Presidential aspirant Newt Gingrich believes that campaigns are all about asking “legitimate questions” and demanding “facts and data” about a politician’s record.
It’s the reliance on such “facts and data” that allows Gingrich to sleep at night after publicly dubbing Barack Obama “the food stamp president.”
During an exchange with Fox News analyst Juan Williams during a debate in South Carolina on Jan. 16, Gingrich defended previous statements that poor kids lack a strong work ethic, that they should be put to work as janitors (child labor laws be damned), and that black Americans should “demand jobs, not food stamps.”
“Can’t you see that this is viewed, at a minimum, as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?” Williams asked.
“No,” Gingrich responded, to roaring applause and rolling laughter. “I don’t see that.”
“It sounds as if you’re speaking to belittle people,” Williams added later in the exchange.
“Well, first of all, Juan,” Gingrich said, “the fact is, more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.”This statement, while technically true, is no more reliable as a factual observation than other conservatives’ claims that Obama has governed during the highest unemployment spike in decades, or that his presidency has overseen the biggest national debt in history.
All three statements may be true on their face, but they lay responsibility for the greatest recession since the Great Depression at the feet of a man who wasn’t even president when the economic floor caved.
“Well, first of all, Juan, the fact is, more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.”
Making such an observation of “fact” isn’t blame-shifting, despite what any Teabagger (or Puritopian) readers may claim. It’s contextualizing.
Non-partisan “facts and data” show that while Obama did indeed oversee sharp increases in the national debt, those increases—a direct response to the recession—nonetheless constitute a decrease compared to the reign of Republican President George W. Bush. (As a side note, Bush didn’t create or save 6.8 million jobs when he expanded the national debt by 89 percent.)
Non-partisan “facts and data” show that while Obama did preside during the highest unemployment rate in decades, no president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has had to combat a crumbling economy.
Lastly, non-partisan “facts and data” show that while Obama has indeed dished out a significant amount of food stamps to hungry, poverty-stricken Americans, the increase from 28.2 million recipients from 2008 to the present—46.2 million recipients in 2011—constitutes an increase of roughly 64 percent. In contrast, the last Republican president oversaw an increase in food stamps recipients of…64 percent!
In layman’s terms, the “food stamp president” has been more economical about feeding the poor during the greatest recession in history than Bush was during steady, uninterrupted economic growth.
None of that really matters for whatever dismal amount of sane progressives remain in America. What matters to most people, because it matters to the mainstream media, is that Gingrich continues to call Obama “the food stamp president,” and some people find such a statement offensive.
Here’s why it’s okay to be offended:
1.) Republicans in Congress threatened to shut down the government, end unemployment benefits, and abolish “social welfare programs” that benefit the poor if Democrats didn’t buckle to their demands and extend tax cuts for millionaires. This is the GOP’s priority—protecting the invulnerable.
2.) The average food stamps benefit paid out to households in 2011 was $284 per month. Two-hundred eighty four dollars per month. Gingrich spends 2,000 times that much at Tiffany’s.
3.) While the food stamps program, officially titled the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program,” costs $78 billion annually, Bush’s tax cuts have cost $280 billion per year, the vast majority of which has gone to the richest Americans while virtually nothing “trickled down” to the poorest Americans. For the record, nearly half of SNAP recipients are children.
4.) To call on black people to “demand jobs, not food stamps,” is to imply that they aren’t already demanding jobs, that they don’t want jobs, which itself is a broadly, racially discriminatory stereotype that black Americans would rather live on welfare than work. Contrary to what Gingrich and his followers believe, the unemployment rate for black Americans is less than 16 percent, meaning 84 percent do work. Asian Americans have a higher employment rate than whites. Imagine how many holy cows conservatives would birth if Asians began publicly lobbying white people to “demand jobs, not food stamps.”
5.) Though (allegedly) intended not to be racially or economically discriminatory, Gingrich’s comments nonetheless are, by the simple “fact” that he isolates blacks and poor people in his prescription for national economic salvation. As anyone who lived through Dubya’s presidency can attest, it’s not just “poor” American children who need to learn what it means to work hard. Shouldn’t rich, silver-spoon-fed millionaires’ brats learn the value of hard work through a few years as janitors too? After all, isn’t it the rich kids whose parents hand them everything they could ever wish for as children, pay their way into elite schools as teenagers, and land them cushy jobs at mommy or daddy’s company as adults?
Blaming Obama for the Great Recession, and calling him “the food stamp president” in kind, is no different than blaming Herbert Hoover for the Great Depression. It’s no different than blaming the leader of the civil rights movement for the “Bloody Sunday” beatings at the Edmund Pettus bridge in 1965.
America is full of calloused, ignarrogant bigots.
Unfortunately for Gingrich (but fortunately for America), that demographic is too small a voting bloc to decide the next presidential election.
