Newt Gingrich has been an official candidate for president for less than a week but already he has set the tone for what issues he'll campaign on against President Obama. It won't be the economy or foreign policy - not directly. Gingrich will instead run a race-based campaign that seeks to divide Americans.
Joan Walsh has the story:
Newt Gingrich doubled down on his clever new slur against President Obama as "the food stamp president." He tried the line in a Friday speech to the Georgia Republican convention, and he used it again on "Meet the Press Sunday." It's a short hop from Gingrich's slur to Ronald Reagan's attacks on "strapping young bucks" buying "T-bone steaks" with food stamps. Blaming our first black president for the sharp rise in food-stamp reliance (which resulted from the economic crash that happened on the watch of our most recent white president) is just the latest version of Rush Limbaugh suggesting that Obama's social policy amounts to "reparations" for black people.
But when host David Gregory suggested the term had racial overtones, Gingrich replied "That's bizarre," and added, "I have never said anything about President Obama which is racist." That's not quite as extreme or silly as Donald Trump declaring "I am the least racist person there is," but it's up there. He also told Georgia Republicans Friday that 2012 will be the most momentous election "since 1860," which happens to be the year we elected the anti-slavery Abraham Lincoln president, and he suggested the U.S. bring back a "voting standard" that requires voters to prove they know American history -- which sounds a lot like the "poll tests" outlawed by the Voting Rights Act.
Just last week Gingrich said Obama "knows how to get the whole country to resemble Detroit," which just happens to be home to many black people. And last year Gingrich accused Obama of "Kenyan anti-colonialist behavior" that made him "outside our comprehension" as Americans, spreading Dinesh D'Souza's idiocy that Obama inherited angry African anti-colonialism from the Kenyan father he never knew. “This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president,” Gingrich told the National Review Online last year.
Campaigns ought to be about bringing people together. That's the kind of campaign Barack Obama ran in 2008 but Ronald Reagan in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1988 both found that using race to tear the fabric of American society apart can be an effective electoral strategy. Gingrich might find some success among GOP primary voters and Tea Party activists by employing racist rhetoric but I believe our country is a different place than it was a generation ago. Voters don't look at Barack Obama and see a racial stereotype. They look at Barack Obama and see the President of the United States of America and they like what they see even if they don't agree with him on every policy issue.
Regardless, a campaign meant to divide Americans along racial lines will hurt this nation. Republicans and Democrats should join together in denouncing racially charged rhetoric.
