DAVENPORT, Iowa — President Barack Obama asked the Iowans who first voted for him as president to give him another chance to accomplish his goals, including the immigration overhaul that he predicts Republicans will want to accomplish if they are defeated in the White House race.

The Obama campaign has stepped up its efforts to make sure Philadelphians — African-Americans in particular — get out and vote for President Barack Obama on Nov. 6.

“It’s more important now than ever before. In particular, because of the choices that are laid out, especially for the African-American community,” said Setti Warren, mayor of Newton, Mass., during a visit to the city this week.

The Obama campaign has been bringing people from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania — a battleground state — for the last several weeks to discuss what Obama’s Republican opponent Mitt Romney was like as governor. Warren was in Philadelphia Wednesday for a few hours attending community meetings and speaking to reporters before heading to Harrisburg for more meetings.

Aware of Pennsylvania’s new voter ID laws, Warren urged all Philadelphians to make sure they had the required ID, and that they plan in advance to get what they needed.

“These are things that affect the African-American community directly,” he said. “So, it’s more important than ever to get people to register with these new laws on the books so that they can vote for the president in the fall.”

Obama holds an edge in Pennsylvania, according to a Quinnipiac Poll released Wednesday. It showed Obama with a 6 point lead over Romney, with 45 percent of Pennsylvanians saying they backed the president, over 39 for Romney.

Obama has the overwhelming support of African-American voters. According to the latest Gallup Poll, 83 percent of Blacks support the president. That number has dipped slightly in recent months, falling slightly from more typical levels above 85 percent, but it remains far higher among Blacks than among other ethnic groups.

And, Obama has worked hard for African Americans, Warren said, ticking off a list of things that included: $960 million invested in minority-owned businesses; working to keep Pell grants, which give Black youth a better chance to get to college, and stimulus funding for the Head Start program that allowed 61,000 instructors to remain on the job or be added to the program.

“For those families that are trying to put food on the table, trying to pay for health care, trying to pay the mortgage, we need a president that understands that,” said Warren. “Mitt Romney does not understand that.”

Romney has been on a bus tour of the state in recent weeks, and he contends it’s Obama who is out of touch.

“President Obama has offered no hope for the future, and he has left American families to bear the burden of his failed policies,” he told reporters at a campaign stop last week. “Too many American families have experienced a lost job, faced foreclosure, or been forced to spend their kids’ college savings just to make ends meet. These are not statistics — these are our fellow Americans. In America’s small towns, you don’t find despair — you find boundless optimism. We know we can make America better, and that is why I am running for president.”

Warren disagrees, and wants Pennsylvanians to see the Mitt Romney he’s seen.

“I believe strongly that we’re at a critical juncture in this country,” he said. “I also feel strongly that people around this country, in Pennsylvania, need to know Mitt Romney’s record. I was there.”

The mayor of a suburban Boston town of about 85,000 people, Warren describes Romney’s tenure as governor as a “failure.”

Romney was governor of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. He won the state’s highest office with a campaign that is remarkably similar to his run for the presidency.

“It was a failed track record he had in Massachusetts, and I don’t want to see him do it to the country,” said Warren.

As a lifelong resident of Newton, Warren said he’s watched as Romney’s policies weakened the middle class through outsourcing state jobs and tax breaks for the wealthy.

“He advertises himself as a businessman that can cure the problems of the country,” Warren said. “But the facts are we were 47th in job creation. He used the same method of outsourcing that he did in the private sector. We lost 40,000 manufacturing jobs … and he actually vetoed legislation in the state that would have prevented outsourcing.”

Personally, Warren, the father of two children — a 1- and 4-year-old — worries about what Romney would do to education if he’s elected.

“He wants to get rid of the Department of Education,” said Warren, adding that Romney cut education spending in Massachusetts, which among other things, increased the number of children in each classroom.

“If this is the kind of leadership he’s promising, it’s not what we need right now as a country,” said Warren.

A veteran of the Iraq war, Warren served in the Navy in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. He comes from a family with a military tradition. His father was in the Air Force and Navy Reserve.

His story is like that of many other African Americans, he said, His parents were both from New York City, his father from Harlem and his mother from the Bronx. Both were active in the Civil Rights Movement, travelling to North Carolina to fight. Military service gave the family the tools it needed to settle comfortably into the middle class.

