NYT's Peters Plays Money Card Against 'Callous' GOP Hopefuls on Front Page

May 5th, 2015 12:50 PM

Jeremy Peters, the New York Times' designated critic of Republican presidential hopefuls, played the money card on Monday's front page, over a loaded headline that harkened back to the 2012 campaign, the infamous media-fueled controversy over a line from a Mitt Romney speech to a private gathering: "G.O.P. Hopefuls Now Try to Woo the 47 Percent."

In Peters' previous front-page stories on the GOP field, he has variously accused members of being ignorantly anti-science (in an extremely misleading report on the vaccination controversy) and anti-immigrant (for opposing amnesty for illegals). So perhaps it's a relief that in his latest front-page story, Republican candidates are merely rich and out of touch, suffering the "taint of callousness" and reaching back to George H.W. Bush's 1992 campaign to make his point.

Yet when those same Republicans dare to attack Hillary Clinton in similar fashion, they are engaging in "caricature."

The last three men to win the Republican nomination have been the prosperous son of a president (George W. Bush), a senator who could not recall how many homes his family owned (John McCain of Arizona; it was seven) and a private equity executive worth an estimated $200 million (Mitt Romney).

The candidates hoping to be the party’s nominee in 2016 are trying to create a very different set of associations. On Sunday, Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, joined the presidential field.

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida praises his parents, a bartender and a Kmart stock clerk, as he urges audiences not to forget “the workers in our hotel kitchens, the landscaping crews in our neighborhoods, the late-night janitorial staff that clean our offices.”

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a preacher’s son, posts on Twitter about his ham-and-cheese sandwiches and boasts of his coupon-clipping frugality. His $1 Kohl’s sweater has become a campaign celebrity in its own right.

Peters couldn't resist dipping into ancient, irrelevant, unflattering anecdotes against previous failed Republican candidates.

We are in the midst of the Empathy Primary -- the rhetorical battleground shaping the Republican presidential field of 2016.

Harmed by the perception that they favor the wealthy at the expense of middle-of-the-road Americans, the party’s contenders are each trying their hardest to get across what the elder George Bush once inelegantly told recession-battered voters in 1992: “Message: I care.”

Peters, who dismissed the Benghazi scandal as partisan politics, and once suggested President Obama was being passively buffeted by "partisanship and forces beyond his control," only vaguely hinted that Democrats as well would have to deal with the so-called privilege issue.

Their ability to do so -- less bluntly, more sincerely -- could prove decisive in an election year when power, privilege and family connections will loom large for both parties.

Questions of understanding and compassion cost Republicans in the last election. Mr. Romney, who memorably dismissed the “47 percent” of Americans as freeloaders, lost to President Obama by 63 percentage points among voters who cast their ballots for the candidate who “cares about people like me,” according to exit polls.

And a Pew poll from February showed that people still believe Republicans are indifferent to working Americans: 54 percent said the Republican Party does not care about the middle class.

That taint of callousness explains why Senator Ted Cruz of Texas declared last week that Republicans “are and should be the party of the 47 percent” -- and why another son of a president, Jeb Bush, has made economic opportunity the centerpiece of his message.

With his pedigree and considerable wealth -- since he left the Florida governor’s office almost a decade ago he has earned millions of dollars sitting on corporate boards and advising banks -- Mr. Bush probably has the most complicated task making the argument to voters that he understands their concerns....

Republicans have already attacked Mrs. Clinton over the wealth and power she and her husband have accumulated, caricaturing her as an out-of-touch multimillionaire who earns hundreds of thousands of dollars per speech and has not driven a car since 1996.

(While Peters reached back 24 years to mock George H.W. Bush, he seemingly forgot Hillary Clinton's ridiculous "dead broke" comment from last summer.)

The story of success against the odds is a political classic, even if it is one the Republican Party has not been able to tell for a long time. Ronald Reagan liked to say that while he had not been born on the wrong side of the tracks, he could always hear the whistle. Richard Nixon was fond of reminding voters how he was born in a house his father had built.