Having largely failed to excite the conservative base during the primaries, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is trying a new strategy for the general election: uniting the base behind him by picking a fight with black Americans.
That strategy was on display during Romney’s speech to the NAACP convention in Houston, in which he evoked boos by vowing to eliminate the Affordable Care Act as president — though rather than calling the law by its name, he used the term “Obamacare,” which is considered pejorative when coined by opponents of the law. Romney later told Fox News host Neil Cavuto that he expected the boos, leading some political watchers to speculate that he elicited them on purpose, in order to create a soundbite that could be routed back to the conservative base. Message from Romney: your enemies (the “liberal” NAACP) are my enemies.
After the speech, and the Fox News interview, Romney attended a fundraiser in Hamilton, Montana, in which he used a line that could have been uttered by Newt Gingrich. According to the pool report, Romney again referenced the reaction by NAACP audience members to his vow to repeal “Obamacare.” He told the fundraiser crowd: “Remind them of this — if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy — more free stuff. But don’t forget nothing is really free.”
What, no “Obama is the food stamp president?”
It is not a novel strategy. Stoking resentment, particularly among certain groups of white Americans against perceived favoritism and “handouts” to minorities, whether through affirmative action in education or hiring (which actually benefits white women more than minorities) or the social compact, from food assistance to Medicaid to Social Security, is a staple of right wing media and politics. The myth that African-Americans are universally dependent on government, draining the system and “stealing” the incomes of hard-working, self-reliant, “real” Americans — a charge that is increasingly being turned against Hispanics as well, thanks to the caustic debate about illegal immigration — is one way Republicans have solidified the support of white working class voters, particularly in the south, but also in the rust belt and the western states, over the course of a generation.
Playing the resentment card, the “reverse discrimination” card, and the “welfare queens” card is key to the success of conservative talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, who pioneered the format in the early 1980s. And these weapons are now part of bare-knuckle Republican politics. It works, despite the irony that some of those who are most hostile to government programs, are themselves dependent on them. And Republican politicians have made slashing food assistance programs and drug testing welfare recipients into staples of state and federal lawmaking.
At campaign time, “welfare queen” politics is an easy substitute for more nuanced campaigning.
It’s why Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississppi, and why George W. Bush spoke at Bob Jones University in 2000, despite the fact that the school still had a policy barring inter-racial dating. It’s why Newt Gingrich called President Obama the “food stamp president,” on Martin Luther King Day, no less; and why Rick Santorum told a campaign crowd he didn’t plan to “make black people’s lives better with welfare.” (He later changed “black” to “blah…) And it’s why Texas Rep. Paul back in the 1990s allowed his name to be placed on newsletters that warned of a coming race war. From Donald Trump’s birtherism and questioning of Barack Obama’s credentials to get into Harvard, to Pat Buchanan calling Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor an affirmative action hire, to the growth of the Tea Party, spreading the gospel of black government dependency and white working class resentment is a winner for the far right.
After all, this is far from the Republican Party whose presidential candidates, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, won 39 and 32 percent of the black vote in 1956 and 1960, respectively (around the percentage Hispanics vote for the GOP today); or whose standard-bearer for governor of Michigan, George Romney, won 30 percent of the black vote on the way to re-election in 1966.
George Romney’s son MItt, the former governor of the blue state of Massachusetts, and a guy whose business record is quickly becoming more of a liability than an asset, needs to maximize his support among a declining population of white voters in order to have a chance at the White House. And he needs to hold Obama’s share of the white vote as far below the 41 percent Obama won in 2008 as possible, to offset what’s sure to be a shellacking of Romney at the hands of black and Hispanic voters.
So Romney’s decision to dip into the Gingrich tactical pool isn’t irrational. But as Michael Tomasky points out in a blistering article on the Daily Beast, it isn’t pretty, either:
Until yesterday, I thought of Mitt Romney as a spineless, disingenuous, and supercilious but more or less decently intentioned person who at least wasn’t the race-mongering pyromaniac that some other Republican candidates of my lifetime have been. Then he gave his speech to the NAACP, and now I think of him as a spineless, disingenuous, supercilious, race-mongering pyromaniac who is very poorly intentioned indeed, and woe to us if this man sets foot in the White House as anything but a tourist.
… Let’s bat the easy charges out of the way first. Spineless? Please. He’s taken every position the Tea Party base has asked and a few they didn’t. Disingenuous? Easy. Either he’s lying now about health care, abortion rights, his support for Ronald Reagan, and his posture toward Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge, or he was lying then. Supercilious? Seems appropriate and perhaps even a bit mild for a man who made fun of NASCAR fans’ rain ponchos and a working-class family’s cookie service.
But he wasn’t a race-baiter until yesterday. That speech wasn’t to the NAACP. It was to Rush Limbaugh. It was to Tea Party Nation. It was to Fox News. Oh, he said some nice things. And sure, let’s give him one point for going there at all. But listen: You don’t go into the NAACP and use the word “Obamacare” and think that you’re not going to hear some boos. It’s a heavily loaded word, and Romney and his people know very well that liberals and the president’s supporters consider it an insult. He and his team had to know those boos were coming, and Romney acknowledged as much a few hours later in an interview with . . . guess which channel (hint: it’s the one whose web site often has to close articles about race to commenters because of the blatant racism). Romney and team obviously concluded that a little shower of boos was perfectly fine because the story “Romney Booed at NAACP” would jazz up their (very white) base.
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