Much hay is being made on recent Romney gaffes, at the risk of overwhelming the true stories being told here. The following seems transparently obvious to me, but since few other people are saying the same things, perhaps they’re worth enumerating.
Romney talks about the poor because no one believes they are. Ask nearly any American, and very few of them believe they are “poor” or “very poor”. Just about every American calls themselves middle-class of one stripe or another, and that includes the guy who hasn’t had a job for two years, and the guy who makes $200,000 but has friends and colleagues who make millions. Of the people who do self-identify as poor, only a handful pay attention to politics. Appealing to the middle-class at the expense of the poor is a standing American meme, and it’s been 50 years since there was any mainstream political discussion of this.
Romney genuinely doesn’t get it, and that’s part of why people can’t stand him. You can tell a lot about how a person thinks by the words they use. This isn’t “gotcha” journalism, this is basic psychology.
The chattering class instantly dismissed discussion of whether W was a sociopath when analysis showed that he became very fluent with words when talking about punishment and retribution, but only made “putting food on your family” flubs when it came to expressions of empathy. This dismissal occurred because some things that are true are still considered impolite in political society. You unconsciously pick up on people’s speech patterns and cadences all the time when you’re building your mental model of what these people are like; it’s part of the 90% of communication that we all use without words. It’s also the hardest thing about ourselves to fake; cover up all you like when you want to present a facade, but your microexpressions and speech hesitations are going to show your true self.
There’s a storyline about Romney that he’s made too much money to understand what it’s like to not have any. This is persistent because it’s true. A man who can spontaneously offer to make a $10,000 bet, or refer to a $370,000 income as “not much”, has simply moved to a realm where money means something different to him than it does to the people he wants to vote for him. This in and of itself is not a problem — Americans don’t hate rich people — but the dissonance it causes when he tries to pretend otherwise is exactly why he comes across as phony.
No one cares about sociopathy in politics because the GOP is built on it. The core of Republican philosophy is “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps”, and is encapsulated in Herman Cain’s “if you aren’t rich, it’s your own fault”. Republican voters love to hear this, because it tells them two stories about themselves that they want to hear: that they’re personally responsible for their own success, and that the American Dream means that they don’t need to responsible for others in general, just members of their own tribes.
This philosophy completely ignores the obvious truth: bad things happen to good people, and these bad things can seriously affect one’s financial health. In an economic downturn, the proportion of people who get shafted goes up, and by definition many of these people are not responsible for having a giant target painted on their asses.
This is why Obama is going to win in a cakewalk in 2012, although few people seem to understand this yet. The bad economy isn’t going to pull voters away from him, because the GOP is pitching their standard message of “I got mine, fuck you.” Meanwhile, huge swathes of swing voters who once had theirs are now wondering whether they’re personally going to be screwed by a “fuck them” philosophy. They’re going to swing back to the GOP when they’re financially safe enough to do so, or when the GOP figures out that its message is so poorly timed. (And when the GOP stops nominating candidates that make Dukakis look like Mr. Charisma.) Obama’s message is “I’ll do my best to have your back.” That’s the sale pitch to have in 2012.