"Under President Obama, the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty than ever before."

Mitt Romney makes income inequality his issue in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Necessary rebranding for Mr. 47%.

"The GOP's Giddiness Over Hillary Clinton's Jobs 'Gaffe' Will Backfire."

That's the title of a New Republic article by Brian Beutler, and I'm sure it makes some liberal-lefty readers feel good, but a competent consumer of propaganda begins with a thought like: So I guess Democrats are terrified that Hillary's pandering to the you-didn't-build that crowd is going to destroy her.

How can Beutler purport to predict that this sound bite cannot be exploited without backfiring? The Democrats won the last presidential election by exploiting one awkward thing Mitt Romney said.

Beutler doesn't mention that, but he makes much of the Republicans' use of Obama's "you didn’t build that" remark, which didn't prevent him from winning in 2012. 

[I]n hindsight, many conservatives acknowledged that the GOP’s obsession with that gaffe revealed more damaging truths about the Republican Party than the gaffe itself revealed about Obama.

“One after another, [Republican businessowners] talked about the business they had built. But not a single—not a single—factory worker went out there,” Rick Santorum told activists at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last year. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage.”

The fixation on [Hillary's] gaffe foreshadows another Republican presidential campaign centered on the preeminence of the entrepreneur, to the exclusion of the wage worker and the trade unionist and the jobless.

"Gaffe" is not the right word. The point isn't: Ha ha, you made a ridiculous mistake. It's: You said what you really think in a revealing way and we're going to use that against you. That's obviously part of American politics, and in 2012, both the 47% thing and "You didn't build that" were revealing and useful. Both were used, and if Obama won, I doubt that it's because the Republicans shouldn't have exploited "You didn't build that." It's more likely that Democrats (and their media friends) jumped on the 47% remark and used it ruthlessly.

The trick is to use these revealing statements well. It would be foolish for Republicans to take the advice to leave the Democrats' overly leftist lines alone. If it's good advice, you'd have to believe that Democrats would leave the Republicans' overly right-wing lines alone. Who believes that?

Krugman sees a "major rhetorical shift" from Romney's campaign to Bobby Jindal's recent speech.

Krugman's column is titled "Makers, Taker, Fakers." Here's one thing that seemed off to me:

Mr. Jindal posed the problem in a way that would, I believe, have been unthinkable for a leading Republican even a year ago. “We must not,” he declared, “be the party that simply protects the well off so they can keep their toys. We have to be the party that shows all Americans how they can thrive.” After a campaign in which Mitt Romney denounced any attempt to talk about class divisions as an “attack on success,” this represents a major rhetorical shift.

There are 2 propositions: A. Those who are successful should be able to keep the fruits of their efforts, and B. All Americans should have the opportunity to work toward their own success.

Krugman comes close to saying Romney only said A and Jindal only says B.

But Romney continually said both things. His opponents worked constantly — and successfully — to make people feel that he was only saying A.  And Jindal is also saying both things. That's the function of the word "simply."

Jindal — in the quoted sentence — isn't saying Romney only said A. He's talking about the way people think about the Republican Party, which is in A terms, because that's the way Democrats have successfully framed them. Jindal is saying the B frame is better political rhetoric.

Krugman goes on to explain why B rhetoric doesn't properly apply to what Jindal and the rest of the GOP are really doing. That is, he's continuing the process that was used so successfully in the campaign to defeat Romney — pushing A, obscuring B.

There is no major rhetorical shift. Not from Jindal and not from Krugman. Everyone is doing, rhetorically, what they've been doing all along.

There are 2 propositions — A and B — that relate to GOP policy. GOP proponents portray them as 2 sides of the same thing: The reason why A makes sense is that it's part of how B works. Opponents of the GOP de-link A and B and portray B as a trick to get people to vote for the party that's only about A.

2 questions for the GOP: 1. How can you truly be about B, with A as a subordinate proposition? and 2. Can you get people to believe that's what you are?

"He didn’t bring up the 47%!"

"He had a whole, you know, area to discuss the role of government and he didn’t talk about a philosophical divide!"

Obama must have determined in advance not to use the 47% material. The question is why. Perhaps the thinking was: Everyone will perk up, this will be the sound bite of the debate, and Romney's expecting it. He'll be prepared. He knows what you'll say, but you don't know what he'll say, in whatever excellent remarks he'll have planned. You'll have to think on the spot, and his whole plan will be to have something you'll stumble over on the spot, perhaps something you once said that you might stammer over explaining, as this sound bite of the evening is being recorded for exploitation everywhere.

He played it safe, which you may say wasn't really safe. But you're not seeing what would have happened down the road not taken.

***

I shall be telling this with a sigh   
Somewhere ages and ages hence:   
Two roads diverged in a debate, and I—   
I took the easy one to travel by,   
And that has made all the difference.

"The pro-Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action, is quick out of the starting gate this morning with a new television ad..."

"... featuring footage of Mitt Romney’s candid comments from a private fundraiser that has rocked the political world this week."



And here are the Romney campaign's new ads about the "War on Coal":

"The president’s view is one of a larger government... where government plays a larger and larger role, redistributes money..."

"I think... that’s the wrong course for America," said Mitt Romney today, trying to regain the offensive position as Democrats made what they could out of his "47%" remark. "We believe in free people and free enterprise, not redistribution."

Helping Romney in this effort to seize the narrative is Matt Drudge, headlining something Obama said in 1998 with the teaser "I actually believe in redistribution." But that video Drudge linked to only has 313 views! Wow. I'm surprised the click-through from Drudge is so extremely minimal.

And here's James Taranto, doing his part for Romney.

