View from Australia: The six things Mitt Romney should never have said

By Jonathan Bradley

If, as he is expected to, Mitt Romney wins today's primary contest in Florida, he'll have all but wrapped up the Republican nomination. His three opponents might keep him fighting until March 6, when ten states vote on Super Tuesday, but, for all intents and purposes, the GOP contest should stop being a competitive race after today.

From there, Romney will be able to turn his attention to the general election. The strengths of the former governor of Massachusetts are well known: He was a successful businessman and a moderate politician in a traditionally Democratic state. He'll be up against an incumbent who has presided over high unemployment and low growth, and whose approval ratings rarely rise above the mid 40s. The hope and excitement accompanying Obama's win in 2008 has dissipated, while the disdain he provokes in conservatives continues to grow.

Mitt Romney has, as I've said before, run an impressively effective campaign, one that has, for the most part, controlled expectations adeptly and used its resources ruthlessly. By all indications, he should be set to provide Obama with a tough challenge this November. And yet Romney's campaign increasingly looks to have a serious flaw: the man at the centre of it.

Romney's awkwardness and wooden personality are famous, but he's running into a bigger problem: he has a knack for saying exactly the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time. At a moment when Romney's business background should be an advantage, his opponents are hammering home the perception that he looks, to use the 2008 words of former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, "like the guy who fired you." Rick Perry, before he departed the race, called the former head of private equity firm Bain a "vulture capitalist." A SuperPAC that backs Newt Gingrich produced a devastating documentary, When Mitt Romney Came to Town, that painted Romney as a predatory corporate raider, one who got rich by destroying jobs. And Mitt Romney, with ill-advised remarks and tin-eared statements, is doing an excellent job of emphasising that perception.

Every politician says silly things from time to time. What's remarkable about Romney is that he has established a pattern of spouting tone deaf catchphrases that reinforce voters' worst fears about him. Many of these are entirely innocuous in context, and it would be unfair for opponents to use them against him. But they will, and it's astonishing that Romney has offered them so much ammunition. Following is a selection of his most egregious goofs:

1. "I'm also unemployed."

In June of 2011, Romney joked to a group of out-of-work Floridians that, like them, he didn't have a job. They laughed, but a lot of actually unemployed Americans — who at the time made up 9.1 per cent of the labour force — did not. The stresses of hunting for work in a down economy have little to do with spending all your time running for president while pulling in $20 million a year in investment income. Romney's statement was innocuous, but it gave a lot of people the impression that he didn't understand the problems facing everyday Americans. 

2. "Corporations are people, my friend."

On Thursday August 11, 2011, at the Iowa State fair, an audience member at a Romney rally urged the candidate to raise taxes on corporations. Mitt's reply echoed across America practically before he had finished making it: "Corporations are people." Romney's point was that higher taxes on businesses were ultimately paid by the shareholders who invested in the company, but to an electorate convinced that Wall Street got better treatment from Washington than the average voter did, the statement sounded preposterous. It didn't help that the Supreme Court used a similar line of reasoning in its Citizens United ruling, which struck down campaign finance laws limiting political spending by corporations. To a lot of people, it sounded like Romney was siding with corruption and big business over the interests of the American people.    

3. "Ten thousand dollar bet?"

In a Republican debate last December, Texas Governor Rick Perry (correctly) accused Romney of having supported the individual mandate that is the basis of Obama's health care reforms. Romney disputed Perry's facts, and offered a ten thousand dollar wager to back up his words. "I'm not in the betting business," demurred the Texan, but viewers at home went away with the impression that Romney had so much money that he could throw around five figure amounts without a second thought. This one seems particularly unfair to me; I'm sure in the schoolyard I might have challenged a classmate "I'll bet you a million bucks," and I sure didn't mean to suggest I had Scrooge McDuck quantities of cash tucked away in my Commonwealth Bank Dollarmite account. But this rhetorical slip has turned, for Romney, into another irritating indicator that his wealth prevents him from relating to the majority of voters.

4. "I like being able to fire people"

It made him sound like a cartoon villain, but the worst you could say for Mitt Romney's meditation on the satisfaction of sacking "people who provide services to me" is that it reflects a poor understanding of the health care market. Romney was telling a group of New Hampshirites about the benefits of having a wide choice in insurance providers, but it sounded to a lot of people like he just got a kick out of handing out pink slips. As American Review's James Fallows said, "you cannot say you like firing people" — it will backfire on you, no matter what you truly intended. Democrats will continue to unfairly use this quote against Romney, and it will continue to be effective.  

5. "Bitter politics of envy"

When Romney won the New Hampshire primary contest on January 10, he told his supporters that "This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy." Democrats were so convinced the line was a gaffe that Obama made reference to it in his State of the Union address:

Now, you can call this class warfare all you want. But asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.

We don’t begrudge financial success in this country. We admire it. When Americans talk about folks like me paying my fair share of taxes, it’s not because they envy the rich.

The president knows from experience the danger of suggesting that voters are "bitter." With talk of inequality increasingly dominating political conversation, Democrats clearly believe the public doesn't want to hear a wealthy politician telling them that their dissatisfaction is the product of jealousy.

6. Three hundred thousand dollars is "not very much"

As Romney was getting ready to finally make public his most recent tax returns, he warned that they would show he paid a low tax rate because most of his money came from investments. "I get speaker’s fees from time to time," he explained, "but not very much.” Turns out those fees amounted to $360 000 over the twelve month period ending last year. Matt Yglesias put that "not very much" into perspective:

That's over 7.2 times the median household income in the United States. If you earned over $360,000 last year and lived in the richest county in America, you'd be earning about triple the local median household income. You would be, in other words, a rich person even if you didn't have any investment income, hadn't made a fortune in your earlier career, and weren't only a part-time income earner who was mostly focused on his presidential campaign.

Did Romney intend to say that only a small proportion of his income came from speaking fees? Perhaps. But to most Americans, $300 000 is a heck of a lot. It was yet another case of Mitt Romney saying something innocuous that nonetheless reinforced a negative impression in voters' minds. These gaffes aren't evidence that he would be a bad president, but they could get in the way of him getting elected president at all. 

31 January 2012