It’s commonplace to note that Newt Gingrich’s dog-whistle appellation that Barack Obama is the “food stamp president” is both racist and politically cynical. But the stereotyping of black government dependency also serves the strategic end of discrediting the entire social safety net, which most Americans of all races depend on. Black people are subtly demonized, but whites and blacks alike will suffer.
Gingrich persists because it’s a dependable applause line, and because his political fortunes keep rising. Compare that to September, when Mitt Romney attacked [ http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11256/1174322-84-0.stm ] then-candidate Rick Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” Perry backtracked, insisting that he only wanted to bolster the program and ensure its solvency. But in his 2010 book “Fed Up,” Perry made his opposition to Social Security clear, calling it “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.” Scrapping entitlements is a core tenet of contemporary fiscal conservatism, but most of the time politicians only get away with attacking the most vulnerable ones: Medicaid, food stamps and welfare cash assistance, which are means-tested and thus associated with the black (read: undeserving) poor, although whites make up a far greater share [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/santorum-defends-comments-about-food-stamps/ ] of food stamp recipients. Government welfare programs with Teflon political defenses — Medicare and Social Security — are nearly universal entitlements and thus associated with “regular” (read: white) Americans.
“Ending welfare as we know it,” as Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans did in 1996, is one thing. “Ending Medicare,” Republicans were last year reminded, is something else altogether. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare,” declared [ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9805E5D71330F933A15751C1A96F9C8B63 ] a 2009 Tea Party town hall attendee who today might very well be an ardent supporter of Gingrich’s assault on food stamps. It is a political lesson that free-market fundamentalists have to relearn with some frequency. It was only 2005, after all, when President George W. Bush launched his ill-fated proposal to privatize Social Security — a setback he later called his greatest failure [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/22/george-w-bush-reveals-his_n_772209.html ].
Yet as more government programs of any sort are framed as pernicious, laissez-faire ideologues are again emboldened to get rid of everything.
As recently as November 2009, the New York Times reported [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/us/29foodstamps.html ] that stigma around food stamps had faded; the program received strong bipartisan support as millions of newly impoverished Americans reached out for food assistance. But temporarily cautious politicians had only stashed the old playbook on the top shelf, and the revival of welfare queen demagoguery made for quick political results. Nationwide, state legislatures are moving to impose drug testing of welfare [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/24/welfare-us-politics ], and even unemployment insurance, recipients.
And and then came the push for cuts. Few noticed in April 2011 when House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proposed cutting $127 billion from the food stamp program. The same went for the proposed dismantling of Medicaid, the healthcare entitlement for the nation’s poorest, which would be transformed into a block grant to the states with no coverage requirements. Everyone was focused on Ryan’s audacious proposal to privatize Medicare, and conservative pundits were eager to sink the popular entitlement under the banner of pragmatic fiscal seriousness. “The Ryan budget,” David Brooks wrote [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/opinion/05brooks.html ] at the time, “will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.”
But politicians have more trouble getting away with criticism of less stigmatized benefits. Corbett suggested on the campaign trail that “The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there.” Democrats pounced and he rushed to issue a clarification, though a conservative think tank eagerly backed up his [ http://www.commonwealthfoundation.org/policyblog/detail/tom-corbett-is-right-on-unemployment ] original position.
Unemployment benefits, however, are on the political cusp: Once somewhat invincible like Social Security and Medicare, some states have made cuts amid the campaign of stigmatization. In South Carolina, state-funded jobless benefits were reduced from 26 to 20 weeks. Republican state Sen. Kevin Bryant blogged [ http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-09-05/business/ct-biz-0905-demon-jobless-20110905_1_jobless-benefits-wayne-vroman-unemployment-benefits ], “I’m disappointed that we have a significant segment of our society leeching [off] the system.” Arkansas, Missouri, Michigan and Florida have also reduced benefits. Yet it was just two months ago that Republicans suffered their greatest embarrassment of 2011 after nearly blocking the extension of unemployment benefits.
Welfare was “reformed” in 1996 because politicians, and many white Americans, were convinced the program’s beneficiaries weren’t meritorious. Indeed, the entire history of the American safety net is one of programs losing popularity as they are associated with poor black people. Initially blacks were largely excluded from New Deal welfare. It was when the War on Poverty broke down racial barriers that white public opinion turned against it. “Increasingly associated with Black mothers already stereotyped as lazy, irresponsible, and overly fertile,” writes Northwestern School of Law’s Dorothy Roberts, “it became increasingly burdened with behavior modification, work requirements, and reduced effective benefit levels.”
