Racial campaign rhetoric

Newt Gingrich said African Americans should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps. Rick Santorum said he didn't want to better black people's lives by giving them somebody else's money.

Then both said they had been misunderstood.

But Marc Morial said he got the message - and he didn't like it.

"The racial stereotypes are intolerable," said Morial, president of the National Urban League. "I don't think just African Americans get tired of it; I think all decent-thinking people get tired of it."

What is it with presidential campaigns and racial rhetoric? Why is it that candidates often inflame tensions race when silence would serve?

Ronald Reagan trotted out the stereotype of the high-living, check-cashing "welfare queen." George H.W. Bush tied Michael Dukakis to the specter of a murderous black rapist named Willie Horton. More recently, Michele Bachmann signed (and then repudiated) a pledge asserting that black children fared better in slavery.

"People don't want to hear this, but these candidates are pandering to a small minority within their own party who probably have racial views more in line with 1950 than 2012," said James Peterson, director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University. "Often, those are the voters who are most active and hard-core. . . . It's politics 2012."

Not so, said John Pitney Jr., professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in California. "Groups like the Urban League and NAACP are primed to see racism in just about anything any Republican says," said Pitney, a former top-ranking analyst for the GOP. "If somebody like Gingrich should mention race in the context of policy, they'll immediately argue that it's racism. It's very unfair. Gingrich has many, many faults, but racism isn't one of them."

To be sure, racial language isn't solely the province of Republicans - or whites.

In his 1984 presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson caused an uproar by referring to Jews as "Hymies" and to New York as "Hymietown." He initially denied the remarks, then apologized.

In 2008, Bill Clinton explained his wife's loss to Barack Obama in the South Carolina primary by noting that Jackson had won it before - as though race were the only reason Obama won there. Then Obama said his grandmother's racial fears were those of a "typical white person."

This year, while talking about Medicaid to Iowa voters, Santorum was quoted as saying, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

As controversy grew, the former Pennsylvania senator insisted he hadn't said "black," telling CNN he "mumbled it and changed my thought" as he spoke. On Fox News, he suggested he may have said "blah," not "black."

On the videotape, it's unclear which word he said.

In New Hampshire, former House Speaker Gingrich said that if the NAACP invited him to speak, he'd talk about why blacks "should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps."

Gingrich told CNN that his comments were taken out of context and that his message was, "Every neighborhood in America deserves a chance to have paychecks instead of food stamps." He said he was being labeled racist for challenging government entitlement programs.

As the GOP contest shifts to South Carolina, some analysts lament the latest references to race.

"There was a time in the early part of this century, when Bush was president, when I would have said the use of this kind of racial rhetoric was on the way out," said David Bositis, a voting expert at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. "Now you have people who are very comfortable in letting their negative attitude about blacks out."

Theodore Mason Jr., a professor of African American literature and culture at Kenyon College in Ohio, recalls Gov. George Wallace standing in the doorway at the University of Alabama, trying to block the enrollment of two black students. Wallace's views, he said, were wrong - but clear.

"Now you've got this complex and cloudy racial discourse," Mason said. "We imagine we're in a post-racial society, so people like Gingrich and Santorum can say these things [and believe] they're not really thinking about group identification."

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