So we have an acrimonious presidential campaign on our hands. Big deal. Wringing our hands about the decline of civility in public life will not reveal how the particular mud being slung by the candidates tells us a thing or two about our political culture. We should all have grown tired of being led by the nose through a media cycle of fixating on a politician's remark until a recantation or apology is offered. The endless repetition of a single sound bite is excruciatingly boring, the recantations and apologies are never sincere, and the whole affair reduces political debate to a shallow-minded policing of acceptable turns of phrase.
But some remarks form a pattern worth analyzing. And one pattern now clear is the racially charged political speech emerging from the Romney campaign. This goes beyond a single stray remark, like the comment on "chains" made by Joe Biden, that great font of stray remarks. Romney has made a few moves that seem designed to appeal to voters with an antipathy to minorities. It is hard to remember a candidate ever using a chorus of boos at the NAACP as a plank prominently displayed in his campaign platform. Many people might be at least personally embarrassed by such a reception. Not Romney, who afterwards declared that he knew he would be booed at the NAACP but went anyway.
That is a remarkable statement. In the careful planning of a political campaign, these boos were anticipated and embraced precisely because they send a message that, in my opinion, the GOP wants the electorate to hear: Romney is the candidate that the NAACP does not want in the White House. As we near November, that message has become louder and more explicit. Romney has said that Obama needs to take his "campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago." And appearing on CBS, he described the Obama campaign as "designed to bring a sense of enmity and jealousy and anger."
To call such remarks racially coded is to pay them the compliment of being subtle. These are explicitly racist remarks that have little to do with the Obama campaign or anything we have seen of the president's public persona. Touré is exactly right to call Romney's statements race-baiting. Romney and his campaign are clearly using keywords that associate Obama with minority urban poverty, fomenting the fear that such individuals would like nothing better than to use government programs as a means of leeching off of the hard-earned successes of others. Such race-baiting complements the thick narrative of self-made success in which Romney and Ryan drape themselves at every opportunity.
This is an offensive tactic, and one that should lead us to respect John McCain's choice not to take such a path in 2008. We can cry foul to the cable-news referees of public discourse, demanding an apology and a trip to the free-throw line. But that would be a dubious effort. It is dispiriting that race-baiting is being used as a campaign strategy in 2012, but that's where we are. The real question is what the GOP hopes to gain with this strategy. And it seems clear enough that they have written off the votes of urban minorities and are making an appeal to independent white suburbanites, the sort of individuals who have pulled their children out of public schools and while their hours away on freeways stuffed with their fellow paranoiacs in an elaborate effort to avoid contact with the kind of angry, idle urban poor they see on TV. Such self-styled bootstrap-pullers have come to see all federal programs as a giveaway to minorities, though in fact they are entirely dependent on the federal government's provision of interstates, affordable petrocarbons, land subsidies, and mortgage benefits.
Recent polling suggests that these are the individuals who will decide the election: Obama holds the city, Romney the country, and the suburbs are divided. It is thus the business of a winning presidential campaign to sway the kind of voter to whom Romney's race-baiting is meant to appeal. That is no small rhetorical challenge for Obama. Playing up the ways in which we all avail ourselves of federally funded programs flies too strongly in the face of such a voter's perception of self-reliance, and is likely to be met with hostility. More promising is an appeal to the kind of stingy self-interest that gives the race-baiting strategy its traction: Romney-Ryan trickle-down economics are an enormous giveaway of middle-class tax resources, making the Wall-Street bailout the new normal. This would be a slight but significant shift away from the Obama campaign's attacks on the shockingly low tax rates for high earners favored by the GOP, an approach that can be dismissed as "jealous" opposition to upward mobility. If I were on the Obama 2012 team, I would place higher education at the fore of such debates: the economic priorities of the Romney-Ryan campaign will make it increasingly difficult for middle-class families to send their kids to college. Here President Obama might point to his administration's efforts to confront sky-rocketing student debt, one of this century's greatest threats to the spending power of the middle class.
But of course I am not on the Obama 2012 team. And gladly so. It's been a silly campaign that has over-emphasized the president's celebrity appeal, a pale shadow of 2008, which made many of us believe that electoral politics could produce meaningful change. Romney's race-baiting is appalling on every conceivable level; it is an insult to his opponent and to the electorate. But one wonders if an Obama campaign that has yet to hit its stride can counter it.
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 |
|
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
Get on down the street.
What is are choice?
How do we get the needed education for our kids ... health care for our seniors and others in need?
What is your solution? I would really like to hear something that isn't political rhetoric. You have the forum ... please speak.
2. And Obama's campaign, particularly his focus on taxing the rich, is designed to divide; it appeals to negative emotions (jealousy and hatred) and presents the base conclusion that "I'm not doing well because you are doing well," so Romney's characterization is correct.
The truth is the ultimate defense against a lie; the middle class and poor are not doing well because the rich are doing so well. The economics, the numbers, it is as plain as day. This system is designed to have the rich, the middle class, and the poor--that is fine, there is nothing wrong with that. This system was not designed to have the wealth quickly and overwhelmingly accumulate at the top. This is akin to having a blocked artery.
Capitalism requires that capital be in the hands of many, so that they can spend and create demand. This flies in the face of the supply-side economics that Republicans cling to, but supply-side economics flies in the face of observable, objective reality.
Let's examine some of Romney's other "racist" statements. He described Obama's campaign as fostering "division and anger and hate" as well as "a sense of enmity and jealousy and anger." If I had to guess, I would say that Romney is referring to the President's campaign rhetoric that pits the poor and middle class against those who are well off, telling them that the rich need to give their money to those less fortunate. That certainly sounds like division to me. Of course, I have no evidence to confirm that he is referring to such things. But you don't have any evidence that he was talking about race.
I guess I'll close with this question: Could you please explain to me how the candidate who is running against "hate," "division," "enmity," "jealousy," and "anger" is the racist one?
That's easy. He is a Republican. Duh!
The more I listen to the race debate in this country, the more I'm convinced that those who decry racism in others are more often than not the people who truly struggle to look past race. Baseless accusations of racism are thrown around with such carelessness that the word itself either becomes meaningless or one is forced to feel guilty simply for having a different skin tone than his neighbor.
Race is a useless, man-made concept that has done nothing but cause division and injustice and for that reason we must move past it. But pointing the finger at others and scouring every word that comes out of everyone's mouth for even the tiniest hint of possibly racially-motivated speech is not the way to do it. All that does is return race to the forefront of our national political debate and inspire yet more division.
I ask you: What indisputable evidence do you have that Romney is engaging in a campaign of race baiting? Has one of his advisers told you this? Has he made even a single comment that explicitly mentions race or divides people along racial lines? The only one I can think of is a comment he made to the NAACP in which he stated that he would be the best President for African Americans.
Go back to Faux Noise. Huckabee is explaining why rape can be a real good thing!!!