This Is What Plutocracy Looks Like: Romney Suggests Obama Bribed Voters [1]
Submitted by Mary Bottari [2] on
Failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney was caught on tape in another candid moment with big dollar donors. In an attempt to explain his stunning loss, Romney alleges that President Obama bribed the electorate with "gifts":
What the president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government, and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote.
What the president did was give them two things. One, he gave them a big gift on immigration with the DREAM Act amnesty program.
Number two was Obamacare. Which basically is $10,000 a family. It's a proven political strategy, which is, give a bunch of money to a group and, guess what, they'll vote for you. The giving away free stuff is a hard thing to compete with.
Forgiveness of college loan interest was a big gift. Free contraceptives were very big with young college-aged women. And then, finally, 'Obamacare' also made a difference for them because, as you know, anybody now 26 years of age and younger was now going to be part of their parents' plan, and that was a big gift to young people.
Where to begin? Previously, Romney was exposed by Mother Jones magazine at a high-dollar fundraiser asserting the wildly misleading right-wing talking point that 47 percent of the vote would go to Obama automatically, because 47 percent of Americans pay no income tax. Americans who don't pay income taxes do pay other taxes, like payroll tax, and the category of those excused includes retirees and active duty military, many of whom are Republicans.
Romney's latest attack on voters neglects the fact that the biggest "gift" given by the government over the last four years was $4.7 trillion dollars [3] for the Wall Street bank bailout. Apparently, when the government is responsive to the needs of working people and students it is called "gifting" and bribery, but when the government expends far more bailing out the big banks, it is business as usual.
In the end, it turns out that Romney was the president of the 47 percent [4] as the vote count rolls in and as his margin against Obama continues to drop.
It will be hard to forget this plutocrat's remarkable sneering farewell to the masses.
Mary Bottari is a reporter for the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). She helped launch CMD's award-winning ALEC Exposed investigation and is a two-time recipient of the Sidney Prize for public interest journalism from the Sidney Hillman Foundation.