In Monday's GOP primary debate, Newt Gingrich earned praise from conservatives while drawing justifiable anger from many for his labeling of Barack Obama as the "food stamp president."  As the former Speaker of the House told moderator Juan Williams: "I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job and learn some day to own the job." Gingrich has since used the exchange in a TV ad and a fundraising letter.

The candidate's comments appeal to conservatives and other whites on several counts. First, Gingrich implies by his comments that Americans receiving food stamps are unemployed, playing on a common misperception held by voters. The reality is that many food stamp recipients are low wage workers. The great majority of low wage jobs lack benefits such as health insurance or retirement accounts and provide little or no chance for career advancement. 

Second, Gingrich's comments reflect a race-tinged strategy that echoes those used by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and Gingrich himself in advocating for the 1996 welfare reform bill. As South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn, who is black, told NPR yesterday, it is no longer the "welfare queen," a line oft-touted by Reagan, but "king of the food stamps." As he noted: "I guess a lot of people see it as, if Ronald Reagan can do it and be so lionized by conservatives, then I ought to be able to do it."

During the 1990s, there was a significant amount of research conducted in political science, communication, and sociology on the factors that shape public opinion and media coverage of poverty-related issues such as food stamps. Multiple strands of evidence demonstrate that the same general principles still apply today, despite changes in the political and media environment.

These factors include the stubborn perceptual screen of individualism and belief in limited government, lingering racial stereotypes, and patterns in how the news media, particularly TV news, cover issues related to poverty and low income work. 

I reviewed this research in a book chapter published in 2009.  The chapter also discussed research proposing alternative communication strategies that might be able to breakthrough these perceptual screens. I have excerpted the relevant portions of that chapter below.

Excerpted from Nisbet, M.C. (2009). Knowledge into Action: Framing the Debates Over Climate Change and Poverty. In P. D’Angelo and J. Kuypers, Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical, Theoretical, and Normative Perspectives. New York: Routledge.

When reaching judgments about poverty, Americans actively draw upon a few core cultural values. In particular, many survey analyses have identified a belief in individualism as guiding preferences about social spending and policies. The assumption underlying a belief in individualism is that economic opportunity in the United States is widespread and that anyone who tries hard enough can succeed (Gilens, 1996a).

Yet other values also play a role. In particular, individualism is balanced in the minds of many Americans by humanitarianism, or the belief that government has an obligation to assist those who are most in need (Kuklinski, 2001). 

In one classic study demonstrating this ambivalence, political scientists John Zaller and Stanley Feldman (1992) analyzed the open-ended answers of survey respondents about whether or not the government should spend more on social services, including education and health. Respondents who opposed increased spending offered thoughts that drew almost exclusively on individualism and a corresponding belief in limited government, emphasizing personal effort, responsibility, and hard work while opposing increased taxes and bureaucracy.

In contrast, supporters of increased government emphasized the core value of humanitarianism—mentioning a duty to help others and the need for the government to provide social assistance—but they also somewhat ambivalently warned against increased taxes and bureaucracy, emphasizing that before receiving assistance, individuals should always try to get along on their own.