Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney doesn’t consider “the poor” part of his mission as president if he’s elected. The lips of Lady Liberty, inviting the world, “Give me your tired, your poor,” are words unheard by Mitt.
The poor have a safety net, Mitt says. But not too long ago he said the safety net didn’t work meaning it didn’t help – and therefore wasn’t needed – and there was just too much overhead he said – though the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says that as much as 99 percent of the dollars set aside for the poor are actually spent on the poor.
Mitt is a well-oiled political weather vane spinning wildly in the winds of public opinion. Republican activists and Independents fear he is an invertebrate without any principles at the center that one could mistake for political character. In a recent turn in the news spin cycle, Mitt was caught up short for his hard hearted indifference toward the poor. He back-filled saying that he’d “fix” the safety net if it needed fixing – the net that he had found unnecessary.
Mitt’s mind is blind to the fact that our “safety net” is not only necessary but it falls short and is past due for a fix for the one in six poor who go hungry, and a third of the poor who have no health insurance. Incidentally, Mitt wants to cut a few holes in the health insurance net by reducing Medicaid. Not the kind of “fix” you’d expect from someone who cares about the poor.
You might think Mitt made the calculation that the poor don’t vote – and that the nation doesn’t care about the poor. But I believe we are all better than that and it explains why Mitt scrambled to explain that he “misspoke.”
Perhaps Mitt thought he was merely topping the chorus of the callous. Republican Presidential primary candidate, Speaker Newt Gingrich, thought it was funny that so many must rely on food stamps so they don’t go hungry.
There is this absurd Dickensian projection embraced by the unfeeling, Mitt and Newt included, that gives them some solace, the belief that all poor are malingerers, faking hunger, homelessness, and illness. Mitt and Newt want us to believe that the poor really could work and earn a living – if they just chose to do so.
Mitt says he favors the middle class. If so, he ignores the fact that the shrinking fractional proportion of our polity that is the middle class is not being promoted into Mitt’s nether regions of scandalous investment incomes. The middle class shrinkage means some of us are joining the poor, losing our jobs, home, health care and retirement.
By contrast, the social contract that has worked for this still young democracy is to promote the good life for one and all by encouraging wealth, but also while creating a climate of public and private incentives favoring jobs for the middle class and transfer payments for the poor.
Our society is out of whack. The true class warfare is the notion that any group has gotten “its own” and the other segments of society must fend for themselves. Many of the rich get it. Mitt is not one of those.
Mitt should read the Book of Mormon more carefully for there it is written:
“But wo unto the rich who are rich as to the things of the world. For because they are rich they despise the poor, and they persecute the meek and their hearts are upon their treasures; wherefore, their treasure is their god. And behold their treasure shall perish with them also.” 2 NEPHI 9:30.
So may his candidacy perish -- if not before Tampa then in November!
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