Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Red Meat

   By Donna Cole


 After the fire had just died down to a smolder over Mitt Romney's comments on President Obama's response to the attack on our Libyan consulate the left wing media's hair is ablaze again over what he said to a donor at a private $50,000 a plate fundraiser about the 47% of Americans who pay no federal income tax. They are high with delight and giddy with glee over their latest big gotcha.


 Why the left had never heard such callous rhetoric. This so reveals the real Romney as the evil capitalist pig we have been telling you he is all along! Some liberals have even declared the election is over, this statement has ended Romney's campaign. A man this heartless cannot be our president. He should just quit and we not even have an election. Put the crown on Obama's head today!


 Give me a break. Republicans have been talking about this issue in various ways for years, with terms like "the makers and the takers" and yes, the 47%. This is nothing new. What Romney said was simply red meat for a donor who had just ponied up 50 large and wanted something to sink his teeth into. So, Mitt threw him a big t-bone. This story is not even news, it happens all the time as Kathleen Parker reminds us in her latest Washington Post column that President Obama has done his own share of throwing red meat to wealthy donors too;
Four years ago, Barack Obama spoke candidly at a similar “private” fundraiser in San Francisco, saying that small-town Pennsylvania voters expressed their economic frustrations by clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”

 Romney knows, the donor knows, and the left wing media who are doing a sad job of pretending to be shocked by all this know too, what the 47% term really means. It is a symbol, just like the left goes around talking about the 99%. The 47% is a symbol of a dysfunctional system of taxation and how close it is to a tipping point. A system that if not reformed will no longer be able to afford to pay for the entitlements and services it offers.


 I don't know how many years this has gone on, but as far back as my memory goes in my forty one years on Earth the Democrats have scared senior citizens by telling them that Republicans want to take their Social Security away. Seniors will be doomed to die filthy and homeless in a dark back alley while eating cat food. And of course Medi-scare, those Republicans will never let you see a doctor again and Paul Ryan wants to throw poor old granny in her wheelchair over a cliff. When in fact, it's the Democrats, who resist any reform at all, are the ones who are going to bankrupt the system which really will throw granny over a cliff and leave seniors without a pot to pee in.


 Could Romney have been a slight bit more eloquent in his comments to that donor ? Yes. Did he make too broad of a generalization ? In some ways. Does he need to go further in depth explaining to the public what the 47% really means ? Yes, and he needs to do so aggressively. For the record, Republicans, Romney included, have been trying to do this for years, but since it mostly falls on the deaf ears of the liberal media it is not reported. Or if it is reported, it is done so inaccurately and with malice. Most importantly Romney needs to explain to those on Social Security and Medicare who are roughly 18% of that 47%, and those soon to be on these programs, that it is his party who are actually trying to save those programs.


 For all the left wing huffing and puffing over his comments, how bad does this really hurt Romney ? We can find the answer to that from Aaron Blake at The Fix;
A new Gallup poll shows that 36 percent of registered voters say the comment makes them less likely to support Romney, while 20 percent say it makes them more likely to back him. Forty-three percent, meanwhile, say it makes no difference.
But even that 36 percent number is a little misleading. The number is driven up considerably by the more than two-thirds of Democrats (almost all who weren’t going to vote for Romney anyway) who say it makes them less likely to support him.
Among independents — the group Romney needs to be concerned with turning off — 29 percent say the comment makes them less likely to back him, compared to 15 percent who say it makes them more likely.
Meanwhile, more than half of independents — and this is the kicker — say the flap makes no difference to their vote.

 This tells me two things. First, most of these independent voters understand the real meaning of what the 47% is, and they understand the real structural problems our entitlement system has. Whether or not they agree with Romney's solutions is another question that we will not know the answer to until after the election.


 The second thing is that just like with Obama's remarks about people clinging to their guns and religion, these type comments just gin up the bases of both parties. In Obama's case, it made liberals happy and conservatives mad. In Romney's case, it was the reverse. The reaction from the voters who really count, the independents, see it for what it is, partisan red meat.


 The left wing press will find something else to express their faux outrage over in a few days and this will be forgotten, or not cared about to start with, by those voters who really count. For Romney, he has time for this fire to die down and do some damage control. So he gets out of this one with a minor scratch, but he really needs to start avoiding getting in these scrapes in the first place. Because if this had happened a week or two before the election, I'd be writing a very different column and it wouldn't be so much about red meat as it would be about dead meat.

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