Tim Noah makes an important point about the Republican vote suppression efforts, namely that it’s informed by the belief that there exists a large number of people (some say 47%!) who are so hooked on the government teat that they won’t vote for anyone who’ll make ’em get out and get a job. So they just have to stop them from voting:
If “there are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what” because they are “dependent upon government” and “believe that they are victims” who “are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it,” and if the only sensible thing for Romney to do is “not to worry about those people” because “I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”—if all that is true, then ignoring them really isn’t going to be enough. Not if they constitute fully 47 percent of the electorate. You need to block their path to the polls. Nothing too overt here—just a little petty harassment. They aren’t the best-organized people to begin with, so all you have to do is shut down their ministers’ souls-to-polls bus operations on Sundays, require a driver’s license and maybe even proof of citizenship. That sort of thing.
That’s true. But let’s not kid ourselves about who they’re really talking about. After all, there’s a long history of suppressing the vote of certain people who have reason to vote against those who rail against such things as the right to vote and “welfare queens” and “anchor babies” and the like. It’s not that the Democratic Party wasn’t guilty of all that back in the day, but it’s been half a century now and things have changed. It’s pretty clear who’s on which side today.
The Republicans certainly need a bunch of white “lucky duckies” to vote for them. They aren’t talking about them. They’re talking about the other lucky duckies — the ones who don’t work hard and play by the rules and deserve every benefit they can get. You know, these people:
I guess I really actually feel we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African-American—voter-turnout machine — Doug Preisse, a top adviser to Governor Kasich and a Franklin County elections official.
The problem is that Romney’s such a clod that he can’t figure out how to cleverly make the distinction and ends up insulting half of his own base. Of course, it is true that for most of the wealthy creeps like Romney and his pals at the fundraiser (and their sadly deluded useful idiots), there is no distinction. They really do believe that anyone who isn’t rich is a parasite, regardless of color. Most GOP politicians are smart enough to walk that line. Mitt isn’t one of them.