http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/us-election/9551740/Mitt-Romney-struggles-to-keep-on-track-as-further-video-revelations-emerge.html
Mitt Romney was fighting to keep his presidential ambitions on track after further revelations from a secretly recorded speech showed him dismissing any prospect of Middle East peace, describing Iran's leaders as "crazy people" and offering details on how terrorists could bomb Chicago.
The new excerpts came hours after Mr Romney was forced to give a hastily scheduled late-night press conference to explain why, at the same event in Florida, he had apparently dismissed half the US electorate as welfare dependents, concluding "My job is not to worry about those people".
The latest round of secretly recorded tapes raised fresh questions over Mr Romney's already weak foreign policy credentials, and completely over-shadowed attempts by the
Republican candidate to 'reset' his
US election campaign this week by focusing on policy specifics.
Asked how he would tackle the quest for Middle East peace if elected, Mr Romney told guests at the $50,000-a-plate fund-raiser in Boca Raton, Florida last May that he would essentially do nothing.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/iainmartin1/100181520/the-spectacular-implosion-of-mitt-romney-means-a-no-choice-us-election/
Romney's outburst has handed Obama victory
Several months ago I wrote a column for The Daily Telegraph saying that, on balance, it was preferable for Mitt Romney to win the looming US Presidential election. Since it was written, a video and certain statements by Mr Romney have come to light which suggest that my original argument suffered from severe design flaws. I am now issuing a product recall.
In the secret recording that has just emerged Romney was caught telling Republican donors he has no interest in 47 per cent of the US electorate, as they are all dependent on the state, expect the government to provide and see themselves as victims. This is one of the all time great election screw ups. A candidate stupid enough to say such a thing in an election year, or in any year, should be asking himself if politics is really the game for him. It will be astonishing if the release of this tape doesn't signal the implosion of his campaign, sealing victory for Obama.
There will be those who say: Romney is right, 46 per cent of Americans pay no income tax. But it isn't that simple. Some of those who pay no income tax, as the Democrats are eagerly pointing out, will be elderly Republicans. Or there are people who now pay no income tax now, but who did in the past or who aspire to in the future when they can get a job. Is Romney calling all such voters subsidy junkies? Also, most Americans pay sales taxes, so many contribute in other ways.
But what is worst about this episode is that Romney chooses to take such a mean, cynical, reductive, depressing view of so many of his countrymen. It is impossible to imagine Ronald Reagan saying, or thinking, that 47 per cent of Americans should be written off. He would have wanted to try and persuade those overly reliant on the state that they could be liberated, and the lives of their families improved, if they voted for him. His creed was essentially positive and aspirational.
The tragedy is that America and the Western world needed this year's election to be a proper contest. Obama has been a deep disappointment as President and the country's finances are in a mess. Britain and the world need a strong American recovery, but Obama seems to have no idea how to help create the climate in which it might happen. In contrast, Mr Romney does have an understanding of business growth and free-markets, although he was far from being the perfect candidate.
Now, with Romney having ruined himself, it becomes a no-choice election. This is quite extraordinary when one considers the tumultuous nature of events since the financial crisis and the need for solutions to be implemented which go beyond the centrist corporatism which dominates the landscape.
The rise of the Tea Party movement on the right and the Occupy movement on the left were presented as being polar opposite developments. But although they advocated different solutions, they were both taking on big, monopolistic interests: big government, in the Tea Party's case, and big business and finance in the case of Occupy.
Big business and big government are often in bed together, whether it be in the bank bailouts or lobbying for tax breaks which cement advantage.
That is one of the main strands of thinking in a brilliant and important new book by the Italian born American economist Luigi Zingales. In
A Capitalism For The People (recapturing the lost genius of American prosperity), he suggests that the language of markets has been stolen and subverted.
Zingales (who was in London last night at the Centre for Policy Studies) has produced a devastating deconstruction of crony capitalism. He issues a rallying cry for open markets. What is needed is proper competition, to serve the consumer, and a dramatic simplification of the tax system to remove the need for big business to spend so much time worrying about trying to influence the government.
In part this echoes the cry of the American progressives from the tail-end of the 19th century and early 20th century, who took on giant monopoly interests such as the Standard Oil Trust (which was eventually broken up). Other targets included J.P. Morgan's rail interests.
In the right hands, an updated agenda of this kind could have been immensely powerful in the current American election, making the case that business and government should serve the interests of the many rather than it being, as it so often is now, the other way round.
President Teddy Roosevelt, the great trust-busting opponent of monopoly and progressive hero of the opening years of the 20th century, would have been the ideal candidate to take such a platform forward. But unfortunately he died in 1919. Leaving the Republicans with Mitt Romney.
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