Conservatives for the 53%
By David Weigel
Sept. 18, 2012
Back on Friday, I trudged around the Values Voter Summit in D.C. and asked conservatives why they thought Barack Obama might win. (The polls, then and now, suggest that he's in the position to do it.) The single most common answer? Well, Obama's Democrats have been pumping up the ranks of the poor with free goodies, and those saps might be numerous enough to vote for him. They'd been hearing that on talk radio for, well, years. "We have 47, 48 percent who pay no income taxes," said Rush Limbaugh in July. "We have 3 million more off the unemployment rolls and on the disability rolls, and they all vote!"
Limbaugh's riff sounds almost exactly like Romney's. So, I'm not surprised to see many conservative talkers calling on Romney to stand by the comments. Michael Walsh calls it the candidate's Gettysburg Moment:
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There's already been a fair deal of lazy commentary comparing Romney's words to the ones Barack Obama uttered at a San Francisco fundraiser before the 2008 Pennsylvania primary -- the stuff about how in bad economic times, "people get bitter, they cling to their guns and religion." The one commonality between those hidden-tape gaffes is that they inform donors of what they already think about the stupidity of their fellow voters. Any liberal, in 2008, was familiar with Tom Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? thesis about how Republicans suckered poor people into "voting against their interest." Any conservative, in 2012, is at least familiar with the "lucky ducky" quasi-Marxist theory that people who benefit from government spending will never, ever vote to cut it.
Did Romney's late night (actually, 7 p.m. local time) presser clean up the story? I think it did so in this way: He did not back down from the comments. He left the impression that his point, about moochers versus makers, was valid. And when Limbaugh warms up the microphone again today, he'll be reinforcing that message, not tearing chunks out of Romney.
Mitt Romney 47%: Conservatives defend his comments.
By David Weigel
Sept. 18, 2012
Back on Friday, I trudged around the Values Voter Summit in D.C. and asked conservatives why they thought Barack Obama might win. (The polls, then and now, suggest that he's in the position to do it.) The single most common answer? Well, Obama's Democrats have been pumping up the ranks of the poor with free goodies, and those saps might be numerous enough to vote for him. They'd been hearing that on talk radio for, well, years. "We have 47, 48 percent who pay no income taxes," said Rush Limbaugh in July. "We have 3 million more off the unemployment rolls and on the disability rolls, and they all vote!"
Limbaugh's riff sounds almost exactly like Romney's. So, I'm not surprised to see many conservative talkers calling on Romney to stand by the comments. Michael Walsh calls it the candidate's Gettysburg Moment:
---
There's already been a fair deal of lazy commentary comparing Romney's words to the ones Barack Obama uttered at a San Francisco fundraiser before the 2008 Pennsylvania primary -- the stuff about how in bad economic times, "people get bitter, they cling to their guns and religion." The one commonality between those hidden-tape gaffes is that they inform donors of what they already think about the stupidity of their fellow voters. Any liberal, in 2008, was familiar with Tom Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? thesis about how Republicans suckered poor people into "voting against their interest." Any conservative, in 2012, is at least familiar with the "lucky ducky" quasi-Marxist theory that people who benefit from government spending will never, ever vote to cut it.
Did Romney's late night (actually, 7 p.m. local time) presser clean up the story? I think it did so in this way: He did not back down from the comments. He left the impression that his point, about moochers versus makers, was valid. And when Limbaugh warms up the microphone again today, he'll be reinforcing that message, not tearing chunks out of Romney.
Mitt Romney 47%: Conservatives defend his comments.
Fool, cya mañana...
