September 18, 2012 05:36 PM UTC

Romney's "Victims" Monologue: A Defining Moment

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: FOX 31’s Eli Stokols:

Colorado Democratic Party Chairman Rick Palacio and Sen. Mark Udall ripped Republican Mitt Romney for his controversial comments about Americans who don’t pay taxes, which surfaced in a video Monday.

“You judge a person’s character by what they say in private,” Udall said at a press conference in Sunken Gardens Park. “Mitt Romney has failed the character test.”

…The comments are a devastating blow to a campaign already losing ground in the polls and a candidate whose opponent had already been engaged in a messaging war to portray him as an out-of-touch millionaire.

“It’s hard to believe that somebody who wants to be president of all of the people of this country would write off half of them,” Palacio said Tuesday.

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Over the years of campaigning for high elected office, Republican Mitt Romney has taken some of his worst heat not necessarily for his opinions on one issue or another, but his readiness to completely reverse himself on just about any issue–which he has done repeatedly as his stint as governor of Massachusetts evolved into presidential aspirations.

More recently, though, somebody has seemingly convinced Romney to stop flip-flopping on the issues whenever he decided it was expedient. Something has convinced him of late that this was the wrong course. Perhaps it was the “Etch-a-Sketch” stuff. We don’t claim to know.

In any event, what we have today in the 2012 presidential race is a candidate who decided to stop flip-flopping at the exact moment his political career depended on him doing just that. Romney lurched hard to the right to win his difficult primary in an attempt to placate the most vocal of his critics in the Republican Party. And now, when everyone expected a move to the center–and Republicans honestly needed him to for the sake of their own image–Romney is inexplicably doubling down on the hard-right tropes that eked him the nomination.

FOX News reports today on Romney’s follow-up to the devastating release of video from a fundraiser of him writing off roughly half the country as “dependent on 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.”

He stands by all of it, even if it was “inelegantly stated.”

“Of course there’s a very different approach of the two different campaigns, as I point out I recognize that among those that pay no tax, approximately 47 percent of Americans, [Pols emphasis] I’m not likely to be highly successful with the message of lowering taxes.  That’s not as attractive to those who don’t pay income taxes as it is to those who do. And likewise those who are reliant on government are not as attracted to my message of slimming down the size of government. And so I then focus on those individuals who I believe are most likely to be able to be pulled into my camp.”

First of all, folks, this is unmitigated nonsense. Please don’t waste too much time arguing the merits of Romney’s meritless case–it’s just not factual. In the above comments, Romney doesn’t even consistently single out federal income tax payers, which is the only way to make the charge that 47% of Americans “pay no tax” credibly. If you simply count federal payroll tax payers, you add another 28% of the population, leaving only the elderly and incomes under $20,000 per year–and even those people pay sales, property, and all kinds of other taxes.

The persistent myth that a huge percentage of the American people “pay no taxes” is a common right-wing axiom, reinforced since the 2008 recession, when the number of people receiving some form of assistance obviously did increase. This belief forms the basis of the conservative “We Are The 53%” campaign and other efforts. It is, at its core, a belief meant to sow contempt for the remaining 47% who “don’t pay taxes,” reinforcing the Ayn Rand conservative worldview of producers of value vs. “moochers.” That is, people “who believe that they are victims.”

We’re not saying nobody believes what Romney apparently believes about a large percentage of the population. But when you start to look under the hood of what Romney is saying, from the factual problems to the ugly prejudices that allow those factual problems to be squelched in his and too many minds…he’s not speaking to a majority of Americans anymore. In fact, he’s telling millions of ordinary people, their grandmothers, their kids in college, their neighbor who’s trying to get back to work, that his job as President is “not to worry about those people.”

It’s going to take a few days to process, but Romney is laying bare something very important. A mistake that drives a whole movement. A fundamentally, intentionally divisive misconception that has fueled a great deal of the last three and a half years of misguided rage.

This conversation needed to start, even if Romney will sorely regret being the one to start it.