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Now tell me who the real racist in the running is?

August 15, 2012 3:05 PM
Who's playing racial politics in this campaign? It's Mitt Romney
BY MICHAEL COHEN

Yesterday, Joe Biden said something stupid. Now it’s hardly the first time those words have been spoken and likely won’t be the last. But this time Biden’s words created something of a firestorm.

When talking about Mitt Romney’s support for repealing Dodd-Frank and other regulations on big banks, Biden said, "They’re going to put y’all back in chains." This was a play off Republican charges that Democrats have shackled the private sector (an assertion that might come as a surprise to Dow watchers). Still, it was a dumb thing to say, and considering that half of Biden’s audience was made up of African-Americans, looks ever more foolish and insensitive.

But what is so fascinating about the incident is not what Biden said, but the Republican reaction to it. After taking a second to unclench their hands from the pearl necklaces around their necks, Romney campaign officials quickly attacked Obama for reaching "a new low" and the candidate himself criticized the President’s campaign of "hate." Here on the Rumble, the perennially aggrieved Derek Hunter writes that this is yet another example of "liberal racism."

But if you really want to talk about who is playing the race card this year, it’s worth briefly revisiting the latest attack ad from the Romney campaign on welfare:

It was the first of two ads that the Romney camp has run on this issue.

It might seem odd to the untrained observer that welfare is even being prominently featured in this campaign. It’s hardly an issue of pressing concern among voters. But of course, welfare never is and never has been just about policy; it’s really about politics and in particular, racial politics.

Romney accuses Obama of gutting welfare reform by granting waivers to state governments in how they choose to implement the law. It’s a charge that is completely without merit; spun from whole cloth; an invented attack line. But again, lying on the campaign trail about President Obama’s record is the rule, not the exception, for Mitt Romney.

Among the accusations made by Romney is that under Obama’s non-existent, made-up welfare plan, "you wouldn’t have to work," "you wouldn’t have to train for a job" because "they just send you a welfare check."

What’s most striking about the ad are the visuals – workers wiping their brow; working class Americans toiling away at manufacturing jobs. And coincidentally all the people in the ad ... are white. This might not mean much, except for the fact that, as anyone who has followed American politics for the past 45 years knows, criticisms of the welfare system from the campaign trail have habitually always been used as racial code in attacks on Democrats for coddling blacks. It is the symbol of wasteful government spending, rewarding poor Americans for not working and creating a culture of dependency.

Since the 1960s, Republican politicians – along with the occasional Democrat – have used assaults on the welfare system to stir up white resentment toward blacks, poor Americans and other minorities for allegedly lazily living off the largesse of hard-working tax-payers, like those visually portrayed in Romney’s ad. That the current President happens to be African-American (and is also visually featured in the ad) is again just another of those odd coincidences.

Indeed, this ad and in fact this whole line of attack is one of the most blatant uses of racial coding in a presidential campaign since the Willie Horton ad of 1988 .. more ..

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just read it and felt to complement yours ..