Jason,
What do you think the purpose of Romney's welfare ad was? I'm referring to the ad that was blatantly false - the one that declared Obama had ended the work requirement for welfare. I'm assuming you know that the truth was that Obama had agreed to allow governors more leeway in reaching the goal of having welfare recipients engaged in work.
These states, some with Republican governors, asked the federal government for more flexibility in how they hand out welfare dollars. Their purpose was to spend less time on federal paperwork and more time experimenting with ways to connect welfare recipients with jobs.
The Obama administration cooperated, granting waivers to some states from some of the existing rules.
The waivers gave "those states some flexibility in how they manage their welfare rolls as long as it produced 20% increases in the number of people getting work."
In some small way, the waivers might change precisely how work is calculated but the essential goal of pushing welfare recipients to work -- something both Democrats and Republicans agreed to in the 1990s -- remains the same.
http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/23/politics/ ... index.htmlRomney and his team had to know this ad was blatantly false, but they though it was worth the risk of running. Why? This was a matter of discussion and included some research.
This link leads to an article worth reading, and I'll quote part here.
http://www.cjr.org/swing_states_project ... print=trueLet’s first take the part where the journalists and academics agree—the contention that racial resentment shapes the welfare ad’s effect. Some evidence comes from Michael Tesler, a political scientist at Brown University and the author of Obama’s Race, who penned an Aug. 20 blog post examining the relationship between racial attitudes and viewers’ response to the ad. Tesler found that when people hadn’t seen the welfare ad, their opinions about how Romney’s policies would affect the middle class, the poor, or black people weren’t connected to their level of racial resentment. (For the questions used to measure “racial resentment,” a term of art in the field, see here.) Upon seeing the ad, though, viewers with higher levels of racial resentment thought Romney’s policies were more likely to help those groups—while viewers with low levels of racial resentment now believed the opposite. As Tesler puts it, the ad made attitudes toward blacks “a stronger predictor of respondents’ views about the consequences of Romney’s policies.” In other words, the ad apparently polarized opinion, with more racially resentful viewers thinking better of Romney after seeing it. (Interestingly, there was no parallel effect on views of Obama’s policies—presumably because racial attitudes are already strongly linked to peoples’ assessments of the president.)
Another finding, described last week on the polling site YouGov by Harvard professor Ryan Enos, is easier to explain. The Romney ad’s claim that Obama has “gutted” the work requirement for welfare has been roundly debunked by factcheckers. But Enos found that respondents with high levels of racial resentment were far more likely to believe the claim than people with low resentment levels. Moreover, high-resentment individuals were inclined to believe the claim about Obama whether or not they believed there was a work requirement in the first place. There may be ways to unpack that logical conundrum, but as Enos writes, “more likely what is holding these attitudes towards work, welfare, and Obama together is the common association with African Americans—and a resentment of African Americans.”
That’s exactly how coded appeals work—they give people enough information to bring underlying beliefs to the surface.
Even if the academic explanation underestimates the ad’s likely effect on working class whites, though, the research presents plenty of reason to believe that the coded appeal is being heard by college-educated whites—which is a part of the story that the journalistic accounts tend to skip over. As a group, the scholars actually tend to think that Romney won’t benefit much from this dynamic, for a few reasons: because racial attitudes are already built in to views about Obama; because the ad does more to remind people of their attitudes than to change their opinions; because, as Tesler’s research shows, many of the people who read the “code” will think less of Romney; and because the better-educated viewers who can decipher coded signals are generally reliable partisans in the first place. These are all good points. On the other hand, turnout can be just as important as persuasion, and Romney could benefit if the ad energizes his supporters. Based on how often the ad has aired, his campaign clearly thinks it’s boosting their effort.
So what’s the upshot for reporters here? It has been encouraging to see so many journalists, including some at the most mainstream of outlets, call out a campaign for its appeal to voters’ baser instincts. But there is, at the very least, reason to ask whether the coverage has reached too readily for familiar frames about racial resentment among working-class whites—and as a result, distorted the ways in which different groups of voters think about policy, and what the actual effect of the welfare ad is likely to be. It’s a concern journalists should keep in mind.
Remember, this was an ad that Romney ran a LOT, even after the factcheckers went into an uproar over it. That means he thought there was a serious benefit to it.
If the proposal that Romney's team was using coded language to trigger underlying racial resentments is just crazy, just a figment of the overzealous minds of those who see racial resentment everywhere in the shadows, then what was the possible goal of running such a blatantly false ad? Romney was already been accused of being less than honest, why give that meme such obvious ammunition? There must have been a significant perceived benefit.