Santorum was blasted by the NAACP on Wednesday for apparently making a racial assumption about people who recieve government assistance. He's since denied he ever said it, claiming that a video of the incident proves it was just an unfortunately homonymic tongue-tied stumble.
Welcome to the frontrunners' club, Santorum.
Here's the quote in question, uttered Sunday at a campaign stop in Sioux City, Iowa. Iin reference to entitlement reform, it sounded like Santorum said: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."
NAACP president Benjamin Todd Jealous, in a statement quoted by CNN, called the remark "outrageous," adding "he conflates welfare recipients with African-Americans, though federal benefits are in fact determined by income level.”
CBS News looked into the racial distribution of food stamps in Iowa, and found that 9 percent of recipients are black, while 84 percent are white.
At first, Santorum responded to questions about the alleged remark by saying that he'd recently watched Waiting For Superman, which he characterized as "about black children," and that perhaps the quote was in reference to the film, according to CBS News. But on CNN this morning, Santorum had a different explanation.
Santorum's current defense is that the word "black" in that quote was actually just a tongue-tied stumbling of words that sounded like "black." In the video of the moment, available here, Santorum definitely pauses before saying the word, whatever it was.
Some—and not just Santorum supporters—are buying Santorum's claim not to have said the word at all. Over at Mediaite, a self-described "LGBT-friendly liberal" writer says that after hearing the cleaner version of the moment in a newly posted CBS video, he's inclined to believe Santorum was just stumbling for words.
Meanwhile, fresh off his near-win of the Iowa caucus, Santorum has climbed to third in the most recent New Hampshire poll heading into the state's Jan. 10 primary.
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The Iowa caucuses are an electoral event in which residents of the U.S. state of Iowa meet in precinct caucuses in all of Iowa's 1,774 precincts and elect delegates to the corresponding county conventions. There are 99 counties in Iowa and thus 99 conventions.
These county conventions then select delegates for both Iowa's Congressional District Convention and the State Convention, which eventually choose the delegates for the presidential nominating conventions (The Iowa caucuses are noteworthy for the amount of media attention they receive during U.S. presidential election years.
Since 1972, the Iowa caucuses have been the first major electoral event of the nominating process for President of the United States. Although only about 1% of the nation's delegates are chosen by the Iowa State Convention (25 Republican delegates in 2012, assigned proportionately), the Iowa caucuses have served as an early indication of which candidates for president might win the nomination of their political party at that party's national convention, and which ones could drop out for lack of support.
