Rick’s race card?
Welcome to the ranks of the frontrunners, Rick Santorum — you expletive-deleted, blankety-blank so-and-so.
It’s become the tradition that a newly arrived frontrunner is subjected to a hazing, as a sort of initiation rite.
The former Pennsylvania senator, who was ignored when he was just a little bitty speck way out there on the Iowa horizon, suddenly no longer has the cozy comforts of obscurity.
National Urban League president Marc Morial pounced on a comment the surging Santorum made out in Sioux City last Sunday. And the candidate all at once got the national media finally to pay him some attention.
While discussing Medicaid and food stamps, Santorum said: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn money.” An unexceptionable sentiment?
Not quite, not according to the Urban League’s Morial. He threw the penalty flag. Santorum, he charged, was pandering to the bigot vote with a stereotype-tainted remark.
We’re not sure why Santorum said it or in what context he said it. But we’re pretty sure it was, at a minimum, an impolitic comment.
For starters, blacks in the Hawkeye State are, as they say in those parts, as scarce as hen’s teeth. And as the Urban League’s guy points out, way more white folks than black folks get food stamps, not only in Iowa but nationally.
So why inject the subject of race into the discussion? You do have to wonder.
Santorum has been complaining for months that he wishes the media would pay some attention to what he has to say. Somebody had better remind him to be careful what he wishes for. And what he says.