His father eventually became assistant secretary of education for Massachusetts.

“If not for that ladder of opportunity that the United States of America provided my parents … they would have never gotten to Newton,” he said. “So, for me this election is about the future, about families like my own. This is a president that gets it — that knows that the greatness of America is about leveling the playing field.”

Contact staff writer Eric Mayes at (215) 893-5742 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

No matter which of the four remaining doofuses (or is that doofii?) survives the spring primaries to emerge as President Barack Obama’s GOP opponent in November, my vote is going to Obama.

Not because we share a political party, or even because we share a skin tone, but because he is simply the best man for the job. Better than that, Barack Hussein Obama is the coolest guy ever to walk planet Earth. Cooler than the Rat Pack. Even cooler than Steve McQueen, if that’s possible.

Here’s a guy who mercilessly ridiculed Donald Trump at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner — and I mean he lit into ol’ Helmet Hair with such ferocity that the loudmouthed television host immediately abandoned his wild talk about securing the Republican nomination — then calmly went back to the situation room and ordered the Navy SEALs to put two slugs in Osama bin Laden’s head.

This same guy stood before Congress and the nation for an hour and five minutes Tuesday night and delivered one of the most passionate, well-written State of the Union speeches I have ever heard. Meanwhile, what he knew, and we didn’t — was that he had ordered that same SEAL team to storm a compound in Somalia where American aid worker Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted, a Dane, have been held hostage since they were kidnapped at gunpoint by Somali pirates in October.

The SEALs safely rescued the pair, and killed all nine of their captors — all while their commander-in-chief nonchalantly laid out his case for a lasting economy and an end to obstructionist partisan bickering.

That is too cool for words. We should replace the tune they always play when the president enters the room, “Hail to the Chief,” with Isaac Hayes’ theme from “Shaft.”

(I can almost hear it now. “You see this cat Obama was a baaaaad… shut yo’ mouth.”)

The only clue he left, and purely accidentally, was when microphones picked up his congratulations to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta as he entered the House chamber. Obama pointed his index finger in a “You da man” gesture at a smiling Panetta and said, “Good job tonight. Good job.” Enterprising reporters descended on the Pentagon to find out what the president meant, and were then told about the rescue operation.

The State of the Union speech itself was a classic, on par with Bill Clinton’s historic final speech to Congress — and almost as long. Obama covered a lot of ground — from jump-starting the economy, to green energy, to the widening gap between the haves and the have nots — with the ease and deftness of a master orator.

To be fair, even for Democrats, there are many reasons to question Obama’s policies, especially when it comes to capitulating to GOP demands in the name of compromise. The Republicans have proven time and again that their only goal is to bring down his administration, and aren’t interested in anything that doesn’t help them accomplish that goal. Yet he continues to seek the high road, to reach across the aisle in search of common ground — and to vainly attempt diplomacy and negotiation with people who can’t spell or define either word. I suppose you could argue that those are good qualities, but I have to admit it’s starting to get on my nerves.

The time has come, Mr. President, to fully implement your most progressive, liberal agenda — intact and undiminished — and let them cry about it later. That is exactly what the Republicans do when they gain power, and how they get things done. Sign the executive orders limiting greenhouse gases, and double our investment in alternative energy sources like wind and solar. Take care of veterans and seniors, and hold corporations and greedy bankers accountable for driving us off the cliff in the first place.

This president has more than earned a shot at a second term. He has proven himself the smartest, most visionary and forward thinking president we could ask for, and stands head and shoulders above the illiterate boob who last held the office. He’s got more family values than Newt Gingrich ever had, more compassion for the middle class than Rick Santorum could ever muster; could never be the entitled elitist Mitt Romney is, and unlike Ron Paul, is completely sane.

At next year’s State of the Union, the entire audience should stand and sing his new theme song in one gravelly, funky voice, “Who’s the cat who won’t cop out, when there’s danger all about? Damn right.”

Can you dig it?

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

Calling a politician out for being a hypocrite is so easy, there’s just no sport in it. It’s almost redundant — as Martin Sheen’s character famously said in “Apocalypse Now” — like giving out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.

But once in a great while, some propped-up empty suit of a candidate goes so far over the hypocrisy line that you just have to say something, out of a sense of sheer decency. Your intelligence can only take a finite number of insults, after all.

Thus is the case this week with presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the Republican Party who backs him and the plight of working women.

