John Nichols: Mitt Romney Abandons His Father's Civil Rights Legacy

[marmar]

from The Nation:



Mitt Romney Abandons His Father's Civil Rights Legacy
John Nichols on January 13, 2012 - 3:22pm ET


The Republican Party, founded by militant abolitionists and once the political home of civil rights champions such as George Romney, has since the late 1960s been degenerating toward the crude politics of “Southern strategies” and what former Republican National Committee chairman Lee Atwater referred to as the “coded” language of complaints about “forced busing,” legal-services programs, welfare and food stamps. But the 2012 campaign has seen this degeneration accelerate, as the candidates have repeatedly played on stereotypes about race, class and “entitlements.”

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum told a crowd of supporters, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

Around the same time, Texas Congressman Ron Paul was scrambling to explain away old newsletters that went out under his name with sections suggesting that “95 percent of the black males in that city (Washington) are semi-criminal or entirely criminal” and describing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday as “Hate Whitey Day.” Order was restored in riot-torn Los Angeles, the newsletters suggested, only when welfare checks arrived.

.........(snip).........

Instead of objecting to the excesses of the other contenders, the “adult” in the race, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, picked up on the themes developed by Santorum and Gingrich to gripe about “the ever-expanding payments of an entitlement society” as “a fundamental corruption of the American spirit.” ................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/165647/mitt-romney-abandons-his-fathers-civil-rights-legacy

[rfranklin]

1. Unfair! He's only against blah people!

Those lazy, shiftless blah people.

[rurallib]

2. His father would be so dissappointed at the greedy, lying

amoral asshole his son has become.
Were he alive, George would take him behind the old woodshed.