THE ROMNEY CAMPAIGN COORDINATES WITH TUCKER CARLSON

I go to a lot of right-wing sites, so I get a lot of right-wing ads. An interesting ad showed for me up in the YouTube sidebar this morning:





What you see above is a screenshot; when I clicked on the actual ad, I went to this page at the Romney site, which hits the word "dependency" hard (click to enlarge):






On one level, obviously, this is Romney taking his "47%" gaffe and trying to turn it into gaffe-ade. On another level -- since Romney's lily-white voter base hears "dependency" and thinks "BLACK BLACK BLACKITY BLACK BLACK," and since the message of last night's shock! horror! Obama video story from the Daily Caller and others is "BLACK BLACK BLACKITY BLACK BLACK" -- I feel as if the new Romney message and the video release have been coordinated.

Whether or not that's the case, this is clearly Romney's message going into the debates: A vote for me is a vote for Us. A vote for Obama is a vote for Those People. I wasn't sure he'd go there -- McCain never really did -- but, yeah, he's going there.

If I were truly paranoid, I'd think that the Romney campaign, or some winger sleazebag like Karl Rove, actually arranged for the release of the "47%" video (and the recently unearthed 2011 video in which Paul Ryan says 30% of Americans are grifters) in the hope that it would turn the alleged shiftlessness of non-white people dependency on government into the campaign's top issue. You'd think nobody would be crazy enough to think releasing the Romney and Ryan videos was a good idea -- but if the videos (and follow-ons like the Obama story) get heartlanders to feel besieged and tribal, this may not be a net minus for Romney and Ryan.