In unintentionally candid moment, Rick Santorum exposes Republican racism against blacks

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Republicans usually use dog whistles to make their racist case to their racist supporters. (You know, like when Newt Gingrich said that poor children have no work ethic and will rob you blind. He may say that he meant all poor children, but of course what he really meant was all black children. But regardless of what he meant, what his words meant to his intended right-wing audience, that is, how they were understood, was all black children. And he's smart enough to know what he was doing.)

But sometimes they unintentionally pick up the wrong whistle and let us all in on their agenda. To wit:

At a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa on Sunday, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum singled out blacks as being recipients of assistance through federal benefit programs, telling a mostly-white audience he doesn't want to "make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money."

Answering a question about foreign influence on the U.S. economy, the former Pennsylvania senator went on to discuss the American entitlement system - which he argued is being used to politically exploit its beneficiaries.

"It just keeps expanding -- I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program," Santorum said. "They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the bottom line is."

He added: "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."

See? Not just poor people, although Republicans don't much care for any of them, but specifically blacks. Republicans are waging a war on entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and indeed against all redistributive policies and programs generally -- specifically, against any help for those in need at the expense of the wealthy. But they sell it by putting a racist twist on it: it's not just freeloading poor people who are to blame, it's specifically freeloading blacks. That plays well with the white electorate of the Republican base, ever fearful that the black man is coming to get them.

To be fair, Santorum was espousing an ideological point that isn't, on the surface, racist, just cruel and utterly unhelpful. He wants everyone, he said, to have "opportunity." But why single out blacks? (And why come out against "diversity," another code word for non-whites, as the source of "conflict"?)

Steve Benen, who also notes Newt's recent comments, calls this "the sort of subtle racism... that Republicans often don't recognize as being racist."

Well, it is.