Is it Just a Gaffe?

Each election year, an overenthusiastic media tries to convince us that a single verbal slip-up can destroy a Presidential campaign. Gaffes are reported endlessly, featured in attack ads, defended and debated, only to retreat from the limelight and be forgotten come Election Day. This year has featured several such gaffes, and now, a leaked video showing Governor Romney speaking off-the-cuff to donors has entered the media frenzy. Romney’s comments in the video have been labeled as “devastating,” “a rolling calamity,” and  “an utter disaster” by the New York Times, Huffington Post and MSNBC, respectively. Bloomberg News even asserted that the video “has killed Mitt Romney’s campaign for president.” But while the liberal media has blasted the tape, voter polling has remained steady at 47 percent for Obama, 46 percent for Romney.

In the video, Romney asserts that “47 percent of the people ... will vote for the president no matter what ... 47 percent who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it ... these are people who pay no income tax.” While this quote grossly simplifies a complex problem, it is true that for various reasons, over 46 percent of American households pay no federal income tax. Nevertheless, I would hope that Romney understands that this 46 percent contains war veterans, college students, retirees and unemployed workers — not just government freeloaders. Also, declaring that this 46 percent will support President Obama “no matter what” is a bizarre exaggeration, as many of these people want jobs and thus want to pay income tax and therefore want a new president who can make that happen.

“We should have enough jobs and enough take-home pay such that people have the privilege of higher incomes that allow them to be paying taxes,” Romney later clarified, although he added that he worries many of the 46 percent won’t want to contribute their “fair share.” This sentiment closely resembles the picture Democrats paint of wealthy Americans as squanderers of wealth — a manipulative argument that divides and defines people based on income and incorrectly implies that America’s fiscal problems can be erased if the rich are overtaxed. The class-based views of politics emphasized by both Romney and Obama miss the point that most Americans who don’t pay taxes would actually prefer to have a well-paying job that requires them to pay taxes. They also overlook the fact that most middle-class Americans do not begrudge the rich but aspire to become wealthy themselves.

Finally though, Romney’s so-called gaffe isn’t a gaffe at all. Rather, it’s an ineloquent way of pointing out that nearly half of American households don’t pay taxes — a fact that angers most Republicans. We want these people to have jobs, contribute to society and pay taxes; we believe that much of the people within this 46 percent can and should have the means to care for themselves rather than depend on governmental systems for support and security. In the summer, when Obama famously told business owners, “you didn’t build that — someone else made that happen,” he was ripped apart by Republicans for stating, without bells and whistles, a fundamental principle of the Democratic party: that government helps create the social and economic systems which shape our successes. These “gaffes” are based on truths perceived by one party and fundamentally disagreed with by the other, and I’m glad that these ideological questions are defining the presidential race this year. Did you create your success or did it result from the systems in place around you? Should we be proud that our social and economic security nets allow for 46 percent of Americans to not pay taxes, or should we shrink that percentage through job creation and economic growth?

But sometimes politicians make statements that are neither gaffes nor crudely stated party ideologies. In a speech last week, Obama declared, “the most important lesson I’ve learned is that you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside ... that’s how the big accomplishments like health care got done.” This statement illuminates Obama’s inefficacy as a leader — he believes that he lacks the power to create change and he acknowledges that “the big accomplishments” of his first term succeeded not through his leadership, but from outside support. Do you want to keep Obama in Washington if he “can only change it from the outside?” This might not be what Obama intended to say, but the political climate in Washington has become so gridlocked that I imagine the president has given up on the American political system — just as many young Americans have. I do not blame Obama for this standoff, but it’s clear that Democrats and Republicans have failed to work together as they did during the Clinton-Gingrich era. If Obama believes that he “can’t change Washington from the inside,” then how can he combat this dysfunction?