Frum: Mitt played up to the rich's class terror but got burned

Conservative pundit David Frum makes it clear what the 47 percent is meant to mean to Republicans, the facts be damned:

Start with this data point:  When you ask white Americans to estimate the black population of the United States, the answer averages out at nearly 30%. Ask them to estimate the Hispanic population, and the answer averages out at 22%.

So when a politician or a broadcaster talks about 47% in "dependency," the image that swims into many white voters' minds is not their mother in Florida, her Social Security untaxed, receiving Medicare benefits vastly greater than her lifetime tax contributions; it is not their uncle, laid off after 30 years and now too old to start over. No, the image that comes into mind is minorities on welfare. 

It's also a lot of silly and, frankly, disproven fear about Obama's diabolical designs on the wealthy (his first term is almost over and America still exists, pretty much as it was under Dubya):

The background to so much of the politics of the past four years is the mood of apocalyptic terror that has gripped so much of the American upper class.

Hucksters of all kinds have battened on this terror. They tell them that free enterprise is under attack; that Obama is a socialist, a Marxist, a fascist, an anti-colonialist. Only by donating to my think tank, buying my book, watching my network, going to my movie, can you - can we - stop him before he seizes everything to give to his base of "bums," as Charles Murray memorably called them.

And what makes it all both so heart-rending and so outrageous is that all this is occurring at a time when economically disadvantaged Americans have never been so demoralized and passive, never exerted less political clout.  [...]

Yet even so, the rich and the old are scared witless! Watch the trailer of Dinesh D'Souza's new movie to glimpse into their mental universe: chanting swarthy mobs, churches and banks under attack, angry black people grabbing at other people's houses.

It's all a scam, but it's a spectacularly effective scam. Mitt Romney tried to make use of the scam, and now instead has fallen victim to it himself.

Here’s Why Mitt’s 100% Wrong on the 47%

By David Frum

September 18, 2012 | Daily Beast

URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/content/dailybeast/articles/2012/09/18/here-s-why-mitt-s-100-wrong-on-the-47.html