NAACP Condemns Rick Santorum's "Black People" Gaffe

Does Rick Santorum think everyone on welfare is black?

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.