The audacity of truth

LITTLE ROCK — Iprobably ought merely to rerun the column I wrote after Mitt Romney flew into Little Rock a couple of weeks ago.

You remember that one. I didn’t think that a person should run for president secretly and by associating only with the elite rich in an implicit political and financial transaction.

I may have pointed out in that column that some people gave Romney sums of money that evening exceeding by about $18,000 the per capita income of the state in which this closeddoor transacting was taking place.

My having the audacity to write such a thing produced several letters to the editor asserting that I was a sorry, no-account class warrior ignoring that President Barack Obama also knows rich people and that some of them have given him a lot of money.

The differences are that Obama generally campaigns publicly and does not propose the same political and financial transaction.

To refresh: Romney landed his plane on one of our longer local runways. Then he snuck through the back door of two of our finer hotels to attend a sequence of rising-dollar fundraising events.

It culminated in a $50,000-percouple dinner with local rich people. I think I’m right that they sprinkled bacon bits on a Caesar salad.

These dining companions want Romney to become president in part because he, unlike the Kenyan Muslim Marxist, appreciates that they made their millions without help from anybody except maybe Ayn Rand and her theories of enlightened selfishness.

Here’s Romney’s transaction: These rich dining companions appreciated that he intends to cut their taxes if elected.

Thank goodness. It’s getting harder and harder to afford a $50,000 dinner.

They also appreciated that he wants to reduce government services for poor people. They believe that using the government to help poor people just encourages poor people to stay poor and live lucratively off food stamps and Medicaid.

Obama, on the other hand, racks up big money from rich people like George Clooney only because they think he’s cool and agree with him generally except that he’s entirely too centrist.

See the difference? Surely you do.

But, if not, we now have the advantage of an undercover recording of Romney’s own words at another of these secretive high-dollar receptions for which rich people forked over mighty sums as part of the implied transaction.

Thanks to somebody running a recorder over in the corner and leaking the recording to Mother Jones magazine, we now know exactly what this candidate of the rich talks about when he is alone with the rich.

Romney got up in front of his highdollar private conspirators and said, and I quote:

“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. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them.

“And they will vote for this president no matter what. These are people who pay no income tax. . . . My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

And somebody accuses me of class warfare?

Romney is likely just pandering. I don’t think he really means much of anything that he says.

He is probably not as awful as all that.

But his words reflect a total misunderstanding and gross stereotype.

A lot of people who don’t pay federal income taxes are not on welfare. And they certainly are not addicted to slothful dependence on government handouts.

Instead, they are retired senior citizens on low-level fixed incomes. Or they are working poor people receiving dependent-child deductions that reduce their woeful taxable income to untaxed amounts.

They are paying state income taxes in Arkansas. They are paying payroll taxes so that they might someday get a little Social Security.

They are paying sales taxes. They are paying property taxes. They are paying motor-fuel taxes to keep their jalopies running so they can get to their jobs.

They most likely are paying a higher percentage of their money in taxes than Romney’s 13 percent federal rate on $21 million for that one full year for which he deigned to release his tax return.

Yet many of those poor people tend to think in a self-destructive right-wing way—either on economics or socioreligious issues, or both—and actually will vote for this man who talks so inaccurately and slanderously about them in the secret company of the super-rich who wage class warfare against them.

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.