The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.
Ads that accuse President Obama of gutting the work requirements enacted in the 1996 welfare reform legislation present the first theme. Ads alleging that Obama has taken $716 billion from Medicare — a program serving an overwhelmingly white constituency — in order to provide health coverage to the heavily black and Hispanic poor deliver the second.
American politics are primarily about race. Full stop.
Before the Civil Rights Act was passed, white southerners voted mostly for Democrats, now they vote overwhelmingly for Republicans. I’m sure that it’s a all big coinky-dinky, that they all discovered Burke and Oakeshott all of a sudden in 1965.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
Not quite. American politics are:
Black and White
Guns and Butter
War and Peace
It’s a quote from something I read in the 70s but I’m damned if I can remember the source.
karen
So racism is acceptable. “Class warfare” not acceptable.
That’s what it all boils down to.
Trentrunner
Imagine Obama saying:
Imagine the shitstorm.
Romney/Ryan 2012: Yes We Klan!
Anya
Why does everyone who writes about the welfare smears start from the premise that blacks are the only people who receive welfare benefits?
Trentrunner
@Anya: “Everyone”?
That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without concern.
Frankensteinbeck
@Anya:
The premise is that white racists, especially older white racists who were deeply influenced by Reagan’s race baiting, equate ‘welfare’ with ‘minorities being paid to not work’. Man, do I remember THAT theme from the 80s. The lie apparently still works.
suzanne
No, American politics are about control along many sorts of binaries.
Still have never had a woman Prez. STILL talking about the contents of our uteruses as if it’s anybody else’s business. STILL STILL STILL, one in three of us will experience one of the most horrifying things that can happen to a person, and the dominant class can’t even agree on what to call it. STILL making less money for more work. STILL have to look hot for the privilege of getting to serve men their meals, which we’re STILL fucking cooking.
Not to underestimate the effects of racism, which are legion and varied and evil, but it is not the whole story.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Anya: I think your question is why doesn’t everyone who writes about welfare smears start with the basic demographic facts about who receives welfare and show how it’s unfair to portray blacks as disproportionate beneficiaries of government largesse?
Mike in NC
Tom Edsall, not Tom Esdall.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
Just shoot me. It will be an act of mercy.
pragmatism
Coincidentally 1965 was the year the Widener library expanded its hours to allow for increased oakeshottian succor.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Anya: The answer to the question I think you’re asking is because it isn’t a debate about who receives how much. It’s a much fuzzier debate about who is deserving of it, who is truly in need of it and who is just being lazy. And you can’t quantify that. All you can do is point out the history of these suggestions has generally been a racist one and continues to be so.
Sly
Conservative politics has always been defined by the paranoid fear that someone somewhere is getting something that they don’t deserve at your expense, either financially or some perceived privilege. How conservatives, white or otherwise, approach racial politics is just one iteration of it. It applies equally to gender politics, class politics, sexual politics… everything. There isn’t a conservative political platform or framework, from Burke until today, that doesn’t emanate from this fear.
Just Some Fuckhead
And I agree with DougJ, although I’d expand it to all politics everywhere is basically tribal, and in America, tribe is generally decided by race.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Sly:
Then why the fuck aren’t they going after the banksters, huh? The last time I got into an argument about “redistribution”, the fact that his money and mine all got redistributed upward never entered the picture.
I’ll be better prepared next time.
maven
I fear we’ll all have to go marching again.
Oh dear. I have hiking poles now.
Spaghetti Lee
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
What’s that quote: “Most Americans see themselves not as an oppressed underclass but as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires”, or something? Fitzgerald, I think, or maybe Barnum. Anyway, that’s why the right wing doesn’t bring it up. They’re desperate to get into Club Richie Rich, so they can’t be caught saying bad things about it.
TheMightyTrowel
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Because the holy writ of St. Frank of Luntz says redistribution only means the movement of wealth away from the already wealthy into the pockets of the undeserving non-white, female, poor and/or gay majority.
Sly
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
Because the number of conservatives with the wherewithal to identify predatory lending and other forms of financial skulduggery as the primary source of the economic crisis are vastly outnumbered by the conservatives who blame unions, poor/brown people, Barney Frank, Jimmy Carter, and/or Time-Travelling Barack Obama.
Sly
@Spaghetti Lee:
The quote attributed to John Steinbeck is “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” and it may be a paraphrase as the source it appears in doesn’t put it in quotes.
patroclus
If it weren’t for the Widener offering Oakeshottian succor so freely, I would have thought that conservatism would have died out by now.
AA+ Bonds
Look to FoxNews.com my children, and lo, ‘Obamacare’ became ‘ObamaCare’ with a capital ‘C’, because ‘Obamacare’ looks like Medicare and Medicare polls well
AA+ Bonds
“Socialism never took root in America because liberals got to get there on their own.” –AA+ Motherfucking Bonds
RaflW
@Sly:
Indeed, a la Rushblo (and sooo many others) is the fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying a hot, mutual bang with the girl who turned you down cold.
Hence all the slut shaming.
xian
+1 for the Aaron Neville reference
Goblue72
Good. Glad to see it. I’d rather fight them in the open. And it’s not 1980 Reagan in Mississippi or 1992 Bush I Willie Horton eras anymore. We’re a far more chocolate (and salsa and soy sauce and glitter dust) nation now – and they are fighting on our fu#%ing turf now!
And liberals have finally woken up that the NPR-tweed pencil neck response doesn’t cut it.
Another Halocene Human
The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.
The Hunger Games was a documentary.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Goblue72: “they are fighting on our fu#%ing turf now!”
amen!
Another Halocene Human
@AA+ Bonds: hahahahaha
Caz
There’s no factual connection between the ads and “pitting the white middle class against the minority poor.” You’re just making it up. As usual, anything you liberals disagree with is automatically deemed racist. It’s to the point now that people are starting to laugh at that response – it’s like a blanket response to everything: “Racist!” Don’t agree with Obamacare? You’re racist! Didn’t vote for Obama? Must be a racist! Want medicare reform? You’re racist…and hate old people.
Don’t you idiots ever get tired of making shit up out of nowhere? You really think it furthers your cause to accuse every non-liberal of being racist for every single point of view they hold that is different than yours? I mean, it doesn’t even have to be anywhere close to dealing with race and you still cry “Racist!”
I mean, honestly, an ad accusing Obama of taking money from medicare to fund Obamacare makes them racist?? That doesn’t even make any sense.
And having confronted you on this, I know the response: Get all pissed off, insult me and call me bad names, pretend I’m supremely unintelligent, mock me, and then call me a troll. No clue how to actually debate anything intelligently or consider the merits of more than one side of an argument, or even critically analyze anything. Obama says jump, you ask “how high?” Pathetic little sheep.
YellowJournalism
Imagine Obama saying:
“No one has to ask me if Michelle is my only wife.”
Imagine the shitstorm.
Don’t kid yourself. Many of them believe that’s a valid question. Because as we all know, he’s a Muslim, and their lifestyles are all like a page out of Arabian Nights.
Caz
@YellowJournalism: Why would anyone think that a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, the sone of a devout muslim, raised for years in Indonesia, who spent college years running around Pakistan, could possibly be a muslim?? Where do people come up with this stuff?? Obviously he’s not a muslim – it’s not like he praises Allah at the end of every speech. How silly!
The prophet Nostradumbass
Methinks someone doth complain too much.
Another Halocene Human
@Just Some Fuckhead: African Americans are on welfare disproportionately, though, as they are disproportionately in prison, but I wouldn’t exactly call being reduced to signing up for SNAP in order to eat “benefitting”.
They disproportionately lost household wealth during the Bush years. Gotta give that community credit for knowing who fucked them–Romney polling a goose egg among likely African American voters.
If only the so-called Master Race were so well informed politically as their emancipated brethren they might actually deserve to vote.
I wonder if that geenyus who told me that only property owners should vote had a mortgage. Hahahaha.
cckids
@Trentrunner: Yep. Or “just so you know, I wear boxers, and they are not magic”. Shit would storm.
Another Halocene Human
@karen: The recidivists defeated the communists (the only ones successfully organizing in the south before the Wagner act) by accusing them of championing “social equality” which was a code term for sex with white women.
The Communist Party of America actually did enforce social equality in a more plain English sense. When reports came back that a labor organizer had let a wire be run through a room to divide white and black sides during a meeting, the CPA shit-canned the person post haste. (Source: Defying Dixie, 2008. You should read it!)
Basilisc
I’m really starting to get worried about this. It’s 2004 again – the SwiftBoat lies were denounced, disproven, derided, but played everywhere in the swing states and convinced enough of the low-info types in OH and FL to win it for the shrub. And it all happened in August, while Democrats were napping, the pundits were on vacay and the undecided voters were in their living rooms, watching TV and fanning themselves. By September it was too late. Is this happening again?
Yutsano
@Caz:
No it’s factually incorrect. But you don’t care.
Another Halocene Human
@The prophet Nostradumbass: If somebody’s paying for that weak shit, they’re getting ripped.
Setting money on fire would be more efficient. Film that and slap it on YouTube and it would be more entertaining as well.
The prophet Nostradumbass
I think I know what Caz will be doing later this week.
Mnemosyne
@Caz:
Yes, and Ronald Reagan never talked about welfare queens driving Cadillacs or strapping young bucks buying T-bones with their welfare money. We just made that all up to smear poor St. Ronnie, and the YouTube videos showing those words coming out of his mouth are totally fake.
Actually, the ads are what the rest of us generally refer to as “lies,” but I guess we couldn’t expect you to be aware of that basic fact despite the fact that every news story about the ads has mentioned that they’re out and out lies.
Mnemosyne
@Basilisc:
Except that Obama is not the unknown challenger to the incumbent president. He is the incumbent president. And Romney is no Ronald Reagan.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Basilisc: @Basilisc: The Romney campaign isn’t being derided by most of hte media. Tom Brokaw has been taken over by the ghost of David Broder, but still has Brokaw’s smug, self-satisfaction. But Obama and his team are much better at this than the Kerry campaign. Kerry had internalized the ‘liberal media’ myth and thought they would go after the swfitboaters for him. OBama won’t make that mistake, and I suspect there are a lot of ads in teh can that Obama and Axelrod are saving for October. And if you saw Romney trying to explain away his foriegn tax shelters on Fox, he all but scripted an ad for Obama
Villago Delenda Est
@Caz:
Oh, I see our current dipshit Rethug troll is spewing his crap all over the board again.
What a waste of perfectly serviceable bandwidth this tool is.
Mnemosyne
@Villago Delenda Est:
At least the spongiform who showed up earlier was able to construct an argument beyond, “LALALALLALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!”
Yutsano
@Villago Delenda Est: Will no one think of the electrons??
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Caz: So what is your position on Obama denying his Islamic faith. Is this some form of taqiyya? If so, please clarify how announcing his Islamic faith would put him in mortal danger. Please show your work.
The Qur’an itself does not prescribe any earthly punishment for apostasy; Islamic scholarship differs on its punishment, ranging from execution – based on an interpretation of certain hadiths – to no punishment at all as long as they “do not work against the Muslim society or nation.”
That last bit is a tricky one. You see, he gives aid and succor to infidels. See for example, his support of gay marriage, the ACA, Wall Street, etc, oh yeah – and he had Osama bin Laden and several other Muslims killed.
Please explain why Michelle Obama is dressed in a way that is disrespectful to Allah. Please explain why his children are as well.
Or maybe you are just speaking out of your arse.
See, because between Caz speaking out of his arse, and Obama being a secret Muslim, the former is far less inconsistent than the latter, is supported by the history of Caz’s posts, and doesn’t conflict with any obvious facts.
In conclusion Caz, I’ll sum this up by stating the painfully obvious. To wit, it must absolutely suck to be you.
El Cid
i dun made mah points now i still waitin on my 15 cent for to get cigarets
Pseudonym
@Caz: What is it with you conservatives interpreting any criticism of your preferred party or policies as calling things racist (or as I call it, RRRRRRRRRRACIST!!!)?
Don’t agree with Obamacare? You probably either don’t have a good idea what’s in it, don’t understand the health care and insurance marketplace, or just honestly prefer less care for a higher cost as long as you can afford the best and those poors can’t.
Didn’t vote for Obama? Well, maybe you were the one person in the country impressed by his handling of the economic crisis, or maybe you admire his war stories and think that despite his clueless grasp of foreign policy that would make him a good president.
Want Medicare reform? Well, maybe you do support moving to the Romney/Ryan “coupons for codgers” plan that is so great the GOP is bragging about how those over 55 get to escape it! It’s all part of the budget that cuts services for everyone, cuts taxes for the rich, assumes revenue neutrality based on nothing, and still doesn’t reduce the deficit.
And maybe you’d rather go with the Romney/Ryan plan of cutting Medicare benefits without cutting costs, versus the Obama plan of cutting costs without cutting benefits. (And R&R are accusing Obama of “stealing” from Medicare, as if the future money or benefits belonged to Medicare alone and were in some kind of lockbox… what does that say about the GOP plan to gut Medicare and replace it with coupons? Is that not stealing? Wouldn’t any entitlement reform be stealing by your definition?)
That’s not necessarily racist.
It’s just either misinformed, unintelligent, or totally dedicated to the new feudalism of worshipping the rich and their misbegotten gains. Or it could be racist. Possibly some combination. None of them reflect too well on you.
Steeplejack
@Sly:
Paraphrased from America and Americans, 1966:
Anya
@Just Some Fuckhead: THIS! Thank you!
Kay
@Anya:
They never write about underperforming or terrible rural public schools, either. That’s because underperforming rural white public schools are managed by white conservatives and attended by the children of white conservatives.
It’s not like they’re turning out merit scholars and ACT score top-tenners out here, yet there’s nary a peep on any “crisis” that demands the intervention of the Walton family and the Gates family and hedge fund millionaires. Weirdly, underperforming rural white kids are OFF LIMITS when attacking/taking over public schools. Why, intervening there would be questioning the wisdom of local elected school boards (all conservatives) and (conservative) parental authority!
OzoneR
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason:
Well for one thing Bank bailouts were unpopular, as are tax cuts for the rich.
But having said that, I would argue conservative think the rich ARE deserving, cause they think they’ll create jobs, also too, cause it pisses off libtards.
sherparick
@Anya: In the late 1960s and 70s, the face of urban poverty became Black (you can see the change in popular culture when you look at crime movies or urban movies ofthe 1950s and early sixties to shows like “Starsky and Hutch” and “Mod Squad” and like movies in the 1970s. Further, the blue collar, unskilled and semi-skilled jobs that men without a high school education (and most African-Americans migrating North in the 1950s and 60s did not have a high school education) were disappearing and unemployment, despite an otherwise booming economy was high in these areas. So though most people still getting Aid for Dependent Children were whites, it was the African-Americans who received it in the Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, LA, and New York that became the story.
George Wallace, gave voice to all that white resentment and hatred in 1964 and 1968, and it has been the same song for the last 50 years:
“Campaigning outside his native state, Wallace had to mask his appeals to anti-black resentment. He spoke instead in racial code, of lazy people on welfare and the collapse of law and order. “You people work hard,” he told a white, blue-collar California audience, “you save your money, you teach your children to respect the law.” Yet, Wallace said, when someone burns down a city and murders someone, “ ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ explain it away by saying the killer didn’t get any watermelon to eat when he was 10 years old.” Furthermore, Wallace claimed, “the Supreme Court is fixing it so you can’t do anything about people who set cities on fire.” http://jmichaelphillips.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-did-black-people-become-democrats.html
Ronald Reagan did much the same thing in 1966 when he ran for Governor of California. (See Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland”) Ol’ Tricky Dick saw how well it worked, and appropriated it and mainstreamed into the Republican Party. As you can see from the above Wallace quote, Romney is using the same memes to stoke white resentment in Medicare debate and in the Welfare blitz.
rikyrah
totally a coincidence that the former Dixiecrats are now Republicans.
sure.
uh huh.
Silver
@Pseudonym: I’m going to steal that post like I’m Fareed Zakaria.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Pseudonym: For the record, when I was writing about the types of people who do not actually learn, or grow, and instead require years of directed abuse, scorn and ridicule heaped upon them in order to housetrain them for civil society?…
^ I was speaking about the guy you responded to.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Just Some Fuckhead: The last time I checked, while white people receive welfare benefits in far greater numbers than black people, as a percentage of population, black people receive it in higher numbers. Again, this is last time I checked.
Now, that is not to say that black people are inherently any of those things that racists like to say they are.
On the contrary, if we did not disproportionately throw them in jail for long stretches, if we did not marginalize them as we do, if we did not warehouse them in crappy inner city housing projects, etc, we’d likely see a change in that.
You’ll never convince a racist of that though, and they don’t actually want any of this to change. If it changed, it might shed an uncomfortable light on them, and force them to acknowledge their own failure.
The best response, as always, is a brick or a shiv. Rhetorically or otherwise. Racists aren’t real people anyway. They’re vicious, dangerous animals, and should be dealt with as such.
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@Another Halocene Human:
Late to the party here, but this is what pisses me off most.
I’d count as ‘upper middle class’ to most demographers. And I know for a fact that ‘the poor’ have little to do with my current problems– it’s the parasitic subset of the 1%, who first financialized the economy (harvesting value from productive sectors like manufacturing and research into unproductive “investments” like hedge funds and CDOs), and then gamed the financial industry until it collapsed.
They basically decided to play World of Warcraft with the world’s money, and the rest of us got to suffer for it. Can’t sell the house. Can’t get a safer mortgage. Can’t change jobs. Can’t get a business loan to make our own jobs. And they won’t let us apply solutions that were proven to work over 80 years ago. Now they want to tie all the world’s wealth to gold, which is roughly equivalent to declaring the Game over and cashing in their chips while they’re ahead of the rest of us. Cross of Gold, indeed.
The mythical black or brown on food stamps who bought a pack of cigarettes isn’t the cause of that. Unproductive parasites like Jamie Dimon, Bernie Madoff and Mitt Romney caused that.
But how do you frame this in a way that normal people can understand, and recite in a slogan of ten words or less?
That’s the challenge.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God: If normal people don’t already understand that, then they’re not normal Q.E.D.
I’m not angry with Romney. He’s a sociopath. I expect as much from him.
I’m angry at the assholes who’d vote for him over this shit.
Your mistake is elevating them to the rank of “people”. They’re not. They’re animals. There is no statement you can make (much less one that fits into 10 words) that will turn them into actual human beings.
Matt McIrvin
@Basilisc: I keep linking to this chart. Electoral-vote estimates from state polling, 2004, 2008 and 2012:
http://electoral-vote.com/evp2012/Pres/ec_graph-2012.html
In all three cases, Democrats were up sometime in the summer and the race narrowed around Labor Day. But in 2004, the Democratic convention had been way back in July, and Kerry was already down by the time the Republican convention began. He had to fight his way back in the debates, and didn’t quite make it.
It’s kind of remarkable that this year Obama has never been down in projected EV count vs. Romney, even though the national horserace polls often put Romney slightly ahead. I’m kind of expecting a Republican convention bounce that could put Obama under temporarily, but the DNC is coming up next and Obama’s a much, much, much better campaigner than John Kerry.
El Cid
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Sure, but it’s harder to know which of those white people deserve this aid and which are lazy bums on a gubmit handout, whereas with black people, well, you know.
dance around in your bones
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
Late to this thread, as always, but THIS.
I got into an ill-advised political ‘discussion’ with some in-laws recently, and I could NOT convince them that it’s not the po’ folk at the bottom of the totem pole who cause the most damage to society/the common good, but the bankers/Wall Street gam.blers/the top 1% who take advantage of every tax dodge/loophole/offshore accounts that have screwed this country up, in fact almost brought it to its knees.
No, it was all the fault of those free-loading homeless and the moochers and the undeserving (who were primarily the poors).
Gawd-damn it was frustrating. Why blame the victims, I said? I was told I was white-washing the issue.
Heh. Really, nobody in my immediate family feels this way, and yet these people looked at me like I was some kind of brain-washed naivete.
I think I almost ruined the party I was at. But I have never been one to keep my mouth shut when I hear BS being spouted.
Matt McIrvin
Here’s an article comparing 2012 to 2004 the other way around, with Obama as the Bush-analogue:
http://www.rollcall.com/news/What-a-2004-Poll-Tells-Us-About-2012-217038-1.html
What he leaves out is that in the actual state preference polls, 2004 was much, much closer and more volatile all around.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@El Cid: fuck. you know I’d laugh at your snark if scumbags didn’t actually believe that shit.