Both Mitt Romney and President Obama have reason to be wary of this turn of events. Race-baiting hooks 2012 campaign

TAMPA, Fla. — During three-plus years of Barack Obama’s presidency, neither he nor most top Republicans felt much desire to talk about race.

Now, the three-plus days of the Republican National Convention in Tampa are being roiled by angry people in both parties eager to talk about race — and how the other side is trying exploit prejudice for political advantage.


A gusher of self-righteous accusations and indignant denials, playing out prominently in news media coverage, has taken what had been a below-the-surface reality of 2012 and put it on naked display: Both Obama and Mitt Romney are keenly conscious of how the nation’s partisan and ideological divides track closely with racial ones, and have crafted strategies designed to ensure that different racial groups vote in the numbers they need.

( Also on POLITICO: Matthews repeats 'racial division' charge)

The question dominating political circles this week — and signaling a potentially ugly fall campaign to follow — is whether these strategies have curdled into overt race-baiting.

( Also on POLITICO: Full coverage of the Republican convention)

Many Democrats believe Romney’s decision to inject welfare into the campaign — with a factually inaccurate ad claiming Obama had reversed Clinton-era work requirements — was an unmistakable, if coded, effort to imply that the first black president stands for handouts for lazy people.

Combined with a recent lead-balloon joke by Romney about controversy over Obama’s birthplace, Democrats have concluded that Romney is making deliberate appeals to prejudiced whites.

Many Republicans — with years of resentment over how they believe Democrats and the media seek to throw them on the defensive on racial issues — howled that Vice President Joe Biden was exploiting racial fears when he told a majority-black audience in Virginia that the GOP’s Wall Street allies want to “put you all back in chains.”

All the talk of code words highlights one irony of 2012: Race is proving more toxic as a subtext to the election than it did in 2008, when Obama’s status as the first African-American major-party nominee was usually celebrated, even by many Republicans, as a sign of racial progress.

But in the hair-trigger politics of 2012, the debate in recent days has prompted both parties to point fingers as if the ghost of George Wallace were advising the opposition’s campaign.

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, a leading Obama surrogate and head of the Democratic Governors Association, said over the weekend: “When you have a party that says coded things, that makes totally false ads up, falsely saying the president is trying to undo welfare reform, I think you’re going to see a lot of heavily and not-so-subtly coded messages from the Romney-Ryan campaign.”

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, in an interview with POLITICO, retorted that Obama is the one exploiting race, with base-motivating policies and rhetoric designed to turn out the Democratic-leaning African-American and Hispanic vote. Asked directly if she thought the president was race-baiting, Brewer said: “Absolutely, I do. There’s no doubt in my mind.

“He panders to them,” Brewer added, a reference to Hispanic voters. “Look what he’s done: He hasn’t secured my borders.”

This uplifting debate took an even more edifying turn on MSNBC, when liberal commentator Chris Matthews on Monday launched an emotional attack on Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, charging that Romney is using the welfare issue and that jokes about Obama’s birthplace are racially coded appeals. “You can play your games and giggle about it, but the fact is your side is playing that card.” Doubling down on this theme, Matthews told convention viewers Tuesday to be “on the alert for tribal messages, the war drums of racial division” from the GOP podium.

Priebus called Matthews’s criticism “garbage” and said Matthews was trying to compete for “the biggest jerk in the room.” Newt Gingrich later went on MSNBC to tell the commentator that he was the racist one for assuming that talking about welfare amounts to criticism of blacks since more welfare recipients are white.

( Also on POLITICO: Cain: Some blacks see only green)

Obama aides did not comment on the claims of race on both sides. Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said that people who don’t want to see the president reelected are basing that decision solely on his policies.

The debate over race-baiting thrills ideologues on both sides and is catnip for cable audiences. But the reality is both Romney and Obama have reason to be wary of being too publicly linked to this turn in the campaign.

Obama, say Democratic strategists, knows that he has prospered when white voters see him through the prism of post-racial politics and doesn’t benefit from a climate filled with incendiary charges on America’s most sensitive issue.

“If you have a candidate who is African-American, you don’t want it to be about race, you want it to be about other things,” said Democratic consultant Tad Devine, who helped Sen. Ted Kennedy win reelection against Romney in 1994.

The president recently told Black Enterprise magazine, “I am not the president of black America.”

Romney operatives, meanwhile, know it would be toxic if their side is judged by most voters to be waging an overt appeal to racial prejudice.

Romney’s poll numbers have stalled across the board, but as NBC and The Wall Street Journal pointed out last week, the most surprising development may be that Romney’s lagging among whites. He still leads Obama by 13 points, according to polling for those outlets. But John McCain won whites by 12 points and still lost decisively — and Obama may do even better among non-whites than he did four years ago.

The welfare attacks came up suddenly from the Romney campaign, which said little about the issue when Obama’s administration changed policy to let states seek waivers on the work requirements. The Romney welfare ads, which have been on heavily in battleground states, prominently feature Bill Clinton signing the welfare reform bill into law. The first ad in the series said that Obama moved “quietly” to “gut” the Clinton reforms so that now, “They just send you your welfare check. … Welfare-to-work goes back to being plain old welfare.”

The welfare ads — regardless of their racial intent — seemed designed to help Romney gain ground on Obama since many independent voters in key demographics, such as swing-state Catholics, tend to view government aid to the poor with suspicion, according to polling data.

Republicans believe the complaints from Democrats about racial appeals are ritualistic, and ring especially hollow coming from a politician whose very presence in office shows that Americans are no longer obsessed with race.

They’re also no longer constantly checking themselves when they talk about Obama. For instance, a recent interview in which Romney surrogate John Sununu referenced the president’s high-school-era pot-smoking would have prompted outrage four years ago.

“Name a campaign in the last 25 years where the Dems didn’t play the race card,” former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour told reporters after an event at the Republican National Convention this week, suggesting it was calibrated to move voters.

“They feel this unbelievable need to turn out their base,” he added.

But the Rev. Jesse Jackson, in an interview with POLITICO, said this understates the complexity of Obama’s circumstances. “President Barack is in an interesting and difficult position,” Jackson said. “If Bill Clinton reaches out to blacks, … it’s seen as progress. If George Bush comes up with four or five blacks in his Cabinet, [it’s heralded]. If Barack did the same level of outreach, it would be taken the opposite way.”

“He’s walking on rolling logs every day,” Jackson said.

Another politician who knows a lot about racial and ethnic fault lines, former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, said he doesn’t think Romney is appealing to racism — but that he is counting on long-standing voting patterns in which ideology, culture and race are intimately intertwined.

“There is a racial divide, otherwise Romney wouldn’t be running neck and neck,” said Koch, who was defeated by his city’s first-ever, and only, African-American mayor. “If Romney is down 21 points with women and two-thirds of Hispanics are going to vote [against] him, [he can’t win] unless the majority of white males are voting for him. … In the South, the Democratic Party is a party of African-Americans, and the Republican Party is the party of whites.”