I have blogged about Romney-Ryan's lies on welfare and Medicare. The lie that Obama is gutting the work requirement in welfare is quite clearly intended to be racially polarizing. After all, in a tough economy with eight percent unemployment, people who are fortunate enough to have jobs won't generally blame those receiving government assistance as being lazy moochers. So, Romney's attack is probably not aimed at Obama's re-distribution from the rich, in general, to the poor, in general. The only 'benefit' that I can see from Romney-Ryan's welfare attacks on Obama is to get poorer whites to cast aside their doubts about the guy from Bain Capital -- with accounts in Switzerland, the Bahmas, and the Cayman Islands -- and fight 'Obama's racial agenda.'
Now Edsall is arguing that Romney-Ryan's Medicare attacks serve the same racially polarizing purpose. As Edsall writes:
Medicare recipients are overwhelmingly white, at 77 percent; 10 percent of recipients are black; and 8 percent Hispanic, with the rest described as coming from other races and ethnicities.So, even though not a single Medicare benefit has been cut by Obamacare; even though new benefits, such as a significant filling of the doughnut hole in Medicare Part D, have been added; and even though the Medicare trustees have said that Obamacare extends the financial viability of Medicare, Romney and Ryan have unleashed a barrage of lies to scare Medicare beneficiaries about Obamacare. Romney and Ryan have seen the large proportion of whites among those currently in Medicare and cynically detected an opportunity. As Edsall explains, unable to make a substantive anti-Obama case to senior citizens, Romney and Ryan are trying, using carefully suggestive ads, to gently coax Medicare recipients, who are mostly white, into seeing Obamacare as a race war being waged against them.
Romney, apparently, has lost confidence in his initial assessment that, the Obama economy being as bad as it is, hammering on unemployment would be enough to get him to the White House. So he is now moving on the welfare and Medicare fronts. He does not have to win on those issues; he only needs to make some headway at the margins, in battle ground states such as Florida.
Romney understands that the Republican party has gained a big advantage among poorer whites, in spite of the pro-poor redistributive policies of the Democrats, by exploting racially charged rhetoric in election campaigns. (Why poor whites would favor Republicans even though that party has consistently fought Democrats' measures to help the poor has been a puzzle for political scientists since at least the publication of Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter with Kansas? The only explanation that makes any sense to me is that poor whites have been persuaded to vote against their self interest by means of racially divisive attacks that claim that Democrats' policies take from whites to give to blacks.)
Meanwhile, as I have argued before, media fact checking by Politifact and various other organizations has not slowed down the Romney onslaught one bit. Romney and his superPACS will keep flooding the TV screens in battleground states with their lies and the media's fact checking will look increasingly like a cruel joke. This kind of fact checking effectively restrains the poorly-funded liar, without putting any real restraints on the well-funded liar.
Update, August 28, 2012: David Firestone draws attention to an interview with Mitt Romney in which he defends his attacks on Obama's welfare policies and says that Obama granted the welfare waivers to “shore up his base.” This is a classic liar's strategy: tell racially cynical lies over and over to gin up hatred among a section of the electorate, brazen it out when challenged, and, finally, assign your own ugly motives to your opponent.
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