The transcript:
ROMNEY: We have to make sure that the promises we make — and Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare — are promises we can keep. And there are various ways of doing that. One is, we could raise taxes on people.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Corporations!
ROMNEY: Corporations are people, my friend. We can raise taxes on —
AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, they’re not!
ROMNEY: Of course they are. Everything corporations earn also goes to people.
AUDIENCE: [LAUGHTER]
ROMNEY: Where do you think it goes?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It goes into their pockets!
ROMNEY: Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People’s pockets! Human beings, my friend. So number one, you can raise taxes. That’s not the approach that I would take.
You should see Twitter right now. It is brutal, and hilarious, at the same time. This is one of those huge major gaffes that’s simultaneously partly true, partly funny, and totally devastating. And the Romney campaign is so tone deaf that it just defended the line by saying “Do folks think corporations are buildings?” It reminds me of Kerry’s “I voted for it before I voted against it.” It reminds of Dean’s scream. Gingrich’s line of credit at Tiffany’s. Bush, Sr.’s amazement at the use of the bar code scanner and then not knowing the price of milk. A gaffe so simple yet so memorable.
Yes, Romney is right in two ways. First, Corporations are technically “citizens” under the law in that you can sue a corporation itself (i.e. ABC, Inc.) rather than suing all of the corporate officers, and the corporation itself can sue in its own name. The corporation pays taxes as a single corporate entity, and, according to recent unfounded and horrible Supreme Court decisions, the corporation has an unlimited right to free speech.
Second, the corporation itself does not exist without human beings running it. Yes, Mitt, we get that space aliens and robots are not running every corporation on the planet (yet). Yes, Mitt, we get that human beings are the employees and corporate officers and the CEOs.
And yes, Mitt, some of those people who are corporate officers and CEOs make tons of money, millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars a year in salary, and those CEOs and corporate officers often pay less taxes on that salary than does their lowly corporate employees sweeping the floors of their corporate buildings. And the corporation itself, the legal entity we talked earlier, often gets so many tax breaks from the government that it pays no taxes at all, even though the corporation makes millions if not hundreds of millions of dollars in profit every quarter.
So Romney is right, technically. But to your average American struggling to make do every month, he is so very wrong, so wrong as to be funny. The audience, a Republican conservative audience laughed at him, and not with him, when he said “corporations are people.” Corporations are not people to them.
If, somehow, Romney survives this and wins the Republican nomination, the election is over. The ads that would be made from this are just too devastating. This gaffe sticks.