Romney Adviser Brags About Loss Of Middle-Class Vote, Critics Charge

Commentary | Mitt Romney adviser Stuart Stevens basically brags about how little the campaign wanted your vote in a recent op-ed on which we reported yesterday.

That a Romney adviser brags in a major newspaper about the campaign’s inaccessibility to the majority of voters sadly seems to come as no surprise given the strategy we saw, but the grand mal hubris still exhibited by some Republicans — even top advisers to presidential campaigns — still seems like Missing The Point: Level, Olympic Medalist.

On the eve of Mitt Romney’s visit to the White House for a post-defeat luncheon, the Romney adviser brags in a Washington Post op-ed (published, incidentally, just before White House spokesman Jay Carney kindly extended an invite to the losing candidate to chill with the President) that, while his guy only got a karma-laced 47 percent of the vote, the other 53 percent were votes the Romney/Ryan camp didn’t want anyway.

In the subtly not-very-gracious piece we mentioned in a previous post, Stuart Stevens boasts that, while Romney got far fewer votes than Barack Obama, the votes he failed to cinch were garbagey, poor and minority votes no one really wants anyway. In fact, the Romney adviser brags, white voters came together in crazy-cohesive numbers to attempt to unseat the incumbent. (Gee, they must have been really excited about Mitt Romney! Wonder what that was about.)

Stevens sneers that it’s “safe to say that the entitlement discussion will never be the same,” before saying, out loud:

“On Nov. 6, Romney carried the majority of every economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household income. That means he carried the majority of middle-class voters. While John McCain lost white voters younger than 30 by 10 points, Romney won those voters by seven points, a 17-point shift. Obama received 4½ million fewer voters in 2012 than 2008, and Romney got more votes than McCain.”

Get the picture? No? Let’s digitally enhance it for you a bit, shall we?

“There was a time not so long ago when the problems of the Democratic Party revolved around being too liberal and too dependent on minorities. Obama turned those problems into advantages and rode that strategy to victory. But he was a charismatic African American president with a billion dollars, no primary and media that often felt morally conflicted about being critical. How easy is that to replicate?”

Suffice it to say, the pathos in that one tiny paragraph from an article in which a Romney adviser boasts that Mitt is basically White America’s Real President is enough to populate a whole series of articles here on The Inquisitr. How could an underdog like Mitt Romney, son of a lawmaker and CEO himself, with more money than God, hope to beat a poor black kid who fought his way up to president of the Harvard Law Review and, eventually, leader of the free world?

(Because, as Stuart Stevens so bravely points out, if we know anything it is that white people have it very rough in this day and age, particularly white people like Mitt Romney who have to constantly apologize for their good fortune.)

In any event, another Washington Post entry from another conservative, Jennifer Rubin, highlights again what the Romney camp has been so reluctant to admit, as have many of their GOP fellows.

It is not the “Obama gifts” that made voters abandon Romney. It’s not the way things are being said. It’s the actual meaning behind them, a meaning that is still abundantly clear as we again watch a thing like the Romney adviser who brags about losing middle-class and white voters to the other guy. It’s a clearly stated and pervasive underlying belief that Stevens feels fine speaking aloud — rich, white votes count more.

Rubin explains:

“But Stevens fails in precisely the way in which the campaign failed: a refusal to acknowledge real and material incompetence by himself and others on the campaign. The piece stubbornly refuses to express regrets or apologies for a campaign that, as evidence has come forth, makes ‘The Perils of Pauline’ look like the Rockettes.”

Recalling “a campaign with grossly defective polling, weirdly ineffective ad buying and a get-out-the-vote operation that will forever give Orca whales a bad name,” she deftly describes how even now, with nearly a month to reflect on what happened on November 6, Stuart still doesn’t “get it,” much like his boss:

” … that tautology pretty much sums up the attitude during the campaign, in which “in his world” the press was at fault, Obama was at fault, conservatives were at fault, the other pollsters were at fault and foreign policy hawks were at fault but never the Boston team …It would be fitting, and certainly less grating, if Stevens included some real acknowledgment that the narrow loss is, in large part, attributable to the errors (we now know) he and his fellow, well-paid advisers made. He writes as if the only thing he didn’t do right was have a winning campaign. Hardly.”

Rubin’s words echo the sentiments of many on the other side of the aisle reading as the Romney adviser brags about the loss of non-white, non-rich voters — it seems so fitting that “entitlement” is the hill on which the campaign chose to die this election cycle.

Because the Romney adviser’s boasts point out that if there is anyone who felt entitled in this campaign, it was their squad. And when faced with a loss, all they have to offer is thinly-veiled insult about envy and greedy gift-seeking from an American populace that ultimately wasn’t buying what they were selling.

How did you feel about Stuart Stevens’ post-election reflection in the WaPo‘s pages?