Romney’s racist dog whistle and the GOP Southern Strategy

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

This week's attempt by the "Galt – Gekko 2012" campaign to inject a racial connotation into Vice President Joe Biden's remarks about Romney's friends among the banksters of Wall Street is a case of psychological projection. The 'Foxification' of the 'news' with manufactured outrage of the day. I and others have written about the Romney campaign's "I'm rubber, you're glue" strategy of projecting onto his opponents his own misdeeds. A classic "Rovian" tactic.

Case in point, in recent days Romney is portraying the outwardly calm President Obama as a man seething with animosity and power lust, he "is all about division and attack and hatred" Romney said Wednesday. Obama, Romney added later while campaigning in Charlotte, is an angry man who "will do or say anything to get elected." Romney takes aim at Obama's likability lead.

For the uninitiated and unimformed media villagers, like Charles Babbington of the AP who wrote the above report, let me explain what this is to you. This is not about the tone or nastiness of the campaigns' political ads which you media villagers seem to fixate on. 

The "angry black man" is a racist stereotype used to scare "white folks" in American politics dating back to the Civil Rights Movement. Stereotypes of African Americans in the United States. When Romney is using this language, he is blowing the racist dog whistle to the nativist and racist base of the modern-day Tea-Publican Party.

The "angry black man" racist dog whistle is why FAUX News Fraudcasting has spent so much time over the past four years race-baiting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and a couple of dumbasses who call themselves the New Black Panther Party, always tying them to President Obama. It is why President Obama goes out of his way to always appear pleasant and in good humor or at worse, professorial, but never angry. He does not want the race-baiters at FAUX News to have any material to use.

If the uninitiated and uninformed media villagers are unable to recognize this or are unwilling to call out this racist dog whistle for what it is, I strongly urge you to find another line of work; you are not worthy of pretending to be a "journalist."

The long-standing GOP Southern Strategy of race-baiting is an integral party of the Romney campaign. The false attack Romney launched last week against the Obama administration on "welfare reform" is the classic politics of resentment for the poor (read minorities) personified by Ronald Reagan's mythical "Cadillac driving welfare queen" from the Southside of Chicago. This kind of race-based politics works when the media fails to "name it and shame it" with public condemnation.

Ed Kilgore writes at the Political Animal blog, A Blast From the Disreputable Past:

I’ve been examining my conscience to figure out exactly why the Romney-Ryan campaign’s “Obama killed welfare work requirement” large and continuing series of ads and speech references and talking points enrages me so very much.

Yes, I used to be something of a welfare policy wonk, and know how incredibly mendacious and wrong-minded this line of attack is, and how deeply hypocritical Republicans are for complaining that Obama doesn’t want welfare recipients to work even as they are trying to destroy every single public policy that “makes work pay” for people trapped in poverty.

* * *

But lying and hypocrisy have become standard weapons in Team Mitt’s arsenal, going back to the savage primary attacks on fellow-Republicans, so why does this particular example bother me egregiously?

And then the obvious finally hit me: the Romney campaign is reviving the single oldest tactic of southern reactionaries: race-baiting white working class voters to distract them from the many issues on which this segment of the electorate is naturally unsympathetic to policies that reinforce economic and social privilege. It’s how the Bourbons reasserted control over the Populists in the late nineteenth century. It’s how conservatives undermined southern support for the economic policies of the New Deal and Fair Deal and New Frontier and Great Society. It was ultimately the fulcrum for the realignment of the whole region from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

So it’s a familiar tactic, but what makes it novel is that it is not being narrow-cast into North Carolina or Virginia or northern and western Florida or Missouri, but broadcast everywhere. And there is zero way it can be rationalized as a part of an overall GOP message supposedly focused on economic recovery and job creation—or even, given the ridiculously small quantities of federal money that go to the Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) program, as part of a budget austerity message. It’s a flat-out racial appeal aimed at convincing non-college educated white voters that this black president wants to take their tax dollars to give them to his shiftless black brothers and sisters.

This very non-southern national Republican ticket is going far out of its way to replicate the most despicable tactics of old-school southern racial demagoguery, and is apparently so invested in this strategy that no end of fact-checking and shaming will convince them to let up for a moment. I should hope that any fair-minded Republicans (and yes, there are some left, impotent as they often are in party counsels) or “neutral” MSM observers, regardless of what they think about the two campaigns generally, would bury this particular blast from the disreputable past in an avalanche of denunciation. If not, then progressives owe it to the country to raise hell about it until it stops or is repudiated by voters.

Ed Kilgore continues in The Power of a Pure Lie:

Just so you know that I’m not the only political observer who’s outraged by the Romney’s campaign’s continued fanning of racial flames via a flat-out lie about Obama’s record on welfare, TNR’s Alec MacGillis watched Romney deliver the lie himself to an all-white audience of Ohio coal miners, and reported his dismay that it drew big applause:

After the speech, several in the audience told me that their favorite part had been Romney’s calling out Obama for weakening welfare work requirements. Yes, one of the more depressing parts of the job of being a political reporter is watching an audience fully absorb a blatant and knowing lie. Which is, of course, what this is.

MacGillis, however, isn’t surprised the Romney, Ryan and their admakers are giving the lie the widest possible distribution, because they’re getting away with it. It is arguably the centerpiece of their entire campaign at the moment, yet the MSM is largely ignoring it, and/or cynically shrugging at its mendacity:

Romney just keeps using it, at stop after stop, in ad after ad. How can this be possible? Well, maybe because very few of my colleagues in the press seem all that troubled by it. Unless I’ve missed it, none of the national papers or networks or Buzzfeeders have done a comprehensive report on Romney’s persistence in playing the welfare card. It’s as if it was enough to have the factcheckers offer their initial scolding, but after that, hey, anything goes. I saw no mention in dispatches from yesterday of Romney’s successful use of the welfare line in Beallsville — instead, the stories were dominated by Romney’s declaration of outrage, later in the day, over Obama’s campaign of “anger and hate.”

I’d have to guess the amazingly persistent pushback from conservatives against the idea that any of them could possibly ever be guilty of an appeal to racism has, ironically, created a large zone of safety for racially motivated attack lines, even if they are based on lies. The Romney/Ryan campaign is sure as hell exploiting it, and in a just world campaign beat reporters would be covering Romney like he’s George Wallace come right back to life until he cuts this crap out.

I will have more about our own George Wallace here in Arizona.