Minorities Have It Easier!: Part III: Romney Secret 47% Video
I have long thought somebody should go through and annotate the 2012 Mitt Romney: Full Transcript of the 47% Secret Video. So I will now do it.
Part III: Minorities Have It Easier!:
Here we see Romney push the first of the Republican hot-buttons that he is going to push with his audience this evening: that because of affirmative action and "diversity" minorities have life easy in America today, and have life undeservedly easy. It's a joke. But it's not. It's a half-joke that reveals a truth that everybody in the room believes and yet knows it is not polite to speak openly.
Whenever Republicans start speaking like this, I marvel at their innumeracy and lack of curiosity: Have they looked at no graphs? Have they perused no tables? And I marvel at their blindness: Do they not look around? Does life look easier for the Latinos in that Florida billionaire's mansion that evening than it looks for the Anglos?
Marvelous... and not in a good way...
Romney: That's one piece about me that you may not know. The other is just about my heritage—my dad, you probably know, was the governor of Michigan and was the head of a car company, but he was born in Mexico. And had he been born of Mexican parents I'd have a better shot at winning this, but he was [audience laughs] unfortunately born of Americans living in Mexico. They'd lived there for a number of years, and, uh, I mean I say that jokingly, but it'd be helpful if they'd been Latino…
Audience Member: Pull an Elizabeth Warren!
Romney: Pardon?
Audience Member: Pull an Elizabeth Warren.
Romney: That's right. Those that don't know Elizabeth Warren—she's the woman who's running for US Senate in Massachusetts, who said that she's Cherokee, has put in her application over the years that she's Cherokee, and Harvard put down that she's one of their minority faculty members.
It turns out that at most she's 1/32 Cherokee, and even that can't be proven...
