Invented racial ugliness

I wasn’t especially impressed by Mitt Romney’s speech to the NAACP (nor, frankly, by the way Romney was booed, though that’s a different matter) but at least I wasn’t driven demented by it. The same, alas, cannot be said for poor Michael Tomasky who sees something rotten lurking in the dark heart of Romney’s, er, standard stump speech:

Oh please. This is guff. Guff on stilts, in fact. It’s true that being booed by the NAACP won’t hurt Romney with the wilder, nastier corners of the Republican base. Nevertheless, to presume Romney set this speech up so as to perform and benefit from this kind of trick shot is to grant the campaign a deeper level of cunning than it has shown any sign of owning.

As for suggesting that referring to the Affordable Care Act as ‘Obamacare’ is some kind of racially-loaded signal  used only by people who loathe the President then, well, this is news to me. Looking at my own RSS feed I see that Obamacare is used pretty frequently by such notoriously vicious Obama-haters as Ezra Klein, Kevin Drum, Andrew Sullivan and the crew at the Economist. There are many others.

Besides, damn it, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (to give the thing its “proper” or propaganda name) is the great legislative achievement of the age. It fulfills 40 years of promises made by Presidents of both parties. Were I an Obama partisan I’d be quite happy to see the President’s name attached to this momentous piece of legislation. And this would be the case even if people who loathe the President are also keen to tie him to his bill.

No, the reason some folk dislike hearing the bill referred to as Obamacare is because the act is, so far, fairly unpopular. It has nothing to do with race. Instead and as a label Obamacare follows in the footsteps of, well, Hillarycare and, gosh, Romneycare.

There’s sufficient real ugliness out there without inventing stuff to flatter your own prejudices that your political opponents must invariably be motivated by the basest motives.