PLANK AUGUST 27, 2012
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The ugliest presidential campaign I ever hope to see was the one George H.W. Bush waged against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Poppy Bush governed like a (relative) moderate, but in 1988 he campaigned like a hard-right bigot, relentlessly attacking Dukakis over an assault-rape committed by the convicted murderer Willie Horton, a very scary-looking African American, during a prison furlough (under a program created by Dukakis's Republican predecessor as Massachusetts governor). Say what you will about 41’s son and eventual successor, George W. Bush—as a campaigner, Dubya never stooped anywhere near so low, on this or any other issue. Bush père’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, publicly compared Horton to Jesse Jackson (with whom Dukakis was photographed after a meeting to consider Jackson as a possible running mate), and an unnamed Bush aide told former TNR writer Sidney Blumenthal, “Willie Horton has star quality. Willie’s going to be politically furloughed to terrorize again. It’s a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”
Thomas Edsall, who provided some of the best reporting on the Bush campaign’s racial mudslinging in 1988, says it’s happening again in 2012:
On television and the Internet ... the Romney campaign is clearly determined “to make this about” race, in the tradition of the notorious 1988 Republican Willie Horton ad ... and Jesse Helms’s equally infamous “White Hands” commercial, which depicted a white job applicant who “needed that job” but was rejected because “they had to give it to a minority.”
The main media consultant for the “independent” pro-Romney super PAC Restore Out Future, Edsall notes, is Larry McCarthy, who crafted the most vile Willie Horton ad of 1988.
Edsall sees the Romney campaign using race in two ways. Most overtly, the Romney campaign is accusing President Obama by of gutting welfare reform by dropping the work requirement—a gross distortion of an unexceptional waiver Obama may grant several states allowing them to experiment with alternative ways to meet the work requirement. Two of the five governors requesting the waivers were Republicans, and among those who have denounced the workfare accusation as flat-out untrue is the Republican former congressman and current talk-show host Joe Scarborough. The second way Edsall sees the Romney campaign using race is more subtle. According to Edsall, Romney is conveying a racially-charged message in accusing Obama of taking money away from (mainly white recipients of) Medicare to fund (majority non-white recipients of) Obamacare.
According to Edsall, Romney and his running mate, Paul Ryan, have so far been leaving the race-baiting to ads on TV and the Internet while taking the high road in their own appearances. That isn’t quite right, as TNR’s Alec MacGillis has shown; Romney is not above integrating the welfare-based attack into his speeches. Now Romney has taken the game to a new level in an interview published today in USA Today. Romney tells USA Today’s Susan Page that Obama issued the welfare waivers to “shore up his base.” President Obama doesn’t represent you; he represents a lot of people on welfare. And you know what they look like. (Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul told the Huffington Post that Romney was talking not about welfare recipients but about “President Obama’s liberal base ... the people who believe the same way he does: that government is the solution to everything.” Yeah, right.)
The idea that welfare recipients could be a plausible electoral base for any candidate is, of course, laughable. The entire caseload for Temporary Assistance To Needy Families is only about two million families (down from about five million in 1994 under TANF's predecessor, Aid To Families With Dependent Children). And not a lot of TANF recipients vote. State welfare agencies are required, under the 1993 motor-voter law, to give welfare recipients the opportunity to register to vote, but for some reason the percentage of welfare recipients taking advantage of this opportunity has declined 79 percent since the law was first implemented. Republicans are obsessed with the idea that welfare recipients shouldn't be permitted to vote. Scott Brown has made a huge stink about an attempt to register TANF enrollees—i.e., to obey the motor-voter law—in Massachusetts. Glenn Beck and David Horowitz have long demonized Frances Fox Piven and her late husband, Richard Cloward, for trying to encourage lower-income people (including, yes, welfare recipients) to vote and engage in political protest. This effort, it’s fair to say, has proven a pretty dismal failure so far.
The real story about TANF, Jason DeParle explained in an April 2012 story for the New York Times, is that it did a miserable job of keeping up with rising need during the 2007-9 recession and the “recovery” that followed it. (As I noted in an earlier post, median household income has actually fallen more steeply during the recovery than it did during the recession.) Since 2007, DeParle reported, eleven states had cut welfare rolls by at least 10 percent, even as the number of very poor families has been growing. It's probably true that most people on welfare who’ve given the matter any thought prefer Obama to Romney. But if Obama is trying to turn TANF into a political base, presiding over its failure to help families in need during an economic downturn seems a peculiar way to go about doing it.
