Ronald Reagan trotted out the stereotype of the high-living, check-cashing "welfare queen." George H.W. Bush tied Michael Dukakis to the specter of a murderous black rapist named Willie Horton. More recently, Michele Bachmann signed (and then repudiated) a pledge asserting that black children fared better in slavery.
"People don't want to hear this, but these candidates are pandering to a small minority within their own party who probably have racial views more in line with 1950 than 2012," said James Peterson, director of Africana Studies at Lehigh University. "Often, those are the voters who are most active and hard-core. . . . It's politics 2012."
Not so, said John Pitney Jr., professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in California. "Groups like the Urban League and NAACP are primed to see racism in just about anything any Republican says," said Pitney, a former top-ranking analyst for the GOP. "If somebody like Gingrich should mention race in the context of policy, they'll immediately argue that it's racism. It's very unfair. Gingrich has many, many faults, but racism isn't one of them."
To be sure, racial language isn't solely the province of Republicans - or whites.
In his 1984 presidential campaign, Jesse Jackson caused an uproar by referring to Jews as "Hymies" and to New York as "Hymietown." He initially denied the remarks, then apologized.
In 2008, Bill Clinton explained his wife's loss to Barack Obama in the South Carolina primary by noting that Jackson had won it before - as though race were the only reason Obama won there. Then Obama said his grandmother's racial fears were those of a "typical white person."
