I have a friend who rents a room from me a couple of nights a week. He owns a house up in Philadelphia with his partner, but works down here in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins. Last night, we joined a few people to watch some experimental short films as part of the High Zero festival of improvised and experimental music, and then got Caribbean food for dinner.
Afterwards, I was sitting on the couch, icing down my ass (I slipped and fell down the stairs on Sunday), and watching a mediocre shoot-em-up on Roku when my friend comes into he room and says, “Did you hear about Romney.”
It was nearly midnight when I found out about Mitt Romney’s infamous 47% speech to a gaggle of über rich donors. And while I was mildly shocked to find out there is actual footage of the speech, I was not surprised in the least that he said what he said.
Much of the media coverage has focused on the potential political fallout and the inaccuracies of the speech. This is very important, but I don’t think it gets to the heart of what happened.
It’s easy to point out that Americans who don’t pay any income taxes do in fact pay all sorts of other federal, state, and local taxes, including FICA, gas taxes, phone and utility taxes, and horribly regressive sales taxes to name just a few. It’s also not hard to note that many of the “non-payers” aren’t even poor people, but rather older people who benefit from a tax structure that is (rightly, I believe) set up to help them. And anyone who 
pays attention to the national economy and politics knows full well that the poor people who don’t pay income taxes are far more likely to live in dead-red Republican states than Democratic strongholds. Second most likely? Contested states like Ohio and Wisconsin. Here’s a handy map from The Atlantic that breaks it down.
Pointing out the factual errors and obfuscations in Romney’s speech is important. We need to keep the record straight. But it’s also pretty simple. So a literalist interpretation of his comments isn’t going to get us very far.
Instead, we need to focus on whom Romney was speaking to. After all, these comments were not meant for public consumption. Rather, he was talking at a private fundraiser to a small group of wealthy Florida donors, many of them elderly.
In other words, Romney wasn’t saying what he believes necessarily. To the contrary, I’m quite confident that he’s very aware of just how manipulative his comments were. Rather, he was telling a bunch of rich people what they wanted to hear so they would continue financing his campaign.
And someone as rich as Romney knows exactly what different subgroups of rich people want to hear.
I think what bears this out are some other comments he made that are not getting nearly as much attention. Here, from the same fundraiser, is footage of a three-minute rant about the Middle East. Among the many gems is this:
The Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace.
It’s one thing to reject the two-state solution. It’s another to accept racist old canards like “Palestianians don’t want peace!” 
No, they really enjoy being colonized and throwing rocks at tanks. And add some ludicrous bullshit about them not valuing the lives of their children as much as Jews do, and you’ve got a typical menu of racist, anti-Palestinian propaganda.
You know, they’re irrational and just not as human as the rest of us.
And that’s not to say the Palenstinian authority is a cavalcade of angels, much less Hamas and Hizbullah. But it’s one thing to make a reasoned political critique and entirely another to cast the opposition as vicious war-mongers, especially when they’re repeatedly on the losing end of the conflict.
Political demographers often break up Florida into three groups: the rural WASP vote, the Cuban vote, and the Jewish vote. It’s likely that Romeny was trying to pander to older, wealthy Jews by bandying racist claptrap about bloodthirsty Palestinians craving violence for violence’s sake. And indeed, it dovetails nicely with his 47% statement.
That kind of thinking about Palestinians, that dehumanization of the “other,” is on a par with believing that most welfare recipients are black, when African Americans comprise only about 12% of the total population. In reality, there are far more poor whites in this country than poor blacks, and most of them actually vote Republican.
So when Mitt Romney raised the specter of lazy, selfish welfare queens, he wasn’t literally attacking poor whites, most of whom will vote for him. Rather, he was pandering to his wealthy, white audience by smearing the nearly one-half of the electorate that has already made up its mind to vote for Barack Obama. The opposition. The enemy. The same way he pandered by smearing Palestinaians.
And so by talking about the 47%, Romney was trying to appeal to the 1%. Or more accurately, the one-tenth or perhaps one-one hundreth of one percent who paid to attend that fundraiser.
Shooting down manipulations and half-lies is very important. We need to keep the record straight. But even more important, I believe, is taking note of of how the national conversation breaks down among different groups.
It’s not just about the lies. It’s also about who’s lying to whom.