Of course, Romney isn’t interested in the facts; he's interested in associating Obama with black and Hispanic undesirables bent on collecting welfare benefits and robbing white elderly people of their health insurance. The son of a politician who walked out of the 1964 Republican convention because of its opposition to blacks could well end up encouraging anti-black sentiments at the 2012 Republican convention. Like Poppy Bush, Romney is not a racist himself. He is, arguably, something worse: A man who, because he has no particularly pronounced views himself, is willing to say just about anything to get himself elected president.
Correction, Aug. 29: An earlier version of this column stated, erroneously, that Obama had granted the waiver. He has merely invited states to apply for waivers.
15 comments
Read Chait's blog entry this morning, then Judis's essay, and now this. Could all three of them be wrong about Romney? Not likely.
- rayward
August 27, 2012 at 1:06pm
Tim, nice article, but I have to point out a small vagueness: "Scott Brown has made a huge stink about an attempt to register TANF enrollees—i.e., to obey the motor-voter law—in Massachusetts." Brown did not oppose the motor-voter law per se, but how the Commonwealth agreed to implement it in an agreement with Demos. I do not agree with Brown on this, but to be fair, he just thinks that the DTA should not have to pay $270,000 for mailings to its clients just because they failed to do their job.
- rlgordonma
August 27, 2012 at 1:16pm
OK fine now let's see a major network anchor read this piece, Chait's, Judis's, on the air. Any or all of the above. Instead they're pretending it's business as usual. Which it was, back in the 19th century.
- Sophia
August 27, 2012 at 1:42pm
PS GWHB, you owe us one. As a patriot, please stand up. Do the right thing and speak out against this.
- Sophia
August 27, 2012 at 1:43pm
Finally: "undesirables." coming from a long line of Jews a few of whom managed to survive, including my grandparents who were smart enough to walk from Kiev to Vienna to Trieste and somehow make it to Liverpool, eventually to Ellis Island (thank goodness) this makes my hair stand up on my neck. History has shown what happened to people who didn't flee. It took courage for my grandfather to set out on that journey, with next to nothing, for a few members of his family and my grandmother's to follow. It isn't easy to leave your home. And America was a safe harbor despite its deep and terrible issues with race, with minorities, with the other, with our originals sins of slavery and the destruction of Native Americans. So here we are today, fighting for the very soul of our nation and confronting people who are willing to incite racists and misogynists. Who else isn't "desirable?" Besides of course "the other," symbolized now by Obama, there are women: apparently we do not have equal protection under the law according to the right wing (this means R&R too) and increasingly this is black letter law on the state level. There is apparently a deep fear of women, minorities and darker people including Hispanics in this country. It's visceral and the Republican strategists know it and they're playing on this and it is DESPICABLE. It's wrong, it's also illegal under our Constitution to discriminate - but - reading comment threads on voter suppression alone I want to cry. I just want to cry. The attitude that only *some* people should vote is appalling and reminiscent of Jim Crow and the status of women - we couldn't even vote until the 20th century. And poor people - whatever our color - man oh man it's a double whammy. Preventing people from access to health care, reproductive health care like contraceptives, even the Church is in on that; then they want to make abortion illegal, lie to women about our own health status, ie it's ok not to mention that pregnancy could be life threatening; it's legal to jam ultrasound wands up our vaginas, now they wish to redefine the word "rape?" Romney claims this isn't HIS platform but he has Ryan for a running mate so what does that tell you? Am I the only person out here who's scared to death but also starting to get angry and wondering where this will end? I also wonder if there's any way to rationally or via art, via persuasion, address the fear that is driving this ghastly campaign. There's something deep in the psyche of white men in particular that's responding to these lies and the fear-mongering. What is it? How can we address it?
