Appearing as a panel member on Friday's Inside Washington on PBS, Politico's Evan Thomas - formerly of Newsweek - made claims about the existence of "angry, white, middle class" men in the Republican Party who are "seething."
And fellow panel member and Washington Post columnist Colby King accused GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum of "pandering" to a racist view "that black people are just shiftless, lazy and hands out" because of a recent comment in which Santorum appeared to bring up "black people" who receive welfare benefits, although the former Pennsylvania Senator denies that he used the word "black."
Early in the discussion, Thomas predicted that Santorum would lose the GOP nomination because of his social conservatism: "This will drag on for a while, and we'll try to gin some excitement into it, but Santorum is a social conservative who cannot beat Obama. And I think enough Republicans are going to figure that out."
The Politico writer soon brought up the subject of angry white men in the GOP: "It's interesting that Perry stayed in because there is still this angry, white, middle class male out there that is a seething force, and Romney is not really their guy. It's not clear who is, I'm not sure, I mean, Santorum for the moment, but in some ways, that is a force to be tapped, and nobody's really found a way to do it."
King soon suggested that Santorum had made racist comments about African-Americans during a recent visit to Sioux City, Iowa. King:
He talked to the audience, and he told them, talking about entitlements, that I don't want black people, to make black people's lives better by giving them someone else's money. Suggesting that black people are just shiftless, lazy and hands out, and the hard working people are white people.
But when you look at the statistics, of course, it blows his thesis out of the water as to who is getting entitlements and who's not getting entitlements. But that pandering that he did in Sioux City is something that's going to haunt him.
Thomas jumped in to complain that "pandering works" because of the existence of angry white men in the Republican Party. Thomas: "Well, except that pandering works, and there are a lot of angry, white, middle class males out there. They're there for somebody to tap into."
- Brad Wilmouth is a news analyst at the Media Research Center