Those are the words recently uttered by an elderly white woman on national television during a Chris Matthews segment. The lady had yelled out "He's a Communist!" moments prior, in reference to Obama. Chris Matthews then pressed her to explain herself, and she found herself unable to say what a Communist is. She ended with the flabbergasted pronouncement, "Just because he was born here doesn't mean he thinks like us."
Now, it would be easy to dismiss this exchange as merely a sign that The Stupid has been out in full force in this election, but that would do the larger truth several pints of serious injustice, because the long-running campaign of GOP- and Tea Party-led xenophobia always intended The Stupid as its logical conclusion: people firmly ensconced in soundbyte-friendly views they don't understand, and can't even explain; people with racist views they can't defend with facts; and people who don't actually perceive those views as racist in any sort of conscious way. This woman does not consciously know that when she says the President of the United States was born here but "does not think like us", she is denying him his citizenship and his "us-ness" on racist grounds that she understands about as little as she understands Communism.
It then bears mentioning that when GOP Senatorial candidates whose 38 year-old sons crack "Let's send Obama back to Kenya" to wide laughter at private, tony brunches, they are actually doing something more pernicious than merely propagating racism: they are normalizing racist views for audiences who may not have the breadth of cultural or educational experience and exposure that might serve as a legitimate buttress against racist views, views that oftentimes fester precisely as a result of people remaining isolated (segregated) from one another. As I said on my Twitter account last night, "The most tragic and ironic part of segregation is that racism does indeed (mostly) break down when people intermingle". It can thus be said that racial segregation is the single greatest enabler of cultural hegemony in our society, and is applied (sometimes unconsciously, but also measurably consciously) by those in power to prevent the kind of cross-cultural class consciousness that might unite poor and working-class people to pursue populist progress that would greatly benefit us all, the middle class included.
By extension, when someone like Mitt Romney makes disparaging remarks about half the country being moochers, or when GOP- and Tea Party-tied Super PACs misleadingly use in a TV ad a black woman's confused message that Obama is giving away free cell phones to poor people, they are consciously extending the half-life of bigotry to keep America ideologically and geographically fragmented in a way that begets more of The Stupid and leads cluelessly uneducated white women to utter words like, "Just because he was born here doesn't mean he thinks like us."
Remember that the next time you hear some Governor or Senator, or his/her sons, apologize for some racist thing they've said. They are not sorry, and they'll already have accomplished their larger goal, at great cost to our nation's long-term viability and unity, but with little blowback to their own careers.