“Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the
law.”—Anglo-Irish playwright-poet Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1744), The Traveller (1764)
The top strategist for Mitt Romney, Stuart Stevens,
has copped to trying steroids to see what they were all about. Perhaps his
candidate wanted something like the same feeling of strength and rush without
actually taking the performance-enhancing drug, because earlier this year—now
known in a video that’s gone insanely viral--he went before a bunch of Florida
fat cats—his people—to talk about the
other guy’s people: the now-infamous 47 percent.
Mitt Romney was so in the moment that he dropped his
mask and became hyperaggressive: “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote
for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with
him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who
believe the 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.”
For years, Romney and his advisers have thought
obsessively about one number—270—the amount of Electoral College votes they’ll
need to win. From now on, they may be thinking of 47—the number that, bandied
about to a friendly audience, might now prevent victory.
The reaction to the video was swift—and not just
from the usual suspects. The candidate, a New York Daily News wag wrote in a headline, was “In Deep Mitt,” or in “A Mitt Storm.” Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal columnist and Ronald
Reagan speechwriter, opined that it was finally time to recognize that the Romney campaign was incompetent. David Brooks, The New York Times’ token op-ed
conservative, encapsulated it perfectly for a baby-boom generation who gloried
in Gilligan’s Island reruns: the headline THURSTON HOWELL ROMNEY.
(Oh, yes—lost in the hullabaloo was Romney’s remark
that it would have been beneficial to him if his father, who was born in a
Mormon colony in Mexico, had actually been of Mexican descent. Many Hispanics
are probably wishing now that the candidate had followed the same
remedy—“self-deportation”—he had urged to solve the problem with undocumented
aliens. If he doesn’t want to self-deport, I’m sure they’ll be happy to lend
him a hand, for free—even if, by his own definition, that would make him a
“victim.”)
There are all kinds of reasons why the reactions to
Romney’s remarks have proven so toxic, but one has gone unnoticed and even
unarticulated, except for the 18th-century writer Oliver Goldsmith, anticipating
events by more than two centuries in the quote above: i.e., so many people
already sense that governmental laws and regulations are tilted
outrageously in favor of the 1%--Romney’s natural habitat. Put another way: Romney’s
rank hypocrisy galls as much as his blithe condescension.
I’m not talking about the tax shelters that so many
at Romney’s fundraiser in Florida surely enjoy. Nor am I talking about the disproportionate influence that their money gets the well-heeled in Washington as well as state capitals all across the nation. Nor am I talking about the host
of the event, Marc Leder, who, as co-CEO of the private-equity firm Sun Capital
Partners, according to the blogger Legal Schnauzer, “does exactly what Mitt Romney did years ago at Bain Capital”: i.e., revive some companies, dismantle quite a few.
No, I mean how the candidate himself has benefited,
personally and professionally, from a different form of the entrenched privilege he criticizes:
*His wealthy father was able to keep him in college
during the late 1960s, when Mitt received draft deferments for
religious-service and academic reasons that allowed him to stay out of Vietnam—this
at a time when many of the “47%” had no such options;
* His reputation as the managerial wizard who saved
the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics was secured with the help of $1.5 billion supplied
by the federal government—much of which was, as noted in the blog Democurmudgeon, given over to wealthy
donors to the games;
* Without a massive bailout from banks and the
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Bain & Co., the firm that launched Romney
on his career as a vulture—sorry, venture—capitalist,
would have gone under. Even more outrageous, as outlined by a Tim Dickinson article in the September 13 issue of Rolling Stone, he
threatened to distribute bonuses to executives at the financially troubled firm
unless Bain were allowed to pay off its debt at a deep discount.
Right now, Democrats might have only one cause for
complaint with the Almighty on the Romney gaffe: Why couldn’t it have occurred
closer to Election Day? Such was the fate of an earlier Republican with a well-deserved
reputation as a stiff, New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. In the final days of
his whistle-stop campaign, on a train with the premature title of Victory
Special,” the locomotive gave a sudden lurch. “What’s the matter with that
idiot engineer?” Dewey barked. That comment aroused the ire of the labor
movement, who came out in big numbers to help Truman beat Dewey.
“Oh Mighty Internal Revenue Service, who turneth the
labor of man to ashes, we thank thee for the multitude of thy forms which thou
hast set before us and for the infinite confusion of thy commandments, which
multiplyth the fortunes of lawyer and accountant alike.”— Russell Baker, “A
Taxpayer’s Prayer to the Almighty IRS,” originally in The New York Times, reprinted in The Morning News (Wilmington, Del.), Apr. 10, 1977
“Please supply the following information and
materials:
“Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the
law.”—Anglo-Irish playwright-poet Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1744), The Traveller (1764)