But, back to the beginning. It all started last week when someone asked Romney about the struggles of working women, and he deferred to his wife, Ann, saying he’s talked to her, and she gave him insight and practical advice.

That tidbit was seized upon by Democratic pundits, whose eyebrow-raising bemusement was voiced by strategist Hilary Rosen, who questioned Mrs. Romney’s bona fides on the subject, saying, “Ann Romney never worked a day in her life.”

Rosen’s point, that the born-rich, married-rich and still-filthy-rich Ann Romney is a poor choice of advisor on the day-to-day tribulations of working moms, was lost in the resulting brouhaha, as the GOP launched into full outrage mode, saying that President Obama, who somehow became an extension of Hilary Rosen, has no respect for women who work inside the home.

“I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys,” Ann Romney tweeted huffily. “Believe me, it was hard work.”

Yes, raising children, especially five boys, is a handful for any mom. Most mothers, though, don’t have the advantages Mrs. Romney enjoyed — specifically, having a small army of maids, nannies, an au pair, housekeepers, cooks and gardeners to do the hard work for them.

Raising five boys was such hard work, Ann Romney hardly found time to ride her dressage horses or attend yachting classes.

Think of all the hard working yet struggling moms you know. Any of them own dressage horses, or even have the slightest idea what dressage is? Probably not. They’re too busy washing and ironing clothes, cleaning the house, helping with homework, paying the bills and stretching the meager grocery budget as far as it can go.

Mitt, God bless him, waded into the fray with this tidbit, “All moms are working moms.” It’s a nice sound bite, and certainly applies to the vast majority of moms in America, but not necessarily the ones who take weekly yachting classes.

Just a few weeks ago, this same Mitt Romney defended the welfare-to-work program he signed into law as Massachusetts’s governor by saying low-income moms on the public dole “need to learn the dignity of work.”

Wait a minute, you say. If poor moms need to learn the dignity of work outside the home, how come rich moms don’t? Don’t they deserve the same dignity, or could it be that the work ethic of the wealthy should remain unquestioned, while that of the working poor should be attacked at every turn?

The worst of it is that the whole supposed controversy was completely made up, and played like a violin by the GOP. Ann Romney admitted as much herself, when she giddily described Rosen’s comments as “an early birthday gift” in an interview with ABC News.

See, the Republicans know full well they’re anywhere from 16 to 20 points down among women voters, according to recent polls. This, by the way, is entirely their own fault.

From criminally invasive abortion requirements, to their opposition to the Family Medical and Leave Act, to the asinine attempt to limit women’s access to birth control, to Romney’s own refusal to support the Ledbetter Act, which ensures women equal pay for equal work, the GOP record on women’s issues has come into sharp focus in recent months.

But rather than admit their own policies are hurting them with the single largest voting bloc, they’ve tried to somehow shift the woman-hater label onto Obama — which is ridiculous on its face. Obama, who elevated two women to the Supreme Court, has long been a champion of women’s rights. In fact, the aforementioned Ledbetter Act was the first bill he signed into law upon taking office.

The GOP is afraid. They should be.

They’re hoping that those women who need to learn the dignity of work don’t also discover the empowerment of the voting booth.

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

In making multiple visits to Philadelphia, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has shown he isn’t afraid to take the fight deep inside a longtime Democratic stronghold. And Romney’s campaign is attacking President Barack Obama’s stance on the one issue most critical to the majority of Philadelphians: public education.

Romney visited Guion S. Bluford Elementary School in West Philadelphia — a Renaissance School matched with a “turnaround” team led by Universal Companies and its founder, Kenny Gamble — on Thursday. In declaring that African-American schools need more money, Romney ripped a page from Obama’s playbook by bringing the conversation to the group of people affected the most.

The Republican presidential candidate visited the school a day after declaring education is the “civil rights issue of our era.”

Romney repeated that declaration during the school visit, but struggled to defend his view that class sizes aren’t a major factor in educational success. Local African-American leaders also said his push for more two-parent families isn’t realistic in their community.

As of press time, officials with Universal haven’t returned calls seeking comment. The School District of Philadelphia also wasn’t aware of Romney’s visit. Bluford sits in City Councilman Curtis Jones’ 4th district, and during Thursday’s Council meeting, Jones voiced his displeasure at both Romney’s low-key visit, and the presidential hopeful’s stance on education.

