The Washington Post‘s lefty proBama blogger, Ezra Klein, has a long “Race and the 2012 election” post on his “Wonkblog” whose argument, when stripped of its qualifying social science camouflage, is that Romney’s ads criticizing Obama’s new work-requirement reducing welfare rule are racist.
It is true, as Klein and other defenders of the president’s recent gutting of the the core of the bipartisan welfare reform signed by Clinton insist, that the Obama administration’s recent proposal didn’t actually eliminate or even weaken the work requirement. “All” it did was give the states the “flexibility” to do so, a “flexibility” whose absence was at the heart of the Clinton-Republican compromise legislation.
Try this thought experiment: imagine that abortion (very much on the Dems’ minds these days, thanks to Akin) had been protected by bipartisan national legislation and not the Supreme Court. Now imagine a Republican president issuing a new regulation giving the states the “flexibility” to regulate it as they saw fit, so long as they didn’t prohibit it altogether. Can you imagine the Ezra Klein’s of the world saying that ads pointing out that the president had undermined abortion rights were “flatly wrong”? I can’t, either.
Finally, note that Klein tries (but fails) to avoid sounding like he’s accusing Romney of airing racist ads, because “this is where things get tricky.”
Romney’s welfare ads are not racist. But the evidence suggests that they work particularly well if the viewer is racist, or at least racially resentful. And these are the ads that are working so unexpectedly well that welfare is now the spine of Romney’s 2012 on-air message in the battleground states.
But wait a minute. Assuming for a minute that Klein and his social science sources are right, why would Romney choose to spend all this money concentrating on voters who, being either “racist” or “racially resentful,” are surely going to vote for him anyway?
Democrats simply have race on the brain.
