By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum may not have clearly articulated the word “black” when he told some Iowans that he didn’t want to help African-Americans “by giving them somebody else’s money.”

But his message was still loud and clear – and straight out of the GOP playbook of race-baiting.

The former Pennsylvania senator, who was surging in the Iowa caucus polls, was recently quoted by news organizations as telling a mostly-white town hall crowd that, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money and provide for themselves and their families.”

From what I can tell from the tape, though, it seems that Santorum was about to say black people, but caught himself so that it came out as “bligh people.”  When pressed by reporters, he refused to clarify which “people” he was talking about.

But Santorum’s enunciation didn’t have to be clear for anyone with any ears – or sense – to gather what he meant.

That’s because he, like many of his GOP counterparts and predecessors, believes that whenever he talks about welfare, he can count on the party’s mostly-white voter base to fill in the blanks with the word “black.”

And the fact that Santorum had to stop himself from saying the word tells me that he still believes there’s power in an old Republican message.

It’s a message that implies that black people on welfare, rather than things like economic downturns and structural inequality, is driving all the country’s woes.

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