“Unbeknownst to many people [Romney] was here this morning at Bluford Elementary school where he was espousing his ‘class sizes don’t matter’ and everybody knows, even internally, size matters — class sizes,” Jones said, thanking his Republican colleagues on council for not meeting up with the former Massachusetts governor.

Jones said he only became aware of Romney’s visit through an update on KWY newsradio. Mayor Michael Nutter and District Attorney Seth Williams joined a rally outside of Bluford, condemning Romney’s stances — and for creeping quietly into Philadelphia.

In advance of his visit, Romney and his election campaign have simultaneously attacked Obama’s stance as elitist while urging districts to do away teacher unions.

“You know, President Obama likes to talk about how he’s for the underprivileged, but when it comes to the money that comes from the teachers union, he’s putting that campaign cash ahead of the needs of our kids. We have to recognize it’s time to put kids first, to get education on track by giving people greater choice in schools, by making sure we reward the very best teachers with great careers and rising income,” Romney said via a statement released by his campaign. “We know what to do to make our schools better.”

Those remarks mirror what Romney recently told Fox News’ Stave Doocy. When asked about the president’s education agenda, Romney wasted little time in going into attack mode, pointing to a Washington, D.C., school choice program that Romney claims Obama and the teachers union shuttled.

“We have a teachers’ union that too often stands in the way of the kind of reforms that would make education work. We know, for instance, in Washington, D.C., that school choice there helped immeasurably with young people - improving their quality of learning and their skills, and yet the President shut down the program,” Romney said on the news program. “We’ve got to put the unions behind, and put the kids first.”

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan assailed the notion that teacher unions are standing in the way of school reform. Jordan noted that the PFT has sacrificed and produced several rounds of givebacks during recent contract discussions. Jordan said there are other factors in union negotiations that either Romney doesn’t know about or fails to acknowledge.

“We have consistently [partnered with the district on cuts] and I would defy anyone from the board who suggests we haven’t been very effective in working with the district to keep health care costs as low as they can possibly be through negotiations,” Jordan said, during a recent editorial board meeting at The Tribune. “That’s a reality that all organizations have to build in; you shouldn’t ask people to work and not have health care.”

Lis Smith, a spokeswoman with President Obama’s reelection campaign, quickly responded to Romney’s visit to Philadelphia — and to the assertions Romney made; striking at Romney’s often-criticized business models and asking if the presidential hopeful will apply the same tactics to education as he did while at Bain Capital.

“When he’s in Philadelphia today, will Mitt Romney tell the truth about how he wants to apply Romney Economics to education? As we’ve seen throughout Mitt Romney’s career in both the private and public sectors, Romney Economics is all about the short term,” Smith said via a statement released by the Obama reelection campaign. “We’ve already seen what Romney Economics meant for Massachusetts students — larger class sizes, a de-emphasis on critical early education, teachers laid off, and in one year alone, the second-largest per-pupil cuts in the nation … these aren’t the priorities Americans want in our President.”

Tribune staff writer Eric Mayes and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Contact staff writer Damon C. Williams at (215) 893-5745 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

At the Democratic National Convention, a number of issues were brought to the spotlight, showing the vast differences between the Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan platform and President Barack Obama’s administration.

On Tuesday night, the mayor of San Antonio, Texas, Julian Castro, electrified the audience with his speech, as did first lady Michelle Obama and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. They touched on women’s rights, the continuing political wrestling over same-sex marriage, veteran’s benefits and other national issues and problems.

Absent was any statement regarding the national epidemic of Black on Black violence — violence which consumes cities like Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Camden and Chicago. Even President Barack Obama has been noticeably silent on the issue, according to some community leaders — and they’re starting to ask why.

“I’ve noticed this, and normally they’re quiet on this issue, but there’s a silence on many serious domestic issues like structural poverty. There are issues that need to be addressed and aren’t,” said author and sociologist Dr. Elijah Anderson. “When it comes to the problem of crime and violence in Black and Latino communities, could it be indifference? We can speculate that it is. Certainly these communities are hurting; there is a national recession and a depression in inner city poor communities.”

Bilal Qayyum, executive director of the Father’s Day Rally Committee also said that he noticed the silence on the part of various speakers regarding the high numbers of young Black and Latino men who are killed every day in America. Qayyum said both parties are afraid of the National Rifle Association.

