Friday, November 16, 2012

Romney's "Gift" Gaffe: What he meant to say.... by John Cassidy

Romney's inner voice: "Anyway, back to the election, which I lost for three reasons. First, my opponent—and I give him a lot of credit for this—displayed a better grasp of arithmetic than we did. While I was out there talking about the trees in Michigan and singing “America the Beautiful,” he and his campaign were assiduously putting together a political coalition that would get them to fifty per cent. When the minority vote is nearly thirty per cent of the electorate, and you get four in five minority votes, you only need to attract about a third of the other voters. In successfully reaching out to women, gays, and young voters, the President could afford to cede to us most of the white male vote, and it didn’t matter. (In places like Ohio and Michigan, he did pretty well in appealing to those voters, too.)"

"Second, the President and his party delivered for its core supporters—not just financially but also in a larger sense. To some extent, of course, politics is a transactions-based business: the main reason political parties exist is to defend the interests of their supporters. In offering a route to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants; in restructuring the student-loan program on terms favorable to the debtors; in introducing heavily subsidized health-care coverage for the near-poor and for hard-working middle-class families—some of whom are minorities; in coming out in favor of gay marriage; even in insisting that, under the terms of his health-care reform, insurance plans cover contraception—the President provided concrete benefits for the groups that supported him in 2008."


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/11/romneys-latest-gaffe-heres-what-he-meant-to-say.html#ixzz2CQJIc464

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