Golf and the Gulf

Yesterday, the news was abuzz with Mitt Romney's latest gaffe. He was talking about how much he loves firing people. What he meant was that people should get to choose their health insurance provider, but coming from a guy who made a lot of money buying companies, gutting them, and sending jobs overseas, it was a stupid thing to say. His competition, including the smarter of the Mormons running for the GOP nomination, is already using these words against him.

Personally, though, I found another comment of his more irritating, without even taking it out of context:

"[Obama] set the bogey for himself. He said, look, I'm going to borrow $787 billion and I'm going to get the economy going and keep unemployment below 8 percent." (January 9, 2011, campaigning in New Hampshire, copied from NPR transcript)

Yep, "set the bogey." Mitt being Mitt, this had nothing to do with Mitsubishi or Messerschmidt fighters bearing down on him; he was breaking out in golf-speak, the language of the 1%. Maybe New Hampshire voters are into that, but I kinda doubt it. Golf is the game of the elite, the milieu that replaced smoke-filled rooms several decades ago, the alleged sport that requires the least effort possible, and comes with servants. Rich guys tooling around in carts, quaffing beverages, telling stupid jokes, and generally enjoying themselves while the masses are kept safely outside the club. Golf was the last sport to allow non-whites to participate, and country clubs centered on golf remain to this day places teeming with the melanin-poor and asset-rich.

To use golf metaphors is to reveal oneself as out of touch with the vast majority of voters, clueless and heartless. To characterize the fraction of Great Recession federal spending that most directly benefited the working people of this nation as a handicap ('bogey' means being one step behind the pace, in case you are one of the 250,000,000 or so people in the US who does not know what it means) betrays Romney's rich-boy prejudice. A trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street? Not a problem. Many more trillions in low and no-interest loans to major financial institutions (who somehow failed to pass it along)? Sound policy, nothing for a financier to complain about. But Obama getting a sub-trillion amount to build roads (roughly half what economists said it would take, but better than nothing), fix schools, and pay public sector workers? That's a loss in Mitt's book.

Nobody else seems to have taken note. Golf is so accepted a form of social intercourse in the beltway that the politicians don't recognize any problem. The main media see the game as a chance to get off-the-record candor. The lobbyists and corporations that benefit from the vast majority of federal spending rely on golf outings in exotic and exclusive locales as tools of the trade (no welfare moms get to take Obama out for a round and pitch the case for aid).

So Mitt, keep talking golf. Let your words speak of the gulf between you and We the People.