“Your Hope has been Redistributed. Here’s your damn Change!”
:)
“Everyone, it seems, is agreed that Mitt Romney has thrown away the election with his 47 per cent ‘gaffe’, where he was caught on a hidden camera dismissing half the US electorate as welfare-dependent spongers.
This, pundits of all stripes decreed, was an “utter disaster” (Bloomberg) for team Romney. It was “politically devastating” according to Time’s Mark Halperin – and it wasn’t just liberals lining up to bash the former Bain Capital boss, Conservatives took plenty of swipes too.
But I’m not so sure that this is quite as devastating as some are making out – and for two reasons.
First, as Jeffrey Lord, a former Reagan aide and Republican party historian told me today, the remarks on welfare-dependency would strike a chord with many of America’s hard-pressed middle classes, just as Ronald Reagan did with his talk of benefit-cheating ‘welfare queens’ back in the 1980s.
“It’s still unclear to me what impact this will have,” he said “A lot of the middle class who pay their taxes are going to listen to Romney and say ‘yeah, damn right’.
“This is a sensitive subject in US politics, but this is the way the middle class feels, and have done for decades. It really does resonate with people. The Democrats are going to have to be careful, in case piling onto Romney is seen as piling on the middle class.”.......................