Mitt Romney’s Gaffe-seekers and Their Success

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Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Mitt Romney’s
Gaffe-seekers and Their Success

--Richard E. Vatz

The paradox of writing critically about the consistent “Gotcha”
strategy of President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is that to write
about it is to accede to the effort to create distractions from his destructive
economic policies (and to a lesser extent his disastrous superintending of the
“lead from behind” foreign policy that has eviscerated American influence
abroad).

The far-left Mother Jones magazine released a video of Gov. Romney at a fundraiser for large donors in
which he said, as quoted by The Baltimore
Sun, “There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president,
no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him who are
dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims…they will vote for
this president no matter what…these are people who pay no income tax...[M]y job
is not to worry about these people…I’ll never convince them they should take
personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Some points of refutation of the Democrat’ spin that these quotes
mean that Gov. Romney has “disdainfully” voiced his contempt for half the
population:

   
Any candidate among donors tends to inflate his rhetoric, but it is a
legitimate point that America through increasing entitlements has become a more
dependent nation and this influences voting habits to reduce individual
initiative. It does not literally mean that Gov. Romney believes that 47% of
the nation is looking for handouts.

2. This is yet another attempt of Democratic sympathizers to
control the campaign agenda to substitute Gov. Romney’s tin ear, unpublished
taxes, riding his dog atop a van and allegedly premature criticism of the
president’s Middle East and North Africa policies to replace discussions of the
aforementioned economy and lack of any semblance of an effective foreign
policy.

3. That 47% of the public pays no federal income tax would be a
telling surprise to the public; if polled, according to my Towson students, the
general public would have guessed it to be around 10%. There is little beyond
the horserace and Romney gaffes and general rhetorical clumsiness which is
covered by NBC, ABC and MSNBC.

I naïvely told some students that no national rhetorician, even President
Obama with his considerable rhetorical skills,  could control the national agenda for four or
more months leading up to a presidential election.

I may have been incorrect.

Professor Vatz teaches Persuasion at Towson University and is
author of The Only Authentic Book of
Persuasion(Kendall Hunt, 2012, 2013)