Update 22:47 Eastern: Reeve doubles down on his assertion in a piece entitled "Why We Think John Boehner Is Hoping for Low Minority Voter Turnout" | A comment by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) that many blacks and Hispanic voters that are traditionally in the Democratic column will not show up to vote for President Obama's reelection because of his poor handling of the economy is being twisted by the Atlantic to suggest that Boehner cynically "hopes" for a depressed turnout by minorities.
"Boehner Says Out Loud He Hopes Blacks and Latinos 'Won't Show Up' This Election," blares the headline for the August 27 story by Elspeth Reeve at TheAtlanticWire.com. Reeve himself got his information from another liberal site:
As Talking Point Memo's Benjy Sarlin reports, Boehner said:
“This election is about economics… These groups have been hit the hardest. They may not show up and vote for our candidate but I’d suggest to you they won’t show up and vote for the president either.”
"Theres one issue in this campaign, one," Sarlin quoted Boehner at the close of his article, "The president’s economic policies have failed. They’ve made things worse."
Of course, Reeve omitted that line from his piece.
The Obama economy has been worse for minorities than for white voters, as numerous data points like median household income and unemployment show. The liberal media may be reluctant to report that and certainly reluctant to fault the president's policies for it, but that doesn't mean the president's failures are not acutely felt by minority voters, who tend to be Democrats, who feel that the president has failed to deliver.
What's more, the media never seem to consider that on the other side of the coin, that perhaps the Obama campaign's populist attacks on Mitt Romney may be calculated in part to push blue-collar white voters from abstaining from voting for Romney, if not swinging them back into the Democratic column. From the Democratic point of view, they'll take all the white blue-collar voters that they can get, but if that's not going to happen, they'd rather they stay home in protest of Romney.
