The Ghost of Lee Atwater

"Of course, Romney isn’t interested in the facts; he's interested in associating Obama with black and Hispanic undesirables bent on collecting welfare benefits and robbing white elderly people of their health insurance. The son of a politician who walked out of the 1964 Republican convention because of its opposition to blacks could well end up encouraging anti-black sentiments at the 2012 Republican convention. Like Poppy Bush, Romney is not a racist himself. He is, arguably, something worse: A man who, because he has no particularly pronounced views himself, is willing to say just about anything to get himself elected president."

Timothy Noah at The New Republic explains why Mitt Romney keeps talking about welfare and Medicare.

As do Thomas B. Edsall at The New York Times, Ed Kilgore at The Washington Monthly, and Jonathan Chait at New York.

Ron Fournier in National Journal writes that the "Romney campaign is either recklessly ignorant of the facts, some of which they possess–or it is lying about why (and how) it is playing the race card."

(And a few months later, Rick Perstein at The Nation presents audio recording of Lee Atwater's infamous 1981 interview on exploiting racism.)