bedtime stories and fairy tales. they re full of lovely lies, lies we tell ourselves to try and understand the harsh reality. for mitt romney and republicans that reality is this, it s not them. it s you. instead of asking themselves yls obama won such a diverse group of voters, republicans might need to ask themselves a different question. why did they lose them? i m happy to help with the answers. they lost them because the people of color who voted for president obama did not like being treated like something less than what they are, american citizens. they lost them because actively working to deny the vote to some of those citizens is a great way to make sure those citizens deny their vote to you. and they lost because the obama campaign ran like a well-oiled machine meticulously seeking out potential new voters getting them registers and getting them out to vote. they lost because while they were busy telling themselves about mitt meant tum, they weren t paying attention to the m
daniel garza of the libre initiative, jelani cobb from the university of connecticut and michael skoal nick, i m sorry, suddenly your name looked like something i could not pronounce, the political director to hip-hop pioneer russell simmons and the copresident of global grind.com. because i butchered your name, i m going to go to you first on this. my pleasure. look, it does feel to me like probably the most appalling or almost sort of ugly part of the gifts narrative is that many of these communitiesen turned out for the president also have the highest unemployment rates. you know, we re experiencing some of the worst aspects of the recession. this isn t about gifts. this is about something else. what the republicans don t understand, what mitt romney certainly does not understand is that our generation has waited for this moment. we have fought tooth and nail over the course of our lifetime for this moment to have a more compassionate america, more generous america and more to
those images but the fact is when they attack those programs in theory, they are attacking poor kids. well, what they re attacking more than anything is not the wasted money as much as it is the wasted lives. and the wasted futures of people who get caught up in of this safety hammock let s just say. what they want is a tramp mo lean. of course, you re going to work hard to fulfill the need that exists. everybody is touched by poverty at one point in their life with need, with scarcity. not everybody is. my parents were farm workers. i grew up migrating from california, nebraska, and washington state. i know what need is and what poverty is. they never took welfare. this is an interesting point. it does feel like the republican party on this question is made up of two different coalitions. one is often the sort of up from narrative of folks who came up from circumstances of poverty. then there is the mitt romney version of republicanism we saw on display this time which isn t a
than a high school dip loam a. it s so clear the president from the beginning of his presidency has talked about at least one year, vocational training, community colleges, he is talking about higher education as being something post high school. how is that being snobbish and wasn t rick santorum misleading people by suggesting that the president is talking about everyone going to some four-year school? the argument rick santorum was making is the argument he was making since beginning the journey months and months ago. and that is that there are two different sets of ideas here, one is the people know best what is right for them and the barack obama/mitt romney version, and that is the government knows best. you can look at their careers, any chance they saw to seize to force the public to do something at the behest of the government,
camp are the same players in the same chairs, the same issues as 2011 but man, the power dynamics have changed. if last year the name of the game was hold the line, this year the opening salvos are more about let s get things done. here is house speaker john boehner yesterday after meeting with the president. i believe that the framework that i ve outlined in our meeting today is consistent with the president s call for a fair and balanced approach. to show our seriousness, we ve put revenue on the table. now, in politics, much of power is about perception. in a post re-election 2012, perceptions are mighty different. here s the president at his first post re-election press conference on wednesday. if there was one thing that everybody understood was a big difference between myself and mr. romney, it was when it comes to how we reduce our deficit, i