Romney's Unsubtle Race-Baiting Campaign Can't Be Ignored
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The New York Times' Tom Edsall meticulously breaks down how the Romney campaign is trying to reach 51% by pitting race against race:
Ads that accuse President Obama of gutting the work requirements enacted in the 1996 welfare reform legislation present the first theme. Ads alleging that Obama has taken $716 billion from Medicare — a program serving an overwhelmingly white constituency — in order to provide health coverage to the heavily black and Hispanic poor deliver the second. The ads are meant to work together, to mutually reinforce each other’s claims.
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The goal is not to make a legitimate critique, but to portray Obama as willing to give the “undeserving” poor government handouts at the expense of hardworking taxpayers.
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The importance to the Romney-Ryan ticket of two overlapping constituencies — whites without college degrees and white Medicare recipients — cannot be overestimated. Romney, continuing the Republican approach of 2010, is banking on a huge turnout among key white segments of the electorate in order to counter Obama’s strengths with minority voters as well as with young and unmarried female voters of all races.
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Faced with few if any possibilities of making gains among blacks and Hispanics — whose support for Obama has remained strong — the Romney campaign has no other choice if the goal is to win but to adopt a strategy to drive up white turnout.
New York magazine's Jonathan Chait, highlighting an anonymous Republican operative's quote to The Atlantic, also illuminates the Romney race gambit, and argues that if it works, it means the end of Social Security and Medicare as we know it:
more:http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012083527/romneys-unsubtle-race-baiting-campaign-cant-be-ignored