- Sophia
August 27, 2012 at 2:01pm
I really like the idea that GHWB could be persuaded to stand up against racism in the campaign, invoking the memory of how he once was the beneficiary of racist ads in his own presidential campaign, & confessing that now he understands how corrosive to democracy that was. That would be great. (As it would also be if his son could be persuaded to speak out against recent manifestations of Islamophobia; & he'd have the creds to do it too, as he made the right gestures to Islam directly in the wake of 9/11, by referring, for instance, to Islam as a "religion of peace".) It's the kind of thing, which, were it to happen in today's harsh & cynical political climate would cause many of us to burst into tears of gratitude. Never happen, of course. It's unfortunate, but public figures, even ones long retired, hardly ever apologize in a sincere way about ethical or moral transgressions, or even just mistakes in judgement, they've made in office, or seeking office. (And that's true across party lines, of course, not to pick on the Repugs here.) "Am I the only person out here who's scared to death but also starting to get angry and wondering where this will end?" Nope, I'm scared shitless myself, Sophia. Think I'll get on my bike, pedal downtown to the supermercado, get some pozole & a brewski, try to think about something else for a while. Before I go though, let me tell ya, there's a whole lot of working-class (to use the quaint Euro-Socialist term) white women who are as red-necked & reactionary as their husbands & brothers.
- Haole45
August 27, 2012 at 3:12pm
I really do think that Mitt Romney may be the most amoral presidential candidate in my lifetime.
- miceelf
August 27, 2012 at 3:20pm
Somewhere along the line, Romney got the idea that running for President is a no holds barred contest and he showed it right away with the "talking about the economy" ad which he defended along with his decision to send hecklers to a speech by David Axelrod. This makes the debates very important and, fortunately, because of Romney's arrogance he can't pull off what George W. Bush did prior to the debates, i.e. lower expectations, so that when Bush did not fall flat on his face, it was a victory for Bush.
- Nusholtz
August 27, 2012 at 4:24pm
Hmm, wonder how the debates will be structured this time, what the format will be, & how many. Is there any agreement about those things yet? I think the VP candidate debates may also be very interesting this time around. I'm hoping for Joe to land a solid left to the jaw of his opponent in the opening rounds (packed with righteousness regarding treatment of the poor, based on Catholic doctrine), when Ryan gets careless & drops his right, preparatory to winding up for a Randian hay-maker...
- Haole45
August 28, 2012 at 12:02am
BTW, love that picture of Romney's mug at the top. That is one worried dude, for sure. He must be relating a story of a very scarey Negro, or something like that.
- Haole45
August 28, 2012 at 12:06am
"Like Poppy Bush, Romney is not a racist himself. He is, arguably, something worse: A man who, because he has no particularly pronounced views himself, is willing to say just about anything to get himself elected president." In other words, he's a sociopath. His father and mother are turning over in their graves. His father could never have become the GOP presidential nominee, because he was too liberal. His mom, Lenore, lost a Senate race in Michigan in 1970, partly because she was too nice to have killer political instincts (but mostly because she went up against Phil Hart, the Dem incumbent). Mitt wants to be president much more than his father ever did. G.W. Bush implied that his father was a coward for not "finishing the job" in Iraq during the Gulf War and killing Saddam Hussein. Would Romney imply something similar about his own father in order to win in November? It's possible.
- magboy47.
August 28, 2012 at 12:17am
Sophia, I agree with Haole45. When you castigate reactionary, white, working-class people, you have to include women. As a member of the working class most of my life, I've met hundreds of such women. And they're every bit as hate-filled and mean-spirited as the men in their lives are.
- magboy47.
August 28, 2012 at 12:29am
Slaves owned slaves. Indians owned slaves. Has anyone asked Romney about the Mountain Meadows massacre? (Too short summary to be accurate, but Mormons framed Indians as killers of wagon train pioneers from Arkansas.) How can we stand ourselves version VVVVVXXXIII?
- skahn
August 28, 2012 at 1:04am
Is there a great deal of political traction in 2012 to be gained by pointing out in an ominous tone that the president who's been in office since 2009 is black? This may turn out to be the non-story of the year.
- ironyroad
August 28, 2012 at 2:15am
Romney is most certainly a racist. "Who let the dogs out" was the only comment that he could make to a group of young black girls who wanted their picture with him, about which I assume they had no idea who he was other than he was in front of a TV camera where they wanted to be. They were young, give them a break. I am pretty sure the thousands of tweets on #FutureRomneyJokes says I am not alone in that opinion. Romney is also a misogynist, not that this aspect of his derangement garners much attention from the male dominant media. He actually said in a campaign speech two days ago " women need our (his and Ryan's) help". I am sure that is how he sees it, but me thinks it is the other way around, and sorry little whiny boys, not a chance of that happening. And someone should tell tea partyers that their favorite news channel is run by an immigrant, but since he is white and rich, they will let this slide.
- smabry03
August 28, 2012 at 6:21am