Mitt Romney is already in hot water over remarks he made at a closed fundraising meeting in May, remarks that have now gone public thanks to a secret video of the event. While pundits are latching onto comments he made about the 47 percent of voters who support Barack Obama—he essentially says they are lazy and want to live off government assistance—the Republican candidate also implies that Hispanic voters are a threat to the United States.
A full transcript of Romney’s remarks to his donors has been published by Mother Jones magazine, which was the first to leak the secret video.
Here, Romney is responding to a donor who asked what could be done to win the women’s and Hispanic vote:
“So we can capture women’s votes, we’re having a much harder time with Hispanic voters. And if the Hispanic voting bloc becomes as committed to the Democrats as the African American voting bloc has in the past, why we’re in trouble as a party and, I think, as a nation.”
Whoa. It’s one thing to say that the Republican Party will struggle without the Hispanic vote. But to say that “we’re in trouble…as a nation” if Hispanics become committed Democrats suggests that Mr. Romney is nationalistic and maybe, just maybe, a little racist. Perhaps he’s worried about the U.S. becoming a nation of Democrats, as Hispanics, who already make up the country’s largest and largest-growing minority, continue to lean Democratic in their politics. Or is he worried about Hispanics taking over and the white males who make up his constituency becoming a minority? One has to wonder.
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But then again, this is the same candidate who, earlier in the video, says that had his father been born of Mexican parents, he’d “have a better shot at winning this.” So maybe Mitt just has race-envy?
Romney hasn’t backpedaled from any of his statements caught on video, either. As to his comments about the 47 percent who support Obama (“…my job is not to worry about those people—I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”), Romney says he stands by his remarks, even if they were “not elegantly stated.” In doing so, he only reaffirms what many of we 47-percenters have suspected all along—that he has contempt and disregard for anyone not in his tax bracket. Oh, but wait—he only paid 13 percent income taxes in 2010, so that puts many of us middle-class taxpayers in a higher tax bracket than him.
The good news for liberal-leaning Hispanics—that great threat to our nation of which Romney speaks—and the rest of the 47 percent of us lazy mooches is that Romney appears to have put the final nail in his campaign coffin. Even stalwart Republicans are quickly distancing themselves from his comments, and party insiders are—mostly off the record—saying his presidential bid, already struggling, is now D.O.A. For him to revive his chances of victory in the next 50 days seems unlikely. And for Hispanic voters—whose votes Romney pretends to court in public while writing them off in private—that’s very good news.
