By: Cliff Kincaid
Accuracy in Media

Fear has set in at MSNBC. Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow are in a state of panic over the idea that Mitt Romney may appeal to white voters and that Obama may not. That Obama is running a campaign based on black racism and exploitation of ethnic divisions in society is of no concern to them.

Citing polling data that blacks and Hispanics are going for Obama, Maddow said on her August 24 show, “Mitt Romney`s only hope now is to win over white voters by a very large margin.” Maddow went on to say that she believes this is why Romney made a joke about Obama’s birth certificate. She made it clear that, in her mind, this was an unacceptable way to campaign and win votes.

Jared Taylor, who runs the organization American Renaissance, comments, “Rachel Maddow wonders whether Mitt Romney is trying to get ‘the white vote.’ What an idea! Everyone tries to cultivate blacks, Hispanics, and even Asians, but wouldn’t it be ‘racist’ to cultivate the white vote? Actually, because they cast 76.3 percent of the votes in the 2008 election, anything that shifts even one or two percent of whites your way is worth doing.”

Taylor told AIM, “Hispanics were only 7.4 percent of the electorate [in 2008], so getting just one percent more of whites to vote for you is like getting 10 percent more Hispanics. If you were Romney, where would you concentrate your efforts?”

The Obama campaign has run a 60-second ad, entitled “We’ve Got Your Back,” appealing to black voters’ nostalgia about the election of the nation’s first African-American president, calling for those voters to “have the President’s back” and stand with Obama again in November.

A black voter commented on the website where the ad is posted: “I am black and I think if Mitt Romney made an ad targeting white people that would be considered racist, but Obama can target blacks and it is not? Ridiculous.”

None of this is worthy of condemnation from the liberal commentators at MSNBC.

Jared Taylor, author of the book, White Identity, has been banned from most programs because he dares to talk about whites as people with special interests of their own, separate from various minority groups. “Only whites must always act as individuals and never as members of a group that promotes shared interests,” he notes in his book, in commenting on the politically correct mindset that prevails on racial matters in America.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, the far-left group that is said to have inspired the violent homosexual to open fire on the Washington office of the Family Research Council, has smeared Taylor as a “white nationalist.”

On her program, Maddow noted that an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed Romney with zero percent of the African-American electorate and losing to Obama among Latinos by a 35-point margin. These lop-sided margins were not considered in any way racial by Maddow. Instead, she viewed them as an expression of legitimate political interests.

The idea of zero percentage of blacks voting for Romney didn’t strike Maddow as racist in any way.

But the notion that white people would vote for Romney, and that he would try to win their votes, was something that she rejected as improper and completely out of bounds.

She asked, “Why would he make a birther joke on the way to the Republican National Convention? Does the Romney campaign think there is an upside here? Do they think it helps them if they somehow reward and comfort and proverbially clap on the shoulder anyone who is the kind of person who still holds a deep-seated feeling that this man should not be an American president? That there`s something illegitimate and un-American about this man being in charge of the government?”

The “birther” joke is not necessarily racial, however, and refers to a belief by many that Obama has not been honest about his family background, the circumstances surrounding his birth, and his history.

Obama, like Romney, has joked about his place of birth, but many conservatives do not regard it as a laughing matter. Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpiao has documented anomalies in Obama’s birth certificate, including in the category identifying his father as being from Africa, while Breitbart.com revealed that Obama himself claimed a Kenyan birth in promotional material that his literary agent sent to prospective publishers.

In another strange twist in Obama’s life story, Professor Paul Kengor says that the audio version of Obama’s book Dreams from My Father eliminates references to “Frank” as Obama’s mentor. “Frank” was how Obama referred to Communist Party operative Frank Marshall Davis in his book.

As Rusty Weiss and I wrote in the AIM report, “Reason to Hate: Barack Obama’s Racist Roots,” Davis was a black racist who saw sinister white plots in the foreign policies of the United States and other Western nations. He had a decisive influence over Obama during his growing-up years in Hawaii and told him that “black people have reason to hate.”

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org.