So that’s the real Mitt Romney for you, the one on the video disdaining 47% of the American people, essentially calling them moochers, who are “dependent on government” and not taking “personal responsibility” for their lives.
While it’s astonishing to hear a presidential candidate dismiss almost half of the electorate, at least we know how Romney really feels.
He feels superior.
And he’s insensitive.
And he’s such a clumsy politician that he didn’t even have the good sense to apologize for those remarks, instead saying that they were “not elegantly stated.”
But he didn’t disavow them. He can’t. Because his whole outlook, his whole philosophy, is that the free enterprise system can provide for everyone and that government shouldn’t provide for anyone.
The financial crisis that Wall Street brought in 2008 and that rocked the world economy for the last four years proves that the free enterprise system can’t get it done and causes great hardship. But Romney offers no help to those who are suffering as a result—nothing but scorn on ice.
The very idea, spelled out in the preamble to the Constitution, that the government should “promote the general welfare” is anathema to him.
He doesn’t really believe in a decent society or in a caring community.
Because that’s what government provides when it takes care of the elderly through Social Security and Medicare, when it takes care of the disabled and the poor through Medicaid, when it takes care of the hungry through food stamps, or when it gives those who can’t find work an unemployment check.
But Romney sneers at it all.
And that’s downright chilling.
If you liked this story by Matthew Rothschild, the editor of The Progressive magazine, check out his story “Free Speech Advocates Defiant in Madison, WI."
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