This morning Robert and Mira had something of a disjointed and unenlightened conversation about Mitt Romney’s recent gaffe at a fancy fund raising party. Romney made a sort of divisive comment of the kind that candidates for President are not supposed to make.
He said the following:
“There are 47% of the people who will vote for [President Obama] no matter what. All right, there are 47% who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of them, who believe that they are entitled to healthcare, to food, to housing, to you name it.” Associated Press / September 17, 2012.
Robert’s only real comment on this is that Mr. Romney’s statement, read literally, is very difficult to understand. Read less literally, it seems that Mr. Romney thinks that Obama’s core base is full of folks who feel the government owes them something more than it should. But the words he chose are mean-spirited. They are bad.
It seems to Robert that Mr. Romney forgot for a moment that he was speaking in public (and when a candidate speaks to anyone who is not on his close staff, it is “in public.”) He got carried away and let the rhetoric fly a little too far. Perhaps, as the New Yorker jokes, he could not control himself after getting drunk on a bowl of rum raisin ice cream.
It is unclear to Robert how much this matters. He’s not going to vote for Mr. Romney in any event, and the folks that are truly undecided voters probably don’t care too much either.