I think Adam Serwer, at Mother Jones, has the right take on Romney’s panderiffic birther “joke”:
… Romney is not himself a birther. He was engaging in ironic post-birtherism—showing solidarity with birthers by making a humorous remark that can be plausibly denied as a joke later. This is a necessary device for a Republican politician who wants to rile up the base without seeming like a lunatic, because the belief that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States is still held by nearly half of self-identified Republicans even after the very public release of the president’s birth certificate. Birtherism remains the most frank and widespread evidence of racial animus among some of the president’s critics. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in The Atlantic this month, the birthers, strapped in their waxen wings, aim for nothing less than the sun: “If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.”…
I suspect many Republicans who continue to subscribe to the birther lunacy do so because it bothers liberals and because it’s an act of symbolic defiance of a president they dislike. The problem with birtherism, however, is that the underlying assumptions driving it have always been broader than the president. Birtherism is more than just a conspiracy theory about the president’s birth. Its underlying principle is a rejection of American racial pluralism. The refusal to believe—in the face of all evidence to the contrary—that Obama is an American reads to many as saying black people don’t really count as American unless they talk like Herman Cain or Allen West.
That’s the problem with Romney’s “joke,” too. It falls into a long list of remarks that suggest an emotional myopia based on an extremely sheltered life experience. It comes across as gloating about the fact that, as a rich white man born into a wealthy and powerful family, Romney has rarely been subject to the kind of racist or sexist assumptions that clog the daily lives of millions of Americans. Romney might as well joke that he’s never been mistaken for a waiter in a restaurant or a clerk in a retail store, or that he’s never been selected for extra screening at an airport or randomly told to empty his pockets by the NYPD. The reason Romney doesn’t have to show the country his papers isn’t because everyone knows he was born in Michigan. It’s because whiteness remains unquestionably “American” for some people in a way blackness does not. That should not be a point of pride for Romney; it should be a matter of anger and disappointment.
My emphasis. In fact, I’d go even further than Serwer on that particular facet of Romney’s unlikeability: Mitt keeps making it obvious that, for him, anyone not a white male worth at least a few million is just an interchangeable cog. A member of “The Help”, as Charlie Pierce puts it. He doesn’t need to understand our quaint little folkways, honor our tiny vanities, even remember our names — we just aren’t important enough to take up that much space in Willard “Mitt” Romney’s beautiful mind. A major facet of the GOP’s appeal to working-class white voters, especially white male voters, since Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”, has been the unspoken advertisment that voting Republican would set you off as a member of the elite… if not actually rich, or well-educated, or white, or male, at least an aspiring elitist with a clear superiority over the faceless mass of those people (non-whites, immigrants, women, DFHs, welfare queens, moochers & looters). Romney can’t manage to fake that GOP-standard wink’n’nod “we’re special, not like those horrible Democrats” bonhomie. It infuriates the very people he most needs to support him that he patently can’t tell the difference between Sean Hannity and Wolf Blitzer and the chairman of the tri-county RNC nominating committee and the counter monkey fetching Mitt’s hot chocolate. A not inconsiderable portion of the Republican voting population consists of those who would (as Davis X. Machina put it) “volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.” To those people, it’s a mortal insult that Romney can’t even bring himself to pretend that he would appreciate their sacrifice — that Romney, in fact, may not be able to distinguish between their honorable sacrifice, and the slovenly unblessed non-Republican lifestyle choice of the DFHs in the next cardboard box over.
Open Thread: Romney, Avatar of Rich White Male PrivilegePost + Comments (87)