Newt Gingrich: "The Good Ol' Boy" Who Wants To Be Prez

Newt Gingrich, with his 3rd wife (and former aide) Calllista

Newt Gingrich has a long and troubled history with making statements which are both counterfactual and controversial. His mendacity and mischievousness know almost no bounds.

Recently, the Republican presidential candidate has become decidedly non-elliptical in his racially charged remarks. Last week, Newt said this before a Republican audience:

Gingrich sought to lay blame for the recession, as well as the economic and social upheaval in Detroit, on Obama and his policies. “President Obama is the most successful food stamp president in American history,” Gingrich said. “I would like to be the most successful paycheck president in American history.”

Unfortunately for Newt it's not 1994 anymore, it's now 2011 so people like Salon's Joan Walsh and The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates have started to notice Newt's blatant appeals to racial prejudice:

But let me be clear: I might not have paid attention to Gingrich's "food stamp president" jibe had it not come along with a panorama of images designed to make clear Barack Obama is blackity black black. Praising right-wing Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Gingrich said he'll make the U.S. more like Texas, while Obama only "knows how to get the whole country to resemble Detroit." In the speech to Georgia Republicans where he tried out the "food stamp president" slur, Gingrich also told the bastion of the old Confederacy that 2012 would be the biggest election since 1860 -- you know, when Abraham Lincoln got elected and the South began to secede over slavery, commencing the Civil War. He also suggested the U.S. might need to bring back some kind of voting test, banned under the Voting Rights Act. Last year, of course, Gingrich denounced Obama's "Kenyan anti-colonialist behavior," which made him "outside our comprehension" as Americans, spreading the lie that Obama inherited angry African anti-colonialism from his absent African father, though he was raised by his white mother and grandparents. Oh, and he headed the drive to label Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor "racist" when she was nominated in 2009. 

So let's review: Welfare slur? Check. Tie to a troubled, mainly black city? Check. Specious association with African anti-colonialism? Check. Dire reference to Lincoln and the start of the Civil War, while campaigning deep in the heart of Dixie? Check. Suggestion we need a voter test? Check. Oh, and for good measure, calling liberals concerned about racial injustice "racist"? Check. Awesome: They've hit pretty much every way the GOP has used to divide Americans by race in the last 200 years! 

Great job, Newt. You've developed the perfect platform to run a spirited GOP campaign that attracts a cadre of aggrieved white people. You'll never be president of the United States, but you'll be the champion of the declining share of the country that still thrills to what we used to call dog-whistle politics: coded varieties of racism only understood by their intended audience.

It will be interesting to see if  other Republican candidates and politicians call Newt out for his racist remarks, or (more likely) they also use more subtly coded appeals to the predominantly pale populace's anxieties about racial progress. Interestingly, on This Week with Christiane Amanpour even George Will said that Newt "is not a serious candidate" for president.

Let's hope not.