GOP race-baiting masks class warfare
from Salon.com:
GOP race-baiting masks class warfare
By demonizing some, the Republicans seek to discredit the safety net for the 99 percent
By Daniel Denvir
Its commonplace to note that Newt Gingrichs dog-whistle appellation that Barack Obama is the food stamp president is both racist and politically cynical. But the stereotyping of black government dependency also serves the strategic end of discrediting the entire social safety net, which most Americans of all races depend on. Black people are subtly demonized, but whites and blacks alike will suffer.
Gingrich persists because its a dependable applause line, and because his political fortunes keep rising. Compare that to September, when Mitt Romney attacked then-candidate Rick Perry for calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Perry backtracked, insisting that he only wanted to bolster the program and ensure its solvency. But in his 2010 book Fed Up, Perry made his opposition to Social Security clear, calling it a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal. Scrapping entitlements is a core tenet of contemporary fiscal conservatism, but most of the time politicians only get away with attacking the most vulnerable ones: Medicaid, food stamps and welfare cash assistance, which are means-tested and thus associated with the black (read: undeserving) poor, although whites make up a far greater share of food stamp recipients. Government welfare programs with Teflon political defenses Medicare and Social Security are nearly universal entitlements and thus associated with regular (read: white) Americans.
Ending welfare as we know it, as Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans did in 1996, is one thing. Ending Medicare, Republicans were last year reminded, is something else altogether. Keep your government hands off my Medicare, declared a 2009 Tea Party town hall attendee who today might very well be an ardent supporter of Gingrichs assault on food stamps. It is a political lesson that free-market fundamentalists have to relearn with some frequency. It was only 2005, after all, when President George W. Bush launched his ill-fated proposal to privatize Social Security a setback he later called his greatest failure.
Yet as more government programs of any sort are framed as pernicious, laissez-faire ideologues are again emboldened to get rid of everything. .................(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/27/gop_race_baiting_masks_class_warfare/singleton/