In final stretch, Mitt Romney channels Lee Atwater

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/in-final-stretch-mitt-romney-channels-lee-atwater/2012/08/27/45afd2fe-f051-11e1-b74c-84ed55e0300b_blog.html

In final stretch, Mitt Romney channels Lee Atwater
By Jamelle Bouie


For the last month, the Romney campaign has been running with a new strategy: blatant appeals to racial resentment. The welfare ads, which falsely accuse President Obama of “gutting” welfare reform, were the first sign of this shift. It continued in subtler form with attacks on Obamacare — accusing Obama of taking from Medicare recipients and giving the revenues to his supporters — and became explicit again with last Friday’s “joke” about the president’s birth certificate.

At this point, in fact, Romney has stopped trying to hide the extent to which he wants to “otherize” Obama as a president for nonwhites. In an interview with USA Today this weekend, he defended the welfare ads by accusing Obama of offering waivers as a political calculation designed to “shore up his base.”

At best, Romney means Obama’s “base” is made up of welfare recipients. And the latest report from Pew Research provides insight into why the Romney campaign has adopted the Lee Atwater playbook for winning elections. Just five years ago, party identification among white voters was near parity — 46 percent identified as Republican, 44 percent as Democrat. Now, Republicans have a twelve point advantage among white voters, 52 percent to 40 percent. Overall, the GOP has become incredibly homogenous — 87 precent of self-identified Republicans are white, compared to just 61 percent of self-identified Democrats.

With blacks, Latinos and other nonwhites so adamantly opposed to the GOP, Romney’s only hope for winning the election is massive turnout from white voters. Indeed, according to Ron Brownstein, Romney needs to capture 61 percent of white voters to win, assuming they turn out at 2008 levels. Moreover, it seems clear Obama retains the support of a critical number of white voters. His approval rating reached 50 percent in the latest Post/ABC poll, and as Greg notes, he leads Romney in understanding the economic concerns of ordinary Americans.

The attacks on welfare and Medicare are crude, but they are one of the few things that could lead white voters — and downscale whites in particular — to doubt Obama’s concern for people like them. Which is why, despite widespread criticism and condemnation, Romney will press forward with these attacks.

Jamelle Bouie is a staff writer at The American Prospect. You can find his blog here.

[apnu]

1. I wonder where Obama stands with women, specifically white women. And youth too.

I have no data but my gut feeling is that Obama's support with the youth is soft (as compared to 2008) but I think he's more liked than Romney. And I think Obama has strong support with women. This makes achieving the 61% of the white vote very difficult for Romney regardless if Romney can scare the poor and elderly into voting for him (which I think is unlikely).

[TroyD]

2. white women - Howard Fineman's comments today:

Howard Fineman just told Chris Matthews that he has heard that focus groups of white women are turning on Obama because of the welfare ad.

He also added that Romney was surprised that they were the most angry about this.

[ailsagirl]

3. "Atwater was a remorseless political assassin..."

I'll just post a description of his biography ("Boogie Man&quot because the reviewer is much better with words than I.

The Murrow, Polk, and IDA Award-winning documentary Boogie Man is about Lee Atwater, a blues-playing rogue whose rise from the South to Chairman of the GOP made him a political rock star. He mentored George W. Bush and Karl Rove while leading the Republican party to historic victories, helping make liberal a dirty word, and transforming the way America elects our Presidents. In interviews with Republicans and friends of Atwater, Boogie Man examines his role in America's shift to the right. To Democrats offended by the 1988 Willie Horton controversy, Atwater was a remorseless political assassin dubbed by one Congresswoman "the most evil man in America." The film examines his irreverent sense of humor, his understanding of the American heartland, and his unapologetic vision of politics as war. It ends with a portrait of a cynic's deathbed search for meaning.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1262863/plotsummary

On 5 March 1990, Atwater collapsed during a fundraising breakfast on behalf of Senator Phil Gramm. Doctors searching for an explanation to what was initially thought to be a mere fainting episode discovered a grade 3 astrocytoma, an unusually aggressive form of brain cancer, in his right parietal lobe. Atwater underwent interstitial implant radiation, a then-new form of treatment, at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City, and received conventional radiation therapy at George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C. The treatment for the brain tumor left him paralyzed on his left side, robbed him of his tone discrimination, and swelled his face and body (from steroids). He spent the remainder of his life in a wheelchair.

Atwater died on 29 March 1991 of his brain tumor at age 40.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Atwater#Illness