“Both parties have been very silent, haven’t they? I think it’s because they’re scared of the NRA,” Qayyum said. “Now in the light of the shootings in Colorado, there’s renewed discussion on banning assault weapons. But when it comes to Black and Latino males gunning each other down, I can tell you that Mitt Romney doesn’t really care — but then both parties have been silent on the issue of violence in America in general.

“Mayor Castro didn’t say anything about it and neither did the first lady. Patrick did mention the problem of crime, but didn’t get into specifics. It’s an issue that they’re not really sure how white voters would respond to. What they could do is cloak the subject by speaking about crime and violence in general because really, when it comes down to it, it is an American problem, not a Black American problem. I’d bet that if you took a national poll and asked the average American what were their two biggest concerns, the first would be jobs and the second would be crime. I also think that if you politicize this, you’ll find yourself in a fight with the NRA. The only person who is likely to mention this problem is Mayor Michael Nutter, who has spoken about this before as a national issue.”

Mayor Michael Nutter was scheduled to speak at the convention on Wednesday, but was rescheduled for Thursday night. In the past, as president of the United States Conference of Mayors, Nutter has been outspoken concerning the high murder rate among young Black and Latino men and the issue of illegal guns that fuel the violence.

According to figures from reports researched by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 85 percent of the Black victims of homicide are male and 51 percent are between the ages of 17 and 19. Across the nation, Blacks accounted for 49 percent of all murder victims in 2005. Black males accounted for 52 percent. If those figures were reversed and white males were killing each other at such a rate, no national resource would be spared to stop it, said Chad Lassiter, president of Black Men at Penn.

“We know why there’s a silence on this issue,” Lassiter said. “There’s lots of jibber-jabber and well-rehearsed, well-written speeches that are calculated to get an emotional response — but are thin on substance. I’m not surprised there’s no real discussion on the issue of Black and Latino males murdering each other, because we’re talking about a segment of the population that’s not part of the landscape. These young men are seen as a permanent underclass, as sub-human and ostracized from society. To raise these issues means you have to talk about institutional racism, the high incarceration and drop out rates — and they’re not going to risk their lobby contracts or their political futures. When it comes to this kind of violence there isn’t a real effort on the part of the power elite to address it. Poverty is a ‘no-no’ and Black male violence is a ‘no-no.’

Philadelphia criminal defense attorney and community activist Michael Coard said the problem won’t be raised because of racism.

“Why isn’t this issue being raised? Because Romney doesn’t give a damn and Obama is afraid to give a damn,” Coard said. “But really, if you think about it, there’s no such thing as Black on Black crime. People don’t commit crime because of race, but because of opportunity and because it’s convenient — it’s neighbor on neighbor crime. Statistically speaking, white males commit more crimes because they’re a larger segment of the population, but the white media doesn’t report that — and why? Because just like America is racist, the media is also racist.”

By refusing to block Pennsylvania’s callous and draconian voter ID law, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert E. Simpson has left the door open to voter suppression tactics that haven’t been used since the 1960s, when white southerners were finally shamed into doing the right thing after a horrified America watched footage of the police dogs and fire hoses used to keep Blacks and other undesirables away from the polls.

Progressives immediately went on a public relations rampage, vowing to fight on through appeals and every available legal avenue until some jurist with a conscience and sense of right and wrong nips this thing in the bud.

I hope they win on appeal, and not just because those most adversely affected by the law are minorities — but because the law is anti-American, and flies in the face of the U.S. Constitution, the document held above all others by the hypocrites who authored the voter ID law in the first place.

What could be more anti-American, more constitutionally incorrect, than the notion that some citizens’ votes count more than others? That by keeping certain people away from the polls, you somehow end up with a free and fair election? It’s galling and ridiculous, and frankly I’m ashamed we have to have this fight almost 50 years after the Voting Rights Act.

Those facts notwithstanding, and despite my continued belief that President Obama will be re-elected in November by a sizable margin, I can’t help but wonder how much effect all this will have on the election in practical terms. Just read the newspapers. Voter ID laws, voter purges and similar machinations are taking place all over the country, not just here in Pennsylvania.

Is it possible that GOP House Majority Leader Mike Turzai was actually onto something when he guaranteed a partisan crowd in June that, “Voter ID will allow Gov. Romney to win the state in November”?

