One of the better answers I have found comes from a well-known supporter of Mr Romney – Suzy Welch, former editor in chief of the Harvard Business Review, and wife of Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric. In an appearance on CNN with her husband, Mrs Welch suggested that Mr Obama’s personal style and choice of musical material define him as a member of a “different America”. I would imagine this is why Mr Romney’s campaign included the snippet of Mr Obama singing “Let’s Stay Together” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. They hoped it would convey his otherness. “It’s the difference between the songs that they’re singing,” Mrs Welch said. “Mitt Romney didn’t exactly do a beautiful job on that song, but think about what he’s singing, OK? I mean it’s that patriotic song and he goes all the way through it. Then you’ve got the very cool Barack Obama singing Al Green. That is the two different Americas. Isn’t it?”
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Is there anyone in America clueless enough not to know what Mrs. Welch means?
UPDATE March 13, 2014. At the same time Ms. Welch was warning the public about Mr. Obama’s dark skinned musical leanings and Mr. Romney was telling his audience that the NAACP should vote for Mr. Obama if they wanted more free stuff, Joe Williams was being fired from Politico, because he was the real racist.
On June 21, 2012, I was invited to discuss race, Republican candidate Mitt Romney, and the 2012 presidential election on MSNBC. I said this:
“Romney is very, very comfortable, it seems, with people who are like him. That’s one of the reasons why he seems so stiff and awkward in town hall settings … But when he comes on ‘Fox and Friends,’ they’re like him. They’re white folks who are very much relaxed in their own company.”
The political Internet exploded. Because I’m an African American, enraged conservative bloggers branded me an anti-white racist. Others on the right, like Andrew Breitbart’s Big Media, mined my personal Twitter account and unearthed a crude Romney joke I’d carelessly retweeted a month before. The Romney campaign cried foul. In less than two weeks I was out of a job.
But wait! There is more. Republican House Leader and former Social Security death benefit recipient Paul Ryan has come out with a typically deep analysis of poverty in the United States where he notes:
“We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work,” the Wisconsin Republican said on Bill Bennett’s “Morning in America” radio show. “There is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
And just in case anyone was unclear about which inner city men he had in mind (certainly not the residents of 740 Park Avenue), Mr. Ryan went on to cite as his intellectual source Charles Murray, famous debunked serial fraud who claims that “science” proves white people just work harder and are smarter than the differently abled races. But yet, remember my question
Is there anyone in America clueless enough not to know what Mrs. Welch means?
And the answer is apparently – yes! The Nation Magazine’s first reaction was to explain:
The culture-of-poverty thesis is like a horror movie villain—it will probably never stop coming back. But it’s particularly perverse to invoke it at a time when welfare been virtually eliminated and huge numbers of those receiving benefits are already working.
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