ADDED: I don't know why we're assuming that something Romney said to donors back in May was genuine. He might have been dishing out stock conservatism to extract money from rich folk. By the same token, Obama has said things to small groups to stroke them. There's an awful lot of crap that can be strewn in our path in this run-up to the election. But what can you do? Turn off the noise? Use everything useful, any which way you can? Run away screaming?

The secret video reveals Romney as "the sneering plutocrat..."

"... fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party," says Jonathan Chait.

[Romney] believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”)...

The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable.  It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.

There are plenty of conservatives who will celebrate all of that. Not the "sneering plutocrat" part, but the Paul Ryanism.

Chait is demonstrating how Democrats can stir up antagonism to Romney, but much of that antagonism will be felt by people who were never going to vote for Romney... like Chait himself. I have never hated Romney, he says. Yeah, you didn't hate him because he seemed so bland and ineffectual, and you didn't think he'd win. But Paul Ryan and his crisp conservatism — that, you hate. I'd say Romney ought to avoid sucking up to Chait. That's the McCain mistake: You get liberals to like you, but they don't vote for you, and the conservatives lose interest.

Chait gives it all away when he brings up Ryan and portrays him as contemptuous. "Sneering plutocrat" is a great phrase, and I expect Democrats to take advantage and plunge forward with that meme. But Ryan is no sneering plutocrat. He brings youthful vitality and intelligence to the conservative cause. If Romney seemed like Ryan in the secret video, that's a useful revelation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Crimso said:

Did Chait actually suggest it is wrong to have contempt for looters and moochers? 

And edutcher said:

When you've lost Jonathan Chait...

you've really started to scare the Lefties. 

"[I]f they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy — more free stuff."

"But don’t forget nothing is really free. It has to paid for by people in the private sector creating goods and services, and if people want jobs more than they want free stuff from government, then they are going to have to get government to be smaller. And if they don’t want to repeal Obamacare they are going to have to give me some other stuff they are thinking about cutting, but my list takes Obamacare off first and I have a lot of other things I am thinking of cutting."

This is a Romney quote that is getting a lot of play right now, notably from Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone, who goes all racial:

Wow. If you live long enough, you’ll see some truly gross things in politics, but Mitt Romney’s work this past week "courting black support" was enough to turn even the strongest stomach.

Romney really showed us something in his luridly self-congratulating N.A.A.C.P. gambit, followed by the awesomely disgusting "free stuff" post-mortem speech he delivered the next night in front of friendlier audiences. The twin appearances revealed the candidate to be not merely unlikable, and not merely a fatuous, unoriginal hack of a politician, but also a genuinely repugnant human being, a grasping corporate hypocrite with so little feel for how to get along with people that he has to dream up elaborate schemes just to try to pander to the mob.

Taibbi takes the quote out of context, ending with the line in the title, and omitting the important "But don’t forget nothing is really free" and the rest of Romney's simple exposition of economic truth.

So... something's disgusting. There are some truly gross things in politics. I agree about that.

"Class warfare" and "the war on women" — 2 wars or 2 fronts in the same war?

A question that came to mind as I was reading this comment, from Yashu, on last night's "Rosengate" post:

What happened was, in their efforts to attack Romney, the Dems suffered a strategery malfunction. Crossed wires caused a short circuit.

Crossed wires: i.e. two separate tactical strands of the Obama 2012 campaign against Romney momentarily met in Rosen's soundbite and short-circuited.

1. GOP "war on women" (Dem pandering to women)
2. Class warfare (spurring resentment of Romney's wealth)

Rosen was predictably going along on #1 (that's the meme the Dems are pushing now, #2 will come to the forefront later). But because they had to defend themselves against Romney's counterattack (Obama's economy hurting women), for a moment #2 came to the fore: i.e., Ann Romney's a rich bitch who's never worked a day in her life, so what does she know about the economy or jobs?

Short circuit. Because the "rich bitch" was tacit, implicit; what was explicit, what everyone heard out loud was: stay-at-home mom never worked a day in her life, so what does she know about the economy or jobs?

A stupid sneering insult to stay-at-home moms, i.e. a large number of women. Short circuit.

Do Democrats need to be careful to fight these 2 wars separately, or is there a way that the 2 wars could be merged successfully? Rosen merely lost a battle. That doesn't mean her side has lost the war or that it is not capable of a war on 2 fronts. You might not want them to win, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. Whichever side you are on, you will want to understand this.

2 Instapundit posts show some sharp, clear things that Romney can't say... but I like picturing Romney saying.

1. Here, Instapundit deals with Romney's supposedly unfortunate remark that he's "not concerned about the very poor":

Frankly, I think he’s got a point. People whose livelihood comes from the government — whether the very poor, or the government employees — are doing fine. It’s people who depend on the actual economy who are hurting.

2. This one links to something I said to Andrew Sullivan who'd taken shot at Romney/Mormons. Instapundit then prints email from Will Collier that says:

Disclaimer: I’ve got no particular use for Romney or anybody else still running this year. That said, whenever a yahoo like Sullivan pulls the “fake friendly” Mormon card over the next year, the response ought to be this speech from the end of the (in)famous South Park “All About Mormons” episode…

Look, maybe us Mormons do believe in crazy stories that make absolutely no sense, and maybe Joseph Smith did make it all up, but I have a great life. and a great family, and I have the Book of Mormon to thank for that. The truth is, I don’t care if Joseph Smith made it all up, because what the church teaches now is loving your family, being nice and helping people. And even though people in this town might think that’s stupid, I still choose to believe in it. All I ever did was try to be your friend, Stan, but you’re so high and mighty you couldn’t look past my religion and just be my friend back. You’ve got a lot of growing up to do, buddy. Suck my balls.