We may be on the brink of a democratic miracle

Jonathan Chait recently framed a conundrum facing Democrats who are convinced that the Romney campaign is playing the race card: you don't have to be racist to subscribe to conservative positions on spending for the poor, but such positions are attractive to those who envision the "undeserving poor" primarily as minorities. His conclusion: while Romney attack ads alleging that Obama is gutting the work requirements for welfare might not be racist if the charge had any basis in truth, the fact that it was concocted out of thin air points conclusively to a race-based appeal. 

Chait is wary of Democrats overplaying the race card, and so asserts at the end that "the best counterattack against Romney’s welfare gambit is simply to point out that Romney is shamelessly lying." But he's threading a needle here, much like people who acknowledge that while a given hurricane can't be chalked up to global warming, an overall increase in hurricane intensity probably can. His personal conviction is delivered in the conditional:

The difference between Gingrich and Romney distilled

Andrew Sullivan takes a crowbar to the political scientists' notion of a Republican "party establishment" and bends it into its new shape: a 'leadership" captured by Limbaugh and Fox, bound to adopt rhetoric and policy that runs on demonizing the opposition -- by means that Gingrich pioneered.

Reading Sullivan's precis of Gingrich's speech, it struck me that the difference between Gingrich and Romney is embedded in one phrase:

Listen to Gingrich's victory speech. It was completely, fundamentally, organizationally Manichean, if you'll pardon the expression. He limned a familiar battle between independence and dependence, pay-checks vs food stamps, America vs "Europe", the American people vs elites "forcing people" for 35 years not to be American, the traditional America vs the "secular, European style socialist bureaucratic system". There is no gray here. There is no nuance. And there is the imputation to the other side of malign motives, secret agendas and foreignness that has been Gingrich's hallmark since the very beginning, when he assaulted the traditions of the Congress until that institution eventually had to repel him (emphasis guess whose).