The same was true for public housing, which once received broad-based support. But in the 1950s, whites moved to segregated suburbs and blacks were left behind [ http://uncpressblog.com/2011/01/18/james-wolfinger-home-sweet-home/ ], and the projects became unpopular and underfunded. Housing benefits for upper-income Americans, like the mortgage interest rate deduction, are not, to be sure, subject to such negative stereotypes, and neither are the billions in federal and state dollars that have been spent on highways and federally subsidized mortgages for disproportionately white homeowners.
Or take public schools. If all of our children, black and white, rich and poor, were in one big system, that system would get ample support. But since many poorer students of color are segregated into separate, unequal and low-performing districts, policy solutions like charters and an obsession over standardized testing that would never pass muster in a wealthy district are advocated as pragmatic solutions.
Count yourself lucky that rich people still (for the meantime) breathe the same air as everyone else.
If some whites reap some cold comfort from Gingrich’s performance, the racial hostility on display comes at a much higher cost to the American people as a whole. We have long since traded the possibility of a decent society for fear and resentment. So watch out for the next attack on “the food stamp president.” The entitlement they end might be your own.
America, Meet Saul Alinsky, The Great Man Newt Gingrich Wants You To Hate
Frank Mankiewicz Posted: 01/28/2012 8:34 am
In his victory statement in South Carolina, and again in the final Florida debate, Newt Gingrich twice accused President Obama of shaping our country to reflect the ideals of Saul Alinsky. He did so twice in his relatively short address, and he has referred to Alinsky as an undescribed villain at least twice before in his campaign. On each occasion, he has offered us nothing beyond Alinsky's name, as though he were referring to as well-known a person as, for example, Steven Spielberg or Paula Abdul. He has told us nothing of Alinsky, whether he is alive or dead and, if of this century, American or not, a political leader or a rock star and, above all, why we should go all out to defeat President Obama in order to thwart this unknown villain's influence over America.
Saul Alinsky's name is not just one of a long list of villains cited by Gingrich as scheming role models or disciples of the president; he stands alone. Alas, except in Chicago, where he spent his entire life, no member of the "Mainstream Media" has picked up on the Alinsky Menace, to tell us in any detail just who this dreaded influence is -- or was, and why we need to support Mr. Gingrich in order to thwart him -- or his memory.
As one who was quite familiar with Alinsky's ideas in the 1960s, when I tried hard -- and at some times successfully -- to put some of them into effect in Latin America as an official of the Peace Corps, I want to add at least a footnote to this campaign for the Presidency, and even to try to put Gingrich's baffling demonization of him into perspective.
Alinsky, born in 1909 and always a citizen of Chicago, was the guiding force in shaping an historic community organization called "Back of the Yards," a loose community group in the area behind the stockyards in Chicago, the very area which is the site of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Alinsky believed these 20th century people, if they realized their common difficulties, could be organized into a community force that could bring about real change.
Alinsky fought hard against the prejudices in the largely ethnic enclaves of Chicago. He struggled with the fact that poor workers were too afraid of their employers to fight against the economic injustices that kept them in poverty. Besides, it seemed "radical"; to form an organization or to join one -- even a labor union. Perhaps even more important, his efforts were almost unanimously opposed by the local priests in the largely Roman Catholic parishes. So Alinsky turned to Rev. Bernard Sheil, the auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Chicago, whom he knew to be a friend of labor, and together, they approached every priest in the neighborhood. Eventually, the Movement had signed up thousands of members, and within a short time the employers had yielded on all the key points Alinsky's organizers had raised.
This triumph and subsequent ones elsewhere made me an admirer and, when I became a Peace Corps official -- in Peru and later as Regional Director for Latin America -- a disciple of Alinsky's. Volunteers under my direction were trained as Community Organizers to, in Alinsky phrase, "rub raw the sores of discontent" in the urban and rural areas of poverty where they were assigned. Communities were formed from collections of individuals with grievances that went unexpressed, until a community organizer urged them to raise them together. We used American examples -- a reading club, a carpool, a credit union -- and unused land became playing fields, abandoned buildings were made into local stores and teachers sent from distant headquarters began to respect their students and their language and their culture.
That's the legacy of Saul Alinsky, Newt, you can find it wherever he or his ideas have played out. And when Saul Alinsky was awarded the Pacem In Terris Award, by a number of Catholic archdioceses and organizations in 1969 he became one of an honorable group of recipients. Among them, well, John F. Kennedy, George Kennan, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King Jr., Sargent Shriver, A. Philip Randolph, Mother Teresa and Lech Walesa. Maybe, Newt, you might want to add all these names with Saul Alinsky's to your own Enemies List.
News 
Market Data 
Discover 
AI
