Recent liberal assaults on Mitt Romney for his comment that he is ‘not concerned about the poor’ teach us something about political communication.  This now familiar quote was taken out of context by Romney’s democratic opponents.  When we hear the sentence that immediately follows the sound-bite saturating communication channels at the moment, Romney sounds a whole lot less cold hearted. 

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.”

Romney did say that he is not concerned about the poor, so democrats circulating the sound-bite are not lying, but as a sound-bite pulled from context it is designed to be misleading, constructed to send a message very different from the one Romney himself, as the person being quoted, intended to send.  In this sense, the democrats are, like Romney, misrepresenting the facts.

At the same time, this quote has been taken out of context in a second way: it is separated from the best available data on what we know about our lives today.  As Ruth Marcus from the Washington Post argues persuasively that

“The deeper problem is that Romney’s remarks betray a trio of fundamental misunderstandings: of the nature and scope of poverty in America; the state of the social safety net; and the impact of his own proposals on protections for the poorest Americans.”

The context that is missing here is that more than 15% of Americans live in poverty.  That is 46.2 million Americans living (for a family of four) on less than $22,134 a year.  The poverty rate has risen for whites and blacks, but the white rate rose to 9.9% while the black rate rose to 27%.  Nearly one in ten Americans make up the working poor, that is, they live in households with an adult working that is nevertheless below the poverty level.  This is part of a long-term trend, not simply the result of our most recent recession, since the average annual income for full-time male workers today is less than it was in 1973. 

But there is a third way that the Romney quote is out of context: it is discussed as if it was not strategic. Romney is talking about the poor in a way that is designed to mobilize middle-class (largely white and male) resentment against the poor.

Here we might say that Romney’s statement displaces one context (the data on poverty) with another intentionally misleading context to strategically suggest that we are already doing a lot for our poor citizens so it is okay to direct our anger toward doing a bit less for them and more for ourselves.

But in a real world context where Medicaid coverage is grossly inadequate (though that will be remedied with the new health care reform), “food stamps provide about $1.44 daily per person per meal, [and only] one in four poor renters receives housing assistance,” it is not surprising that a candidate would want to reframe the conflict to distract us from the fact that the US “has one of the least generous safety nets in the wealthy developed world,” as Marcus notes.

In this sense, I wonder if democrats focusing on the ‘I am not concerned about the poor’ sound-bite are reinforcing the image and message Romney’s more carefully coded phrasing intended to send, while also making it more difficult for us to see his strategic choice to confuse voters and mobilize the very real frustrations of the working poor and struggling middle class by re-focusing their resentment and anger toward the poor rather than toward elite leadership failures.

Further, according to Marcus, it is not just Romney who is willing to talk about poverty out of context.

“It is a bipartisan truth that talking about the poor has fallen out of political fashion. Both parties prefer to focus their rhetoric on the beleaguered middle class, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is where the votes are.”

To the degree that states succeed in disenfranchising poor and minority voters, the electoral pull toward discussing poverty as if it were merely a justification for middle-class resentment will only grow more difficulty to resist.