If you were considering voting against Mitt Romney because of his disdain for the 99 percent; it turns out there’s only 47 percent of America that he isn’t interested in representing as POTUS.
In a statement that pits him squarely against the middle class and will certainly serve as another nail in his presidential ambition coffin, Mother Jones released a video yesterday that has Mitt Romney saying: “There are 47 percent … 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.”
He added, “My job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”
I don’t know what additional evidence one would need to conclude that Romney’s campaign is little more than a thinly-veiled war against the working class.
But don’t take my word for it, here’s what conservative columnist David Brooks said about Romney’s telling statement in a piece aptly headlined Thurston Howell Romney. He writes:
Romney, who criticizes President Obama for dividing the nation, divided the nation into two groups: the makers and the moochers. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare? The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.
But forget for a moment the political reality that Romney was effectively campaigning against a huge number of people who were potential supporters, a larger point is he was actually low-balling the percentage of America that relies on the public sector.
We all are. Elizabeth Warren describes how we are all dependent on public sector programs far better than I can in this famous Youtube video:
So why does Mitt exempt 53 percent of America from his ire? Because despite what they say it isn’t government Romney and the Republicans don’t like, it’s the middle and working class.