What he dished out there are all the old tropes from the lunatic base about President Obama...not American, drug-taking, socialist community organizer.
We've heard it all before.
But it sounds like this might be exactly where the Romney campaign is going to go.
"[Romney] has said Obama's a nice fellow, he's just in over his head," the adviser said. "But I think the governor himself believes this latest round of attacks that have impugned his integrity and accused him of being a felon go so far beyond that pale that he's really disappointed. He believes it's time to vet the president. He really hasn't been vetted; McCain didn't do it."...One person who will be thrilled with this approach is half-term governor Sarah Palin. It will also be great news for the Breitbart crew who continue with this fantasy that President Obama was never properly "vetted" during the 2008 campaign. That phrase is nothing more than a dog whistle stand-in for birtherism.
In the next chapter of Boston's pushback — which began last week when they began labeling Obama a "liar" — very little will be off-limits, from the president's youthful drug habit, to his ties to disgraced Chicago politicians...
The reference to Obama's past drug use seems to suggest that former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu wasn't going off-script after all when he dinged the president for spending "his early years in Hawaii smoking something" during a Tuesday morning Fox News appearance.
If that's where the Romney campaign wants to go, I'm sure they'll manage to firmly tie up the lunatic vote. More power to 'em. He will finally have made a decision on which path to take.
And the exodus will continue.
Geez, you might think someone planned it this way ;-)
P.S. Perhaps Romney should give Sarah Palin a chance to address the Republican Convention. She might just give him a moment like Pat Buchanan served up in 1992. Go for it Mitt!!!
I say this from a position of white male privilege, I am very aware, but there is one thing about the increasingly explicit racist and sexist appeal of the GOP, and that is that it gives everyone, POC and white people who are growing, to beat it back. I do not mean that the retrograde forces will have won if we don't take the trifecta of Presidency and both houses. I mean we organize, speak, and above all go a bit out of our comfort zone to connect with people who have both a residual fear of "otherness" but also a real sense of human decency. For a lot of people, especially white Americans, those two are now in intense conflict.
ReplyDeleteThe recent revelations about Zimmerman are a case in point. They were unexpected, I was shocked, but it's not a surprise. The story initially--right after the murder--brought out as we know all kinds of neo-Klanism, but more importantly to me there were clearly a lot of white people who more passively identified with Zimmerman or sympathized with him, even if they wouldn't say it was good to shoot Trayvon Martin.
When this stuff comes to light, it gives a great opportunity to point and say, do you want to ally yourself with that? Do subtly (but effectively) racist white people want to stand behind Sununu's nonsense? Likely not: it appeals to their unexamined bigotries, but cuts against their sense of their own "moderation."
It's like there are a lot of white people in the country--I won't make any claim for percentages--who are at a tipping point, ready for an Aikido manoeuvre to knock them into what is for them a new voting pattern.
You made some good points. Imo, some white people are reasonable but may be confused. They may have limited contact with POC so get their opinions from stereotypes seen in the media or ranted on by their politicians. They don't understand the concept of "institutional racism" or why POC get so upset at the use of certain "dog whistles."
DeleteI think the more & more blatant racism coming from the extreme Right is making some white folks very uncomfortable.
BTW: Sununu is smoking his own dirty socks! Just saying....
Aquagranny911
Thanks for that Bill.
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