More racism from Romney

We've talked about this before: although he isn't about to state publicly "I hate black people!", Mitt Romney has been reading Lee Atwater's playbook.

Earlier in the campaign, in his (mendacious) attacks on President Obama's welfare reform policies Romney released a campaign ad contrasting the hardworking white people who resemble Romney's base with the darker races who want to just sit at home and collect welfare checks.

Now he's got John Sununu making the same appeal.

First off, make no mistake about it: what John Sununu says is the official position of the Romney campaign. He is a "surrogate", someone sent out to make statements on behalf of the campaign, sometimes statements that would be too unpalatable for the candidate to say himself. It is questionable whether it makes sense to have someone as abusive and bullying as Sununu is as your surrogate, but I guess that's the point of having a surrogate: you get to have your points made in the strongest possible terms without having the candidate make the offensive statement in quite such an offensive way.

This week for the second time the Romney campaign used Sununu to make a racist attack on President Obama. You may recall that the first time was when he commented that President Obama needs to "learn how to be an American."

This week the attack was on Colin Powell. Sununu was on Piers Morgan's show on CNN, and he stated that the reason Colin Powell was supporting President Obama has nothing to do with any policy agreeemnt, but simply because they're both black.

Yes, he really said that.

As I said before, does this mean that Mitt Romney is personally motivated by a distaste for black people? I suspect not. On the other hand, the same could probably have been said of George Wallace or Lee Atwater.

But the fact that he's willing to build his campaign on such openly racist themes makes it, if anything, even scummier.