I’ve tried not to think about that, just as I’ve convinced myself that in the end, all this won’t matter when Obama stands on the podium in triumph on election night.

But what if the worst should happen?

What if the concerned organizations and valiant lawyers on the front lines of the voter ID battle lose their appeals, and the law is in full effect on Election Day? Worse, what if Turzai is right, and key swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida (coincidentally, those states specifically targeted by the GOP’s suppression strategists) fall into Romney’s hands?

And even worse than that, what if winning those key states is just enough to put Plastic Man over the top, and we’re faced with four years of watching people who own dressage horses and offshore accounts snatch food from the mouths of babies and senior citizens?

I know. Too horrible to contemplate, but in the name of pragmatism, we should at least consider the possibility, however remote — and what we’d do about it. I don’t have a doomsday scenario strategy mapped out, but I’m pretty sure how I’d handle a Romney presidency. It is remarkably similar to how the Republicans have handled President Obama these past three years.

First, taking my cues from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the knuckle-draggers, I’d never, ever call him President Romney. Just Romney, or better yet, just Willard.

Second, I would never miss an opportunity to bring up the racist past of the Mormon Church. I’d quote Mormon founders and leaders who taught until 1978 that my Black skin is a curse, and I am therefore unworthy of the blessings of God, or entrance to white heaven. (If you think this is a nasty, unfair swipe at the man’s religious beliefs, you should take up your appeal with my complaint officer, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.)

Third, I would spend a great deal of time and effort writing catchy sayings for bumper stickers and T-shirts. Mitt and Ryan – Always Lyin’, Need Healthcare? Just Die Already, and Utah is for Haters spring immediately to mind. Think I’m being unfair again? Check out the anti-Obama signs and bumper stickers at a tea party rally, then get back to me.

Finally, I would use this column to berate, harass and ridicule the Romney administration at every turn — rewriting history to suit my own purposes, and making up “facts” as I go along. I would do this every single week, without regard to relevance or context. There are too many examples to list here, but check out Ann Coulter or Cal Thomas if you have an objection.

If the other shoe indeed drops, I hope it’s a size 14. I know just where to put it.

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

Film director Woody Allen once famously said, “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” I imagine this is what GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney had in mind when he showed up to speak at the NAACP national convention in Houston this week.

Romney knows he has to peel away at least some Black votes from President Obama to have even an outside chance of winning this election. I don’t think any reasonable Republican expects a seismic shift in the numbers, but maybe if they could just get Obama’s projected 95 percent of the Black vote down to under 90 percent, they’d consider it a major coup, and from there, hey, anything can happen.

I’ll give Romney credit where credit is due. It took a lot of gumption for him to stand in front of that audience and vow to repeal Obamacare, slash education, and set the cause of civil rights back 75 years. He took the boos, the jeers, and the catcalls like a man, and endured what I’m sure was one of the most uncomfortable events in his extremely comfortable life.

Probably adding to his trepidation in front of the NAACP audience is the fact that he knows Republican outreach in minority communities ranges from nonexistent to open hostility. You have only to look at Arizona, where the frenzy to root out illegal brown people has reached such a fever pitch that they detained their own former governor for questioning because he’s, well, brown.

The images of watermelons, bone-through-the-nose witch doctors, and dressed up monkeys on their posters and signs at rallies tells you all you need to know about how the tea party-dominated GOP feels about Black people. Since Obama took office, the racists have shed any semblance of subtlety they may have once had, and gone into full-tilt skinhead mode. If you think the NAACP audience was rude in booing Romney a few times, try to imagine how the president would have been received at a meeting of the John Birch Society.

Now that they’ve angered, alienated, disenfranchised, and marginalized women, Blacks, browns, gays, the poor, the elderly, and anyone else who isn’t a Caucasian male millionaire, the GOP suddenly realizes the numbers they have left won’t win a national election. So what can they do?

Outreach, that’s what. Or at least, what passes for outreach when you’d really prefer to avoid altogether the people you’re forced to reach out to.

In the Republicans’ case, it means look forward this summer to images of Romney eating Cuban sandwiches in Miami, wearing a sombrero in San Diego, and showing up at Willie Mae’s Scotch House in New Orleans for fried chicken — probably wearing a hoodie.

