The 2012 Presidential Election Discussion Thread

By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: January 17, 2012


CHARLESTON, S.C. — South Carolina has the nation’s first female Indian-American governor (a Republican), the highest-ranking African-American in Congress (on the Democratic side) and a rapidly growing population of Latinos, all evidence, longtime political players here say, that the state is shedding its racially charged past.

Editorial: Preaching Division in South Carolina (January 18, 2012)
Charles M. Blow: Newt Gingrich and the Art of Racial Politics (January 17, 2012)

But like the historic slave plantations that draw tourists on the outskirts of town, the legacy of that past has not been totally wiped from the politics of today. And if the general election campaign by Republicans against President Obama, the nation’s first black president, goes on to include a fraught, multilayered discussion about minorities and entitlements, work ethics and what it means to be American, then it will have gotten under way in earnest here this week.

So it was that on Tuesday Newt Gingrich gleefully said his description of Mr. Obama as a “food stamp president” at Monday’s Fox News debate had “struck a chord with the American people”; the White House press secretary asserted that it was “crazy” to say so, and then Mr. Gingrich doubled down — releasing an ad with his debate-night assertion that “more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.”

Mr. Gingrich was clearly making the case that he is the candidate most able to take the fight to Mr. Obama in the fall, but he was also laying bare risks for his party when it comes to invoking arguments perceived to carry racial themes or other value-laden attack lines.

Mr. Gingrich has been engaging in such arguments here and there for the past couple of weeks, as has Rick Santorum, who found himself in the middle of a tortured debate in Iowa several weeks ago over whether he had said he did not want to make “black people’s” lives better “by giving them somebody else’s money.” (He said he misspoke and was misquoted as referring to “black people” when in fact he had meant to say, simply, “people,” but stumbled and also uttered “blah.”) Mitt Romney, who regularly says Mr. Obama wants to create an “entitlement society,” often suggests that the election is about saving “the soul of America.”

Obama essentially defers on the issue of the pipeline. Is there anyone here following that closely?

The oil people responded that the technology would be so sophisticated that the pumping of oil could be stopped immediately.

The pipeline would go straight through the aquifer that provides that state with its water.

No, they are really dumb... they are the dumbmasses.