The Republican presidential field is so prone to gaffes — Mitt Romney’s “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” Rick Santorum’s comparison of gay relationships to “man on dog” — that the subtler horrors coughed up daily by the candidates often go unnoticed. You have to give Mitt Romney credit; despite his wooden affect and G-rated vices (hot chocolate!), the man suffers from such an advanced case of foot-in-mouth disease that he’s been able to overshadow the King of Ridiculousness himself, Newt Gingrich. It takes a lot — namely, a $10,000 bet or a fondness for firing people — to outdo moon colonies and schoolkids working as janitors. So it’s no surprise that this gem from Gingrich, delivered at a campaign event at a cowboy bar (don’t ask), flew under the radar:
We think it is the left which has abandoned and betrayed the poor because its safety net is actually a spider web and it traps people in dependency. My goal is the exact opposite of Governor Romney’s. My goal is to turn the safety net into a trampoline to allow the poor to rise and be like the rest of us.
Coming from the guy who chastised Romney for even suggesting a difference between the rich and poor, saying “I am fed up with politicians of either party dividing Americans against each other,” this is pretty rich. The bizarre image of food stamp recipients performing aerial gymnastics notwithstanding, there are several things I find offensive about Gingrich’s statement.
For starters, since when are the poor not “like the rest of us”? Talk about dividing Americans against each other. The Census Bureau reports that the official poverty rate in 2010 was 15.1 percent. By that measure, more than one in ten Americans are poor. These are your neighbors, your kids’ classmates, the family behind you in the grocery store. That’s what is so scary about poverty in America; it can be almost invisible, hidden behind the doors of average-looking houses and masked by material goods like Xboxes and air conditioners — the very things Republicans cite when they insist that no one in this country is really poor. In short, the poor are “the rest of us.”
Even more disturbing is Gingrich’s casual implication that the poor lack some intrinsic work ethic or characteristic common to the rest of us. This is hardly revolutionary stuff, coming from the party that coined the term “welfare queens” and advocates drug-testing recipients of unemployment benefits, but it’s still a pernicious and offensive idea. A worldview in which CEOs “earn” every penny of their overinflated salaries and taxes “steal” from hard-working Americans is naturally one in which the poor are to blame for their situation. It is not a paradigm that allows for bad luck, lack of education or below-living-wage jobs. Anyone who is poor is obviously poor because of their own failings.
When Republicans scream about class warfare, they accuse the president of demonizing businesspeople and insulting the rich. But conservatives can’t have it both ways: If the rich are just like you and me, deserving of the billions they’ve earned through their own sweat, then the inverse must also be true. People in need of the safety net — or the trampoline, if Gingrich insists — are just like you and me as well.
. . . So Well Read. . . 