They already know the lame attempt at outreach won’t do much good, but they’re obligated to put forth a cursory effort. Romney won’t make even the smallest dent in Obama’s numbers among African-American voters, and they know it. But since you can’t take any vote for granted in a tight race, he’s got to go places he doesn’t want to go, and smile in the faces people who know he doesn’t have their best interests at heart.

You saw the pictures of Romney back in May when he visited the Guion Bluford School in West Philly. I don’t believe I’ve seen a man so stiff and ill at ease, especially around children. He looked like he was waiting for a colonoscopy, not being serenaded by enthusiastic elementary school students.

Nervous? You bet. The last time Mitt Romney was around that many Black people was when he was — aw, who am I kidding? He’s never been around Black people, and it showed.

When the GOP convention was here in Philly in 2004, Republicans made a big deal of calling themselves, ‘The Party of inclusion.’ It’s even funnier eight years later, seeing as how they’re no closer to actual diversity than they were 50 years ago.

I was there for that convention, and at any given moment there were more Black people on stage than there were in the audience. I was also stopped by security volunteers and asked to show my press credentials an average of every 15 minutes or so. I remember saying many things about the GOP that week, but “party of inclusion” wasn’t one of them.

If Woody Allen was right, then the Republicans can count themselves 80 percent successful at reaching out to members of the Black community.

At least Romney showed up.

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

I didn’t know this was National Cut and Run Week. I guess I didn’t get the memo.

Rick Santorum got it, and at long last decided to get out of the race for the Republican nomination before suffering another embarrassing loss in his home state of Pennsylvania. Which brings me to a side point: just how did we get to be Zippy the Pinhead’s ‘home state’ in the first place? He was born in Virginia, where his family still resides. He (presumably) pays taxes in Virginia, and if his kids weren’t home schooled to keep them away from free thinkers, they’d probably be educated in Virginia. He lived in Pennsylvania long enough to purchase property and run for office.

Apparently, just buying a home somewhere makes you a born-again native. Well, you can claim him if you want, but speaking as a native Pennsylvanian, I refuse to accept him as a neighbor. We have more than our fair share of reality-challenged dullards as it is.

I will admit, though, that getting out now was about the smartest thing Zippy’s done in the past few months. If he’d held on past next Tuesday, and probably taken a butt whipping in Pennsylvania in the process, the next several news cycles would have been dominated by television talking heads using phrases like “humiliating,” “devastating” and “crushing” to describe his defeat here.

If Santorum has any ambition for running again in 2016, and you know he does, this week was the time to bow out — while his stock, and positive poll numbers, are about as high as they’re going to get.

I will further admit to a tiny pang of disappointment. I was hoping he’d hang on until the GOP convention in Tampa, and help Newt Gingrich throw a monkey wrench into the machine by way of a brokered convention. Not because I’m a Democrat, but because I’m a columnist, and Santorum’s shoot-from-the-lip style makes good copy. No one in politics says as many stupid things as he does on a minute-by-minute basis, and I’ll miss him — especially since his departure leaves us with little to slow down the Mitt Romney Express.

The good part is, though, that the more people find out about Romney, the less there is to like. Wait until the mainstream gets hold of the fact that Romney, until 1978, believed the tenets of the Mormon church that Black skin was a curse, (albeit one that can be reversed upon ascension to heaven, where the cursed melanin will be changed to pure white), and that interracial dating was punishable by death.

But there will be time to dissect Romney later, and you can bet that’s going to happen.

Back to the Week of the Quitters, and the big news that George Zimmerman’s legal team dropped him like a faulty transmission Tuesday.

That revelation brought its own set of strange questions, as we found out that not one of his lawyers had ever met Zimmerman face to face.

Think about that for a minute.

For the past several weeks, we’ve seen these doofuses or their surrogates describe Zimmerman’s broken nose and cuts to the back of his head. They recounted the circumstances of Trayvon Martin’s death with authoritative detail, and made every effort to paint the 17-year-old as an aggressive thug who was probably up to no good.

But the truth is, they’d never met Zimmerman, never seen any injuries, and never spoke to paramedics or police officers on the scene. They conducted no independent investigation, and based their entire case outline on the word of a man so cowardly he wouldn’t even tell his defense team which rock he was hiding under.

Why would a cadre of greedy, amoral lawyers back away from the biggest case of their lives, and a trial that would have made them famous? A trial, which by the way, would have been televised coast-to-coast, and the resulting book and movie deals would have made them all very rich men, win or lose?

