Remember when Gingrich called Obama the "food stamp president"? Or Santorum's "blah people" cop out?
So far I haven't seen anyone on DU bring up Newt Gingrich's "food stamp president" comment about Obama during a presidential debate (of course that was exaggerated) or Rick Santorum's comment "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money." Santorum excused his comment by saying he meant to say "blah people". But now with the mid-July HHS directive that became exaggerated and misrepresented all over right wing circles (see for instance this Heritage Foundation blog post "Obama guts welfare reform"
, Romney found the PERFECT opportunity to have the ultimate Obama-bashing message:
- A campaign speech near Chicago (Obama's hometown) specifically suburb Elk Grove Village that is next to the O'Hare Intl. Airport;
- A pointed statement regarding the HHS directive: "We must include more work in welfare. We will end a culture of dependency and restore a culture of good hard work";
- And of course the fact that Obama is black and turned 51 3 days prior, and Gingrich successfully made Obama the target of a welfare-related attack.
Put that all together, and this latest speech and accompanying TV commercial by Romney has GOT to be the contender for my States' Rights Award (link is to an old post where I listed other examples). Think about it. For his first post-convention speech Reagan chose the PERFECT setting for a speech about "states' rights"...a small southern town known to most Americans as the place where three civil rights workers were murdered. Reagan's handlers obviously knew the way some in Mississippi felt just one and a half decades after the federal government shut down Jim Crow laws for good.
Compare that to Romney jet-setting to suburban Chicago three days after the president's birthday going to a majority white suburb and making an attack on Obama's welfare policy including the phrase "culture of dependency". The policy in concern was proposed in the middle of last month. So why would Romney target that HHS welfare policy three weeks later? In Obama's own backyard, specifically a suburb where many in the community choose to live to avoid the urban plight? Romney was telling the audience what they wanted to hear: a cryptic condemnation of those "others" in parts of Chicago like the South Side...and some in the audience might have registered a certain vulgar racial epithet rather than "others" in their minds.
Thom Hartmann did this commentary on July 24 presenting examples of dog-whistle politics from Romney and past Republican campaigns: