Elspeth Reeves: Race Takes Over the Race
As Jonathan Chait quoted somebody who badly wishes to remain anonymous, this is going to be the very last presidential election in which a candidate is willing to throw the votes of all other ethnicities away in an attempt to maximize their share of the white-people's vote.
Elspeth Reeves:
Race Takes Over the Race: Mitt Romney says that Obama allowed a waiver for the work requirement for welfare -- if states have a better way of getting recipients into jobs -- so that the President could "shore up his base." Romney probably didn't mean the Republican governors who asked for the waivers but, fitting with his campaign's recent message, poor black people who take white people's money.
On MSNBC's Morning Joe Monday, Chris Matthews tore into Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus about the welfare attacks and Romney's birther jokes…. Priebus said Romney was just talking about his Michigan roots, and accused Matthews of being unable to take a joke. Matthews yelled that "The first joke he ever told in his life is about Obama's birth certificate."
Romney's advisers believe Romney "needs a more combative footing against President Obama in order to appeal to white, working-class voters and to persuade them that he is the best answer to their economic frustrations," The New York Times' Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg reported. And as we pointed out on Friday, if Romney gets 61 percent of the white vote, he wins. If you have any doubt that Romney is playing the race card, check out his YouTube page….
"Last I checked, John McCain never suggested openly that his rival's base was welfare recipients. Or did I miss that part?" The New Republic's Alec MacGillis tweets. In July, an unnamed Romney adviser told BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins that Romney would boldly go where McCain would not in 2008. Romney "believes it's time to vet the president," the aide said. "He really hasn't been vetted; McCain didn't do it." On conservative blogs, "vetting" means calling Obama a leftist foreigner. The first person from the Romeny campaign to dip a toe into that was surrogate John Sununu, who said Obama needed to learn how to be an American in late July. Romney tried it Friday with a birther joke…
