The comment that Mitt Romney made on Friday while campaigning in Michigan about never having been asked to show his birth certificate was stunning. While the Romney campaign, and Republicans in general, tried to laugh the incident off as a joke; most people weren't buying it. Saturday's edition of Up With Chris Hayes dedicated a good portion of the show talking about race, racism, and President Obama's presidency, including a roundtable discussion with Chris Hayes, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Melissa Harris Perry, W. Kamau Bell, and Jay Smooth. If you have time, you should watch it. Monday morning on Morning Joe, Chris Matthews really told off Reince Priebus, calling him and his Republican Party out for dog whistles. It's been all over cable news, and all over the Internet.
When the campaign started, didn't we hear that Romney's plan was to run on the economy? He was going to talk about the economy all the time, hang it around President Obama's neck, and win the presidency. Whatever happened to that strategy? Chris Matthews started figuring it out a couple of weeks ago:
But here's the problem ... belief is not something Romney is known for. Conviction is alien to him. Romney, his own people say, is a data miner. He doesn't start with the truth. He digs and digs, and tries to find what to do based on the data he can mine. Not exactly a leader. Not exactly a person of conviction. Not even close to being a Ryan or an Obama. Ryan believes government should stay out of our lives. Obama believes that it has a vital, corrective role in a society, that would otherwise be driven by the market, by profit seeking alone.
Oh yes, when this campaign started, Romney's data mining told him that he would cruise to a win in this election by keeping everybody talking about the economy. Unfortunately for Romney, running a political campaign is not like running a business. As a businessman, Romney is used to being in control. Ever since his trip to Europe and the whole #RomneyShambles fiasco, things have been spiraling downhill. As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time Romney's had a good news cycle. Was it back when he took President Obama's "you didn't build that" comment out of context? No, that wasn't it because the poll numbers didn't move much after that. Was it when he announced Paul Ryan as his running mate? Well maybe for a few hours, but then didn't that whole Todd Akin thing happen?
It's become quite clear to Romney and his data mining that talking about the economy has done absolutely nothing to move the polls in his direction. Selecting Paul Ryan as his running mate, didn't do much to move the numbers either. So what is Romney thinking at this point? Well, maybe a little history lesson will help. And I know just the person to give us one. On Monday's nightsThe Rachel Maddow Show, Rachel did a fantastic job putting everything into perspective.
In 2008, John McCain lost African-American voters [4%] really, really badly. And he lost Latino voters [31%] really, really badly. He lost Asian voters [35%] really badly, and he lost voters of other races [31%] that are not African-American or Latino or Asian really badly. Even though he still lost overall [Obama 53%, McCain 46%], the only way he was able to get the race as close as he did, was because he did win a majority of the white vote [McCain 55%, Obama 43%]. He did win 55% of the white vote. Well, right now the Romney-Ryan campaign is doing roughly the same as the John McCain did with Latinos [26%], even worse. They're doing even worse with African-Americans [0%].
Ronald Brownstein crunched the numbers over at the National Journal over the last few days and determined that if white people make up the same portion of the electorate as they did in '08, the magic number that Mister Romney needs to reach among the white voting population is 61 percent [See Obama Needs 80% of Minority Vote to Win 2012 Presidential Election, National Journal, August 27, 2012].
He needs 61% of the white vote. The means he needs to capture a lot more of the white vote then John McCain [55%] did four years ago. He needs more of the white vote than George W. Bush [58%] got when he was reelected in 2004. He needs more of the white vote than George W. Bush [54%] got the first time around, as well. He needs to beat Bob Dole [46%] in the white vote by 15 points. He needs to do better, more than 20 points better, than Poppy Bush [40%] did with white voters when he lost to Bill Clinton. He even needs to be better than Poppy Bush [46%] with white voters when Poppy Bush won. He needs a higher proportion of the white vote than any Republican candidate has had in 28 years when Ronald Reagan [64%] was reelected with a nearly 20 point overall landslide margin. The only other modern election in which a Republican got an even higher proportion of the white vote was Nixon in '72; when Nixon [67%] won the election overall by 25 points, so essentially he won everyone.
Even among people who think Mitt Romney's going to win this election, nobody thinks he's going to win it by 19 points the way Reagan did or by 25 points the way Nixon did. And in the absence of a landslide, an overall landslide that big, how on earth can you plan to get that huge a proportion of white voters? Well, who knows if it's feasible? But Lord knows he is trying.
