Making the Election About Race
Making the Election About Race
By THOMAS B. EDSALL
The Republican ticket is flooding the airwaves with commercials that develop two themes designed to turn the presidential contest into a racially freighted resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.
Ads that accuse President Obama of gutting the work requirements enacted in the 1996 welfare reform legislation present the first theme. Ads alleging that Obama has taken $716 billion from Medicare — a program serving an overwhelmingly white constituency — in order to provide health coverage to the heavily black and Hispanic poor deliver the second. The ads are meant to work together, to mutually reinforce each other’s claims.
The announcer in one of the Romney campaign’s TV ads focusing on welfare tells viewers:
In 1996, President Clinton and a bipartisan Congress helped end welfare as we know it by requiring work for welfare. But on July 12, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping the work requirement. Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you a welfare check. And welfare-to-work goes back to being plain old welfare. Mitt Romney will restore the work requirement because it works.
¬snip¬
Web sites devoted to examining the veracity of political commercials have sharply criticized the ad.
more: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/27/making-the-election-about-race/?hp
= new reply since forum marked as read
