Could Mitt Romney 'victims' comment be good for his campaign? (+video)
That's what some conservatives assert. The uproar over Mitt Romney's remarks that 47 percent of Americans see themselves as 'victims' and feel entitled to government support is an opportunity to emphasize how Romney differs from Obama over the role of government, they say.
Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney poses for pictures with supporters, before boarding his campaign charter plane at Love Field in Dallas, Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2012.
G.J. McCarthy/The Dallas Morning News/AP
Mitt Romney’s “victims” tape is bad news for his campaign, runs Washington’s conventional wisdom. It doesn’t do to dismiss 47 percent of America as too dependent on government, in this view, and it’s even worse to say “[my] job is not to worry about those people.”
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Washington Editor
Peter Grier is The Christian Science Monitor's Washington editor. In this capacity, he helps direct coverage for the paper on most news events in the nation's capital.
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Democrats are gleeful about what they judge to be an electoral game-changer. Some Republicans are running for cover – Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, for instance, was quick to disassociate himself from Mr. Romney’s expressed views.
But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? Is it possible this faux pas could actually be good for the Romney campaign?
That’s what some conservatives are arguing Wednesday morning. They say that while Romney’s comments may have been badly put, the whole uproar has handed the ex-Massachusetts governor an opportunity to refashion his campaign message and to emphasize that he wants to lessen the power of government, while President Obama wants to increase it.
“Lemonade out of lemons? If he can refine and hammer home,” tweeted conservative Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin, a staunch Romney supporter, on Wednesday.
It isn’t as if the Romney train had been humming on an open track. In recent weeks his campaign has been beset by so many problems, self-made and otherwise, that Politico tagged him “man of constant sorrow.” Remember his botched trip to London? Clint Eastwood’s strange GOP convention appearance? The flap about his hasty statement on the Middle East riots, which we won’t even begin to try to describe?
As the “constant sorrow” song goes, “for six long years, I’ve been in trouble. No pleasure here on Earth I find.” (It hasn’t actually been six years, but it might seem that long if you’re a Romney campaign official.)
In this context, a candidate needs to find an opening where he can get it, to paraphrase Ms. Rubin’s post on the subject Wednesday at Right Turn.
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