When we left off, I had just suggested you read the Mitt Romney’s Q&A session with potential backers in its entirety which you can do here. (You can save yourself some time by clicking through the ads asking for donations and subscriptions, and skipping over the links at the top of the page which let you jump to a particularly juicy part – with each text link thoughtfully providing you instructions on what to think while reading the quote.)
(BTW – that last sentence represents an attempt to counter the rhetoric Mother Jones’ is using to influence your thinking through my own use of the rhetorical device of innuendo, i.e., a point I want you to focus on delivered as a humorous – if slightly sarcastic – aside.)
But back to business, one of the good things about reading a transcript of the “Secret Romney Video They Don’t Want You to See!!!!!,” is that it provides some distance between the actual words spoken at the event and the captivating “spy-cam” visuals in which the story was originally wrapped.
And if you read the transcript, you’ll find little that’s actually surprising with regard to what a Republican Presidential candidate in general, and Mitt Romney in particular, might say in an informal setting with potential donors.
I could have certainly lived without having been exposed to all the glad-handling (the downside of pathos) and pandering (ethos’ evil doppelganger), but I don’t expect to see anything less distasteful from the President in these two areas when Mother Jones gets around to releasing a similar “explosive” spy video they are no doubt trying to get on the Obama campaign as we speak.
So by just using the Principle of Charity, we seem to have gotten to a point where we are able to place this story in the proper perspective, a perspective that should make most critical thinkers wonder why we had to spend a week of the campaign talking about little else.
In theory, we could also use this same Principle when looking at the combustible 47% quote that got the most media attention and just take the candidate’s word that he misspoke when he said these words. But the Principle of Charity is meant as a tool to help us weed out the unimportant from the important, not as an invitation to be so open minded that our brains fall out. So even if we agree that Romney spoke artlessly, we’d be missing an important point if we did not take what he was talking about seriously.
Logic fans out there might want to jump right into turning the obvious enthymeme of the 47% statement (that 47% of Americans don’t pay taxes and thus will not vote for him) into a syllogism like:
- 47% of Americans do not pay taxes.
- Anyone who does not pay taxes would not vote for a Republican out of self interest.
- Therefore, Romney entered the race with 47% of voters who will not vote for him out of self interest.
As with the syllogism we created to analyze the anti-Obama “Doing Fine” ad, this is a valid syllogism which clearly suffers from problems with soundless. Even if we accept the first premise as accurate, the second premise has been pretty thoroughly debunked by those pointing out that the population of the US which pays no tax consists of a wide range of people: the very poor, low-income families, retirees, active duty soldiers, the unemployed, etc., many of whom happily support Republican as well as Democratic candidates (or don’t vote at all).
The problem with using Aristotle to show up the candidate, rather than just sticking with Mother Jones, is that it misses a bigger (and more interesting) point that can only be understood in the context of some of that background knowledge we talked about in the last podcast (and will talk about much more in next week’s show).
In this case, we need some background knowledge in current conservative political thought. And with regard to who pays and who gets what from government, the number conservative thinkers are focused on these days is not 47% but 51%. For 51% represents a majority, and the fear is that if we ever reach a point where a majority gets more out of government (in terms of salary, benefits, healthcare, transfer payments, etc.) than they put in (via paying taxes), then we enter an age when (as one conservative writer puts it), the majority can keeping voting themselves lollipops that the minority will have to pay for.
And this is not an academic debate, but in fact underlies the reason why Europe’s economy is collapsing one country at a time, leading to political riots and who knows what after that.
But if a conservative Presidential candidate wants to make the case that America might suffer the same fate, then it is incumbent upon him to be clear where we currently are with regard to the percentage of the population that falls into this gets-more-out-of-government-than-they-put-in category. For just because someone living in poverty gets some food stamps and pays no taxes doesn’t mean they want to stay in their current state and will vote for whoever promises to keep them there.
In fact, the biggest drain on Greek and other European economies is the high percentage of people on the government payroll (who also earn government pensions after an early retirement).
In other words, if Mr. Romney wanted to make an important conservative point that we should be giving some thought to, he should have put the legwork (in terms of research and critical thought) into understanding and communicating a more rigorous figure of our current “deadbeat percentage,” (and what it’s made up of) rather than relying on a lazy, inaccurate equation of “percentage of people who don’t pay taxes = percentage of freeloaders who are the problem”.
His failure to coherently express himself about an important issue (making that issue all the harder to discuss) is thus the reason why he should be rightly criticized, not because some partisan journalists managed to wrap these words in video imagery that leverage the tools of the Internet-driven media age to get you to draw their (not your) conclusions.
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