Four years ago, speakers attacked Obama for his lack of administrative experience, his history as a community organizer and his celebrity, while lauding the virtues of the small town (as opposed to the big city). They skirted the issue of race.
Not this year. Expect some ugliness this week as the Republican convention unfolds — thanks to the Romney campaign’s use of race to try to sway white voters to his side. Thomas B. Edsall explains:
The Romney campaign is willing to disregard criticism concerning accuracy and veracity in favor of “blowing the dog whistle of racism” – resorting to a campaign appealing to racial symbols, images and issues in its bid to break the frustratingly persistent Obama lead in the polls, which has lasted for the past 10 months.
The result is a campaign run at two levels. On the trail, Paul Ryan argues that “we’re going to make this about ideas. We’re going to make this about a positive vision for the future.” On television and the Internet, however, the Romney campaign is clearly determined “to make this about” race, in the tradition of the notorious 1988 Republican Willie Horton ad, which described the rape of a white woman by a convicted African-American murderer released on furlough from a Massachusetts prison during the gubernatorial administration of Michael Dukakis and Jesse Helms’s equally infamous “White Hands” commercial, which depicted a white job applicant who “needed that job” but was rejected because “they had to give it to a minority.”
The party’s original list of speakers — seven birthers — indicates that these recent attacks are part of a larger party strategy. As Carlos Galindo wrote in the Tuscon Citizen, the party has
bet it all on a platform of fear and racism. They have actually convinced many blue collar workers to go against what’s best for them. They use code words and phrases like “the welfare president”, “socialist”, “European style governing”, “the Kenyan”, and the most common phrase, “I want my America back.”
Their America? That’s a key phrase, because the romanticized past is really a white past, one that consigned blacks to segregated neighborhoods and segregated schools, that made some jobs off-limits to blacks and severely limited the ability of black Americans to prosper.
The nation has huge problems, but taking us back to a time of legal segregation and discrimination will not fix them.
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Hank Kalet 