You know why. Because Zimmerman’s case is a guaranteed dead loser, and as soon as they figured that out, they decided it was in their best interests not to stand their ground.

They ran for the hills the minute the special prosecutor announced she wouldn’t empanel a grand jury, and would probably charge the trigger-happy vigilante herself, which she did a few days later.

Like Santorum, that was probably the lawyers’ smartest move too.

Maybe it wasn’t Cut and Run Week. It was more like Cut Your Losses Week.

Daryl Gale is the Philadelphia Tribune's city editor.

OK, Republicans, we’ll go over this one last time: I am Black. I voted for President Barack Obama. I did not vote for him because he’s Black, and I’m willing to bet my meager paycheck that most Black politically astute voters didn’t vote for his skin color either.

I voted for the president because he was head and shoulders above the lying, smarmy, condescending, snake-eyed weasel you Republicans called a candidate. For most Black folk, and for most Americans in general, it turns out — it wasn’t even a choice.

Look, we Democrats didn’t complain when our nominee, the jelly-spined Michael Dukakis, got his butt kicked by George H.W. Bush in 1988. Dukakis was an idiot, and we knew it. Once we saw the ridiculous photo of that doofus riding in a tank wearing a battle helmet, we realized the race was over. But we sucked it up, and took the beating we deserved, because it was essentially our fault that our candidate was so weak.

Republicans seem to lack even that minimum degree of self-awareness. In defeat, the GOP has pointed fingers at everyone but themselves. Mostly, though, they’ve blamed Blacks and other minorities for their own dismal failures.

Paul Ryan, the phantom running mate — who magically disappeared as soon as he was named for the VP slot, blamed the loss on Obama’s turnout in “urban” communities — as if we’re too stupid to figure out the code. Mitt Romney, still clueless about his own culpability in turning off millions of potential voters, said Obama bought the election with lavish “gifts” to the president’s base supporters at taxpayer expense — “gifts” like health care and student loan forgiveness.

Only Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana, attempted to grasp the message voters were sending the GOP on Election Day — and even he only got it half right.

Jindal said, rightly, that the GOP would need to reach out to minorities and disenfranchised voters if the party ever wants to become viable again. He said they’d have to soften the divisive language on rape, homosexuality, immigration, and contraception, to name a few — or perish like the dinosaurs.

Jindal’s on the right track here, but he’s still on the wrong train. The GOP has got to reach out beyond its base of rich old white men, to be sure — but not just by softening the language. They’ll have to completely shift their divisive platform, politics and policies to even give themselves a chance with the millions of voters who rejected them last week in disgust. Just changing the tone will only mask their intentions, and add another layer of hypocrisy to their present pack of lies.

The fact is that millions of Americans — Black, white, gay, Hispanic, or whatever — voted for Obama not because they were snookered by a Democratic snake oil salesman, but because they were justifiably horrified by the things that actually came out of Republicans’ mouths for more than two years.

Did the GOP really think that the softer, gentler Romney who emerged at the very end of the campaign would somehow negate the 47 percent putdown, or the legitimate rape fiasco, or Rush Limbaugh attacking a college student as a slut, or invasive ultrasound procedures forced on women seeking to terminate their pregnancies? Did they think we’d forget about Newt Gingrich’s “food stamp president” slap, or Rick Santorum’s vow not to give white people’s money to lazy Blacks? Were we supposed to look the other way while Michelle Bachmann blamed the economic recession on poor Black folks, or ignore Rick Perry’s frequent hunting trips to the N-word Ranch?

We haven’t even gotten to their unashamed hatred of gays and lesbians, their plan to build an electrified fence to fry undocumented workers crossing the border like a giant bug zapper, or their apparent willingness to let their own grandmothers search through dumpsters for food scraps in exchange for hefty tax cuts for millionaires.

No, they’d rather believe that somehow Black people conspired to undo them, because if history has shown them nothing else, it’s that blaming dark-skinned folks is easier than looking in the mirror.

So go ahead. Call me racist for voting for Obama, while ignoring common sense and a mountain of damning evidence. Blame everything and everyone but yourselves — and your obsession with a continuing white pseudo-Christian plutocracy.

Keep it up all the way until 2016, when you can blame President Hillary Clinton and all those darned women for your next scheduled butt kicking.

Daryl Gale is the city editor of The Philadelphia Tribune.