[Video of Mitt Romney speaking in Michigan]
I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised; where both of us were born. Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital. I was born at Harper Hospital. No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate; they know that this is the place that we were born and raised.
It's amazing. Nobody's curious about my origins and my status as an American. Nobody needs ... unlike some other secret Kenyan presidents we know. Am I right? What's the difference peeps?
Has Romney been data mining again? He's figured out that now the only way for him to win the election is to get the majority of the white vote. Let's see Romney refuses to release his taxes, and asks the American public to trust him. He refuses to release a detailed plan for the economy, and once again, asks us to trust him. Now he's calculated that he has to get the majority of the white vote. And his solution is to become a racist? Wow!
The transcript of the remainder of the segment along with the video is below the felur-de-orange, including a fantastic discussion with Bob Herbert, who surveys the landscape and what Romney is doing and concludes that the Romney campaign doesn't have an answer to the questions about abortion, is making blatant racial appeals with welfare ads and birther jokes, and has an economic plan that consists solely of tax cuts for the very wealthy.
And what's happening, I think, is that the voters are seeing that this is who Mitt Romney is. That he is not the moderate who has had to sort of play along with the right wing of his party in order to get the nomination but ... now he's being identified with all these extremist issues and I don't think that overall that plays well.
I'm not a politician, but I have read enough to know that if you are a politician you want to make sure that you define yourself to voters in as positive a light as possible. Mitt Romney started out with a plan to redefine President Obama as a leftest extremist who doesn't know what he's doing. Instead, the one thing Romney is succeeding at is painting a portrait of himself as right-wing extremist. I don't think this is going to end well for Mitt Romney.
The Romney campaign is still running ads also about welfare; ads that are blatantly, racially charged. Showing images of hardworking white people and telling them that their black president is just going to start handing out welfare checks to people who won't even look for a job. As a special bonus, the policy claims behind these very racially charged ads has been as thoroughly debunked as the birther nonsense has been. It's just made up entirely in terms of policy matters. But the Romney campaign is sticking with the strategy of campaigning on welfare.
As our friend, Ezra Klein, pointed out at The Washington Post today, the Romney campaign is running more ads about welfare than just about any other issue now. Of the 12 most recent ads posted to his campaign website, five are about welfare. That's more than the number dedicate to healthcare [four], more than the number dedicated introducing Paul Ryan [one], and more than the number dedicated to the economy [one] [See Race and the 2012 election, The Washington Post, August 27, 2012].
So it's the Jobs, Jobs, Welfare Queen Platform. Let's talk about welfare. Mr. Romney, for his part, took the whole stoking white racial resentment welfare strategy a step further this weekend defending the welfare ads to USA Today and accusing the president of taking this action that he didn't actually take on welfare as a calculation that was designed to "shore up [the Obama] base" [before] the election [See Interview: Romney blasts Obama for a 'vituperative' campaign, USA Today, August 26, 2012]. As if people on welfare are Barack Obama's base (wink). Especially the lazy ones (wink). Don't expect this to stop though. The Romney folks need to get to 61% of white voters, somehow. And the Romney campaign apparently believes that this welfare queen thing is working. Romney campaign aides insisting to CBS News that their racially, dog whistling, factually inaccurate welfare ads are totally working. The ads are helping the campaign gain ground with middle-class voters [who are] anxious about the economy [See Romney pushes on with discredited welfare attacks, Associated Press, August 22, 2012]. I wonder what other kinds of ads might help the Romney campaign gain ground with these middle-class voters they're reaching out for? These specific types of middle-class voters they're reaching out for.
The big media guy at the main pro-Romney super PAC is the man who produced one of the most racist television ads in presidential history, the infamous Willie Horton ad [See Making the Election About Race, The New York Times, August 27, 2012]. Maybe he'll have some ideas. A Republican strategist told Ron Brownstein for his National Journal pieces a couple of days ago, quote this is the last time around, excuse me, This is the last time anyone will try to do this [See Obama Needs 80% of Minority Vote to Win 2012 Presidential Election, National Journal, August 27, 2012]. Meaning this is the last time anyone will try to run a presidential campaign aimed at winning a slim majority of votes overall by winning a big majority of white votes. Presumably this is the last time we will see this strategy because white voters alone will not be will not be enough to win an election in the coming years as the country changes. And it might be enough this year.
