The Unbearable Whiteness of Mitt Romney
On this celebration of Martin Luther King Day, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney showed once again that he is completely out of his element when it comes to matters of race and ethnicity. First, Romney offered his own rendition of "Who Let the Dogs Out" to a group of African-Americans in Jacksonville. Then that same day Romney, who insisted in the past that "we cannot be a bilingual nation," began running Spanish language ads in Florida.
As CBS reported Monday, the Romney campaign crashed a Jacksonville MLK event much to the dismay of an onlooker who yelled, "Mitt Romney, go home! You're delaying the parade." Later while posing with a group of African-Americans youths, Romney decide to keep it real by covering the Baha Men classic from 2000. As CBS described the scene:
The typically old-fashioned Romney was relaxed enough to quote from a popular hit single from a few years back.
"Who let the dogs out?" he called out, as he stood there beaming in his shirt and tie. "Who! Who!"
(At least on this score, Romney is in good company. During the '04 campaign, the desperate-to-be-hip Democrat Wesley Clark offer his own pop culture laugher, "I don't know much about hip-hop, but I do know OutKast can make you shake it like a Polaroid picture.")
Of course, this awkward episode was hardly the first for Mitt Romney when it comes to black voters. In July 2006 while describing Boston's ongoing Big Dig project, Romney joined Tony Snow and John McCain in the casual use of the "tar baby" slur. As the Boston Globe recounted:
In his first major political trip out of the state since a ceiling collapse in a Big Dig tunnel killed a Boston woman on July 10, Romney told 200 people at a Republican lunch Saturday about the political risks of his efforts to oversee the project.
"The best thing for me to do politically is stay away from the Big Dig -- just get as far away from that tar baby as I possibly can," he said in answer to a question from the audience.
While Romney apologized for the remark, his spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom offered an improbable explanation. "The governor was describing a sticky situation," he claimed, "He was unaware that some people find the term objectionable, and he's sorry if anyone was offended."
Meanwhile, Romney's cognitive challenges concerning matters of race and ethnicity also surfaced in his courtship of the Cuban vote in next week's Florida primary. There, Romney debuted a new Spanish language ad title "Mi Padre", featuring the candidate's son Craig. In the spot, Romney himself chimes in with "soy Mitt Romney y apruebo este mensaje" (I'm Mitt Romney and I approved this message).
Sadly, the former Massachusetts Governor has been an outspoken advocate of English-only in the United States. As ThinkProgress documented, Romney's past statements make his current Sunshine State pandering more than a little hypocritical:
"English needs to be the language that is spoken in America. We cannot be a bilingual nation like Canada."
"You strengthen the American people by securing our borders and by insisting that the children who come legally to this land are taught in English."
Making matters worse, Romney was one of the Republican candidates who skipped the Spanish language Univision debate in Florida last September. (Only John McCain agreed to attend.) As Cecilia Munoz of the National Council of La Raza put it, "It's not just that they are not coming. It's that some of them are visibly insulting us." It was only after pressure from leading Republicans that the Romney and other GOP campaigns agreed to a rescheduled Univision event in December.
None of which is to suggest that Mitt Romney is an unreformed bigot making base appeals to the Republican base. (In December, Romney told NBC's Tim Russert that he "literally wept" and "could not have been more pleased" when he learned of the 1978 decision by his Mormon church to finally end its prohibitions against black members.) More opportunist than racist, Mitt Romney is just comically awkward and painfully inappropriate.
Or as Isaac Jaffe (played by Robert Guillaume) might have put it on the late, great TV show Sports Night, do you suppose Mitt Romney "could be any more white?"
UPDATE: As the New York Times noted, Romney also showed his street cred by telling a small child wearing a gold necklace, "Oh, you've got some bling-bling here."
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He is absolutely awful. It never ends with him.
Posted by Theresa on January 22, 2008 9:43 PM