Paul Waldman writes about Newt Gingrich's ability to "pick at the scab of racial resentment," citing his characterization of Barack Obama as a "food stamp president." Waldman also recalls Gingrich's racially tinged mocking of a Clintonian initiative:
You may remember that in 1994, Bill Clinton proposed a large crime bill with many features in it, including money to hire 100,000 new police officers. But when Gingrich mounted his campaign against it, he focused on one tiny element: "midnight basketball," something that actually began under the George H.W. Bush administration, to give kids at risk of joining gangs something else to do. Midnight basketball, Gingrich argued relentlessly, told you everything you needed to know about Clinton's plans to give your hard-earned money to people who didn't deserve it. "Midnight basketball" became the "welfare queens" of the 1990s.
This is an excellent example of how much racial resentment is intertwined, and possibly even subordinate to, the Republican Party's hostility to urban America. Big-city residents of all races share one thing with African-Americans: Very few of them vote Republican, and the GOP doesn't lose anything by using them as political foils. Even in Republican primaries, there are proportionately few votes in densely populated areas*, so it makes sense to encourage, and feed off, suburban and rural voters' resentment at their tax dollars going to solve urban problems (a phenomenon that can be found in almost every state).
Midnight basketball is a perfectly reasonable idea to most big-city dwellers of all races, and well worth the cost if it reduces crime by even a slight amount. But if you think that safe streets (like health care) is a finite resource rather than a universal right, it doesn't make any sense to divert tax money to the most hopeless cases. Better to help the police maintain safe streets in the suburbs than to fight a lost battle in inner-city neighborhoods.
According to Waldman's post, Gingrich went on Meet the Press and scoffed at the charge that "food stamp president" is a racially charged phrase, adding that Obama "follows the same destructive political model that destroyed the city of Detroit."
The specific reference to Detroit, not at all representative of the current health of urban America, is surely no accident — not just because it's mostly black, but because I suspect that most GOP voters feel that, the Disneyfication of New York notwithstanding, all major American cities are eventually going to fall apart as badly as the Motor City has. Just as the GOP elites believe that all entitlement programs, from Food Stamps to Medicare, are doomed to collapse and thus not worth saving.
*In New York's 2008 Democratic primary, Manhattan cast almost three times as many votes as Long Island's Nassau County; the ration was exactly reversed in the GOP primary. Same thing in New Jersey, when comparing Newark's Essex County to suburban Morris County. And in Georgia, the biggest sources of Democratic votes were in DeKalb and Fulton counties, which include Atlanta and nearby suburbs; in the GOP primary, sprawling Cobb and Gwinnett counties were at the top.
Comments