But this year the Republicans are almost 90% white. The new PEW numbers say, in terms of self identified Republicans, it's 89% white now [See Making the Election About Race, The New York Times, August 27, 2012]. And the calculus the Romney campaign appears to be making is that if they can maximize that vote; if they can maximize the white vote by any means necessary then maybe they can win with nobody else supporting them. Which means we're about to find out whether you can win a presidential election in this country in this year, in the year 2012, by deliberately running against minority voters. Joining us now is Bob Herbert, he's a distinguished senior fellow at Demos, a progressive policy think tank and advocacy group. Bob, thank you for being here.
BH: How are you, Rachel?
RM: I hear you reacting to the way I was laying that out. Is it because you can't believe they're doing this, or do you think that their reasoning is faulty?
BH: Um, you know, Mitt Romney has so many problems. He's an unappealing candidate. He's not a very good politician and he's running a campaign without a message. It's a campaign that doesn't have a theme. So, what he's essentially doing is going all over the place saying, you know, white people please vote for me. It's the only route that he and his advisors see to an electoral victory this November. But, you know, I just think that; I think that in 2012 in the 21st Century, you can't win an election if that's the only thing that you've got going for you. I still think that racial appeals work. I still think that there is, there are a fair number of people in this country who are, a fair number of whites who are hostile to blacks, who do not want a black president. I don't think it's anywhere close to a majority of whites so if he needs to attract white votes to win this election, and he does. It would seem to me that what would be better is to try and put forth a campaign that honestly appeals to the concerns of white voters in this country. And you could start with, you know, having a plan to develop jobs; having a plan to build a stronger economy and that sort of thing. And especially if they're talking about middle-class white voters because I think that is a crucial voting block. So if you're talking about middle-class suburban voters, for example, I just don't believe they like racist appeals. I don't think that they like extremist appeals of the right or the left, you know. So it just seems to me that it's not a great strategy.
RM: The other thing that's going on around the convention obviously beyond the parties' control is the weather and the rescheduling and the rejiggering of the schedule that that entails, which involves losing a little bit of their message. They wanted to have sort of theme days for each [day] of the convention. That's all ... they're trying to sort of stick with some of the themes, but that's screwed up. But the other thing that's happening is that they've really brought a lot of these socially conservative issues into the discussion this week. The welfare stuff is so blatantly racial that it brings the racial discussion into, into mainstream discussion about what their strategy is. I mean this isn't, this isn't a cockamamie theory that I've cooked up about what Romney is doing. It seems pretty blatantly that this is what they're doing. There's also this stuff going on about abortion. And there's a split in the Party about that, which is going to be aired out a little bit, I think, with the Mike Huckabee speech likely, and with some of the fights that are on the floor. But they're also bringing that up themselves; Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan both doing interviews about that in the last few days. What happens in terms of their appeal, racially, to bring; when they put forth those social issues up front? Does that affect any of the racial inflection that they've got?
BH: You know, I think that it's all of a piece and I think it's, instead of forward looking, it's really backward looking. So when you start talking about these social issues, what Mitt Romney is allowing to happen now is that he's becoming identified personally with all these issues. He's got Paul Ryan on the ticket now, so you've got that whole rape slash abortion issues that they just don't know how to talk about. They're on the wrong side of the issue and they don't know how to try and explain it.
RM: They can't come up with an answer; it's gotten worse, yeah.
BH: Yeah, exactly. And then they're doing these blatant racial appeals, you know. And then they've got, you know, an economic program that consists solely of tax cuts for the very wealthy. And what's happening, I think, is that the voters are seeing that this is who Mitt Romney is. That he is not the moderate who has had to sort of play along with the right wing of his party in order to get the nomination but he's basically a practical, pragmatic moderate guy. But now he's being identified with all these extremist issues and I don't think that overall that plays well.
RM: I don't think it's the narrative that he intended, certainly.
BH: Right.
RM: It's interesting to see him off his game. I mean, part of what presidents have to do is talk when the script goes wrong.
BH: Yeah, exactly right.
RM: Bob Herbert, distinguished senior fellow at Demos. Bob, it's great to see you. Thank you.
BH: You too, Rachel.
RM: Appreciate it.
BH: Bye.