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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRomney: Hooray for Whiteness!!
Romneys joke is part of a recent chorus of racist dog-whistles emanating from the Romney campaign. In recent weeks, Romney has doubled down on ads attacking Obama for eliminating the work requirement for welfare, something Obama simply has not done. While the ads may be completely false, the ads play on old racist assumptions about welfare, ground that Republicans have been mining since before Ronald Reagan was talking about strapping young bucks buying steaks.
Romney also told supporters in July that members of the NAACP wanted free stuff, implying that Americas oldest civil rights group is just looking for handouts.
Romney has struggled to win support among non-white voters; indeed, a recent NBC poll showed him with literally no support among African Americans. So Romney apparently has decided to try to win by swinging enough older, white voters to win the election.
The move represents a last gasp for the Southern Strategy, in which Republicans use racial animosity to win support from southerners and blue-collar Democrats. The strategy, pioneered by President Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, ended up swinging the solid South from Democrats to Republicans; as Democrats booted racists from their party, Republicans welcomed them with open arms.
Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/romney-hooray-for-whiteness.html#ixzz24xw8ThLY
gollygee
(22,336 posts)I saw it on my Twitter feed. I really think this is turning into a completely racial election season. Everything the Republicans are doing plays to racists, and that's the intent.
nc4bo
(17,651 posts)unblock
(51,920 posts)well, certainly in many currently republican districts and some states, sure. so we'll continue to see it at the congressional level.
but on the presidential level, it's getting harder an harder for them to bank on turning out enough bigots and suppressing enough democrats to offset the increasing diversity of the overall citizenry.
sooner or later, they're going to have to reach out to some constituency that the bigots loathe, and they'll need to pull in enough to compensate for the lower bigot turnout that will result from that outreach.
most likely, given the current trajectory, this will only happen after an EPIC fail of all-out hate, perhaps in 2016, followed by republican "soul-searching" -- not that they'll find one.