Lucky Duckies or Fat Cats?

Four months ago, Mitt Romney delivered one of the most influential speeches of the 2012 campaign. Sadly, the campaign itself was too shy to publicize the speech, and so its influence wasn’t felt until earlier this week, when Mother Jones magazine posted video footage of it. (The video is also notable for its lovely golden palette, and for the shiny tableware in the foreground, both of which suggest that the anonymous cinematographer was the rapper Drake.)

The speech was more of a talk—a question-and-answer session with donors in Florida. And the most provocative part comes at the end of the first of two recordings, when Romney offers a rather pessimistic assessment of his chances:

There are forty-seven per cent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what, all right. There are forty-seven per cent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And that government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president, no matter what. And, I mean, the president starts off with forty-eight, forty-nine—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven per cent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. He’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean, that’s what they sell every four years. And so 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.

People don't like to be called “victims.” (Within days, Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama Super PAC, had posted an ad that asked, with mock incredulity, “Victims?”) But, judging from the reaction to Romney’s remarks, the most explosive words were, in fact, “forty-seven per cent.” Instead of insulting a small, unpopular segment of the electorate (which is a venerable political tactic), Romney insulted nearly half the country. His claim seems to be based on a coincidence: in 2011, about forty-seven per cent of households paid no federal income tax; in May, when he delivered his remarks, polls put Obama’s support, likewise, at about forty-seven per cent. It doesn’t follow, of course, that those two equally large percentages refer to the same group of people, or, even if they did, that none of them could be persuaded, by an effective political campaign, to defect.

Some commentators looking to put Romney’s remarks in context have seized upon an influential 2002 op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, which warned that a sizable number of “lucky duckies” pay no federal income tax. Among liberals, the essay was instantly notorious, thanks mainly to that mischievous and ill-chosen nickname. (Whether or not various exemptions and credits are wise policy, “lucky” probably isn’t the best description of how they feel—though perhaps we could prevail upon Clint Eastwood to ask his living-room furniture.) And yet the Journals argument made a kind of sense: by reducing the number of people who pay federal income tax, the government also reduces the number of people who have a vested interest in the federal income-tax rate.

Stated more broadly, this argument resonates with the fundamental conservative argument against the Democratic Party: that it has made government programs too big, and turned too many people into beneficiaries. In his acerbic booklet, “The Dependency Agenda,” Kevin D. Williamson, a National Review editor, writes, “We are all welfare queens now, or at least we soon will be.” This critique is linked to a fear that, as more people become beneficiaries, ever fewer of them will vote to limit their own benefits. “A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury,” as an old Scottish historian once put it—or, more likely, didn’t. In this view, which finds its echo in Romney’s observation, a democratic country is a precarious one, always at risk of being destroyed by its least productive citizens.

Liberals, too, have lately been talking about democracy at risk, though they are, naturally, less likely to blame “lucky duckies” than fat cats. Especially after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which allows corporations to spend unlimited sums on independent political advertising, liberals are anxious about a different kind of takeover: instead of the masses voting to fleece the élite, they see the élite scheming to disempower the masses. In a recent New Yorker article about President Obama’s struggle to raise money, Jane Mayer talked to Obama’s senior strategist, David Axelrod, who called the Supreme Court decision “a threatening concept for democracy.” He said, “If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there’s no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage.”

Such is the nature of a political campaign: one side claims that the other “starts off with a huge number”; the other side claims that the first side has “a permanent, structural advantage.” Is it possible that our democracy has been hijacked by two opposing groups, simultaneously? Neither scenario, it should be said, is particularly flattering to voters: one sees them—us!—as unscrupulous moochers, and the other sees us as unsophisticated suckers; one sees us as dumb enough to bankrupt the state, and the other sees us as too dumb to look out for our own interests. Both of these caricatures probably contain some truth. But each of these caricatures is also a falsifiable prediction, and a pessimistic one: in this election, as in every election, one side or the other is bound to strengthen its case—by losing.

See our full coverage of the campaign season at The Political Scene.

Photograph by Charles Dharapak/AP Photo.