The Obama Diary

Charles Pierce: …. Chris Matthews got all up in the slick, smug little grill of obvious anagram Reince Priebus this morning on Morning Joe’s Playhouse over the obvious racial air-raid sirens that have echoed through Republican politics only since about half-past 1964, and which have grown especially loud these past few weeks as Willard Romney made his little fun-fun about birth certificates last week, and his campaign released an ad falsely accusing the president of “gutting welfare reform” …

If you can tear yourself away from the attempts of the hosts to tut-tut-my-good-man the whole thing to death - and poor Tom Brokaw, who freaking covered the civil-rights movement and knows good and well which party latched on to the wrong side of those events and rode them to glory, looks as though he might have a stroke - listen carefully to what Matthews says. He links the birther joke to the welfare commercials, which any thinking analyst would do, since they came hard, one upon the other….

…. What we have in this campaign is a joining of old Republican money with the modern American financial universe, and its power applied to advance ideas straight out of the swamps of the Wallace campaign 50 years ago. It is an unholy mess, and it is precisely the unholy mess over which Reince Priebus wants to preside, and if Mika wants the tone to change, maybe she should start there.

I predict Matthews will be disciplined. I, for one, am willing to go his bail on this one.

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Michael Tomasky: …. Tom Edsall said it without quite saying it this morning in the Times (link), that this Romney-Ryan campaign is becoming among the most racist we’ve ever seen. The two key lies so far are totally about race - that Obama is soft on welfare recipients, and that he’s “robbing” $716 billion from Medicare (77 percent of recipients are white) to “pay for Obamacare” (that is, to extend health care to black and brown people who don’t deserve it, haven’t earned it, etc.).

… We’re going to be hearing a lot of those lies this week, and a lot of quasi-racist dog-whistling about how Obama doesn’t feel the same way about America as “we” do. So no - still not sure what I should find non-loathsome about that.

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Read Thomas Edsall’s ‘Making the Election About Race’ piece here

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Ed Kilgore: … It’s clear by now that the Romney campaign is going to shrug off the almost universal denunciation of his welfare ads (and to only a lesser extent, his Medicare ads that show a white senior frowning as the narrator says ObamaCare is “not for you”) as a pack of despicable, race-baiting lies ….

… If nothing else, his wizards probably figured out some time ago that the “welfare” crap offered a rare opportunity to hit notes equally effective with “the base” and the non-college educated white voters who make up a high percentage of this election’s “swing”. Add in the thick armor conservatives have built for themselves against any accusations of racism — now, almost by definition, they believe only liberals are racists, and only white people are targets of racism - and it was probably an easy call for Team Mitt, particularly since truthfulness is not a factor at all.

…. Romney’s not going to be shamed out of his unsavory tactics. But on the other hand, if his gambit fails, not only will his presidential ambitions perish once and for all, but just maybe the kind of politics he has come to exemplify - rich people encouraging the middle class to “kick down” at “those people” - will take a hit as well.

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