my campaign is about the 100 percent of America. And I’m concerned about them. I’m concerned about the fact that over the last four years life has become harder for Americans.”

Romney didn’t explicitly reference his now-famous comments about “the 47 percent,” but he sought to draw a difference between targeting potential supporters and wanting to help the entire country.

“I know I’m not going to get 100 percent of the vote, And my campaign will focus on those people we think we can bring in to support me,” he said. “But this is a campaign about helping people who need help, and right now the people who are poor in this country need help getting out of poverty, the people in the middle-class need help because their incomes have gone down every year for the last four years.”

***

What I explained to them and what I think the media misses is that many of the people the media would claim Mitt Romney described as “victims’ weren’t who Mitt Romney was speaking about. And those people intrinsically know it. They may technically fall into the category Mitt Romney described as government dependent victims, but they know he’s not talking about them. He’s talking about the people they also are talking about.

But more than that, and this is really what the left and media miss, a fair number of those people in the 47% are not there by choice. They are there by Barack Obama’s economic policies. And they absolutely understand that Barack Obama’s policies got them there. All they need to hear from Mitt Romney is that he really does get it and really will fix the problem, not just manage the decline of the nation as his primary opponents claimed he would.

That off the cuff, off the record talk was what they needed to hear. Mitt Romney recognizes we have a problem with government dependency, as do a majority of Americans. But more importantly, Mitt Romney will improve the lives of that 47% by growing the private sector, not redistributing pieces of the economic pie.

***

There will always be some who for whatever reason find themselves dependent on the charity of others. But when half the population is along for the ride, the system becomes dangerously out of balance. Things fall apart.

This isn’t right-wing theorizing. Decent neighborhoods collapse this way. So do whole societies.

Romney should say this. Loudly and often and without embarrassment. As he suggested at his secretly videotaped fundraiser in Boca Raton, America is at the tipping point. Many Americans sense this, and not just conservatives but independents and hard-working Democrats and anyone else who understands the degrading and destabilizing effects of dependency. Romney’s remarks are defensible. He should defend them.

***

You do have to wonder if anything the media have propounded as political wisdom has been right. No one gets everything right in a campaign, but if a pundit or reporter got most of these wrong, why pay any attention?

Here we sit with Romney as the presidential nominee. Ryan energized his ticket, was a hit with the base and has put Wisconsin in play. None of the supposed “gaffes” have changed the course of the race. Romney never released more tax returns than he initially promised. Eastwood’s “empty chair” was a hit with the base. The DNC bounce is gone. One of the most effective arguments the Republicans have made is that Obama took $716 billion from Medicare to pay for Obamacare. Obama fell in foreign policy approval in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, and attention is now turned to whether the administration was lying when it said the attacks were spontaneous and all about an anti-Muslim movie.

So when the media mavens on the right and left are in hysterics over Romney’s 47 percent remarks, think how accurate the media’s judgment has been. Consider whether the pundits think everything is a disaster for Romney and just don’t like him.

***

“The question of this campaign is not who cares about the poor and the middle class,” said Romney during a fundraising event at an Atlanta hotel.

“I do. He does,” Romney continued, a reference to himself and to President Obama.

“The question is who can help the poor and the middle class,” he said. “I can. He can’t.”…

“He really believes in what I’ll call a government-centered society,” Romney said. “I know there are some who believe that if you simply take from some and give to others, then we’ll all be better off. It’s known as redistribution. It’s never been a characteristic of America. There’s a tape that came out just a couple of days ago where the president said, yes, he believes in redistribution. I don’t. I believe the way to lift people and help people have higher incomes is not to take from some and give to others, but to create wealth for all of us.”

***

“You look at all of the front pages of a lot of these so-called conservative websites and they’re moaning and groaning about how Romney has lost it. But out here in the heartland, outside of that bubble, people aren’t paying attention to what [Mother Jones writer] David Corn is saying.”

***

Click the image to watch.

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