In June, Michelle Bachmann - while kicking off her official presidential campaign in Waterloo, Iowa - confused a killer (John Wayne Gacy) with a cowboy (John Wayne): "Well what I want them to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That's the kind of spirit that I have, too," she said. Oops; movie star John Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, three hours away. The John Wayne that Waterloo was home to is notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Bachmann's camp addressed her remarks in a statement saying, "John Wayne is from Iowa, his parents lived in Waterloo." (Which is true; but Wayne never lived there.)
But a misstatement regarding patriotism and John Wayne's America (or, to be more accurate, John Wayne's cowboy hero character's America; John Wayne, the actor, was a chain-smoking, drinking womanizer who was married three times) is one thing. Democrats are jumping all over GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney's commentary from Des Moines on Thursday, where he demonstrated an amazing display of foot-in-mouth disease before an angry crowd:
ROMNEY: Do I believe that Social Security should take no part in deficit reduction negotiations? Social Security and Medicare are a large part of federal spending. It is about half. Not just this year, but over the coming decades, if we are able to balance our budget, we have to make sure that the promises we make for Social Security and Medicare are promises we can keep. There are a couple ways to do that: one way is to raise taxes on people. That's not the way -
VOICES FROM CROWD: Corporations! Corporations!
ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend. We could raise taxes and -
VOICE FROM CROWD: No they're not!
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people. So - [audience laughter] where do you think it goes?
[audience shouts and laughter]
VOICE FROM CROWD: In their pockets!
ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets. Okay - human beings, my friend. Number one, so number one: you can raise taxes. That's not the approach that I would take. Number two, you can make sure that the promises we make are promises that we can keep. And in my view, the areas that you have to consider are, for higher-income people ...
Or to quote my Detroit-area attorney friend Adam Taub from his Facebook page: "Corporations are people? Holy shit, then according to the transitive property, Corporations are . . . SOYLENT GREEN!!!!! ARRRgHhhhhh!!!!"
Wait, do I really need to explain this movie? I do? Ugh. OK, in the year 2022, the greenhouse effect has poisoned the Earth. The world is grossly overpopulated and there are almost no natural food sources remaining. Street vendors sell "Soylent Red" and "Soylent Yellow" (made from soybeans), while the government controls (and hands out rations of) "Soylent Green" every Tuesday. Soylent Green is supposedly made from high-energy plankton, and is often in short supply due to high demand. Real food is unheard of. And ... you know what? I am getting off-topic; click this link to learn more about this Charlton Heston classic!
Back to Romney. Everyone - and by this I mean everyone who follows politics to some degree - knows Romney will do the candidate shuffle on this one, that he will try to tell everyone he really meant corporations employ people, who get paychecks, and so they are "people." But those who are even remotely intelligent know that's not what he meant. Not at all. After all, as CEO of Bain Capital, Romney profited while five of the companies under his firm's direction went bankrupt, and thousands of workers lost their jobs. It will be difficult for Romney to spin this positively; his opponents (whether Democrats or other GOP presidential wanna-be's, all chomping at the bit) will clamor he didn't care much about those people, but he definitely cared about a "person" in the form of Bain Capital.
Romney spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom quickly went to Twitter to defend Romney: "Do folks think corporations are buildings? They're people who incorporate to conduct business. They create jobs and hire more people."
(Sidebar: Is the heckler in the front really Romney's "friend"? A "my friend" quote from anyone who is not really your friend seems a patronizing comment. Perhaps he meant to say, "Corporations are my friends, people.")
Then again, maybe it isn't Iowa; Bachmann ran into this kind of trouble previously, when she confused Concord, N.H., with Concord, Mass., as the birthplace of the American Revolution. And 2008 GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin famously screwed up her American History earlier this year with her misquote about Paul Revere's famous ride:
"He who warned uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."
As any elementary student can probably tell you, Revere was not attempting to warn the British when he rode around crying, "The British are coming." Nor was he ringing bells and trying to protect gun rights. And as any US historian could tell you, Revere didn't even finish the ride that came to be named after him. Revere was stopped by a British patrol on his way to Concord, and never made it. In fact, he was riding with two other men (William Dawes and Dr. Samuel Prescott), only one of whom (Prescott) succeeded in warning the Americans in Concord that the British were coming.
Not that we should let the facts get in the way of our opinions or anything. Thank you, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for your politically inaccurate poem.
But in the grand scheme of things, I believe Romney's commentary will do far more damage to his credibility than Bachmann's and Palin's historical gaffes will do to theirs. At least with "friends" on the short end of the tax/Social Security/Medicare scale; the (tax-free) corporate donations should keep rolling in.
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