Gotcha Morning | Mitt Romney Plays the Race Card

The first official (truncated) day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida gave MSNBC's Chris Matthews a chance to come face to face with RNC Chair Reince Priebus during a special edition of Morning Joe.

Matthews did not hesitate to call out Priebus on Mitt Romney's surprisingly Birther-esque assertion at a campaign stop in Michigan last week that "no one's ever asked to see my birth certificate." In the lively debate that followed, Matthews also tied the false attacks by Romney on Obama's welfare policies to a broader trend of the GOP playing the race card against the President.

While Chris Matthews may have the strongest reaction to the unwarranted birth certificate remark by Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign responded to it themselves over the weekend. Late Friday, they released this ad labeling Mitt Romney "Birther-in-chief."

Romney himself dismissed his comments as nothing more than a harmless joke, which is the defense his Republican allies are adopting. They claim that Obama has made similar (though definitely funnier) jokes about himself, such as the Lion King video that opened his 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner speech or even the "Made in the USA Mug" the campaign started pushing again this week.

Yes, as the Obama campaign ad above states, questions about the President's birth certificate do distract from the issues that will affect Americans' lives. But that doesn't mean they can be dismissed as nothing more than moments of levity from the man who wants to replace Obama in the White House. It's one thing for the President to use humor to deflate the unfair attacks against him. It's quite another for Mitt Romney to invoke those lies, which so many Americans still believe to be true, to get a cheap laugh and reinforce the idea of President Obama as "other."

Either Mitt Romney thought of his birth certificate joke on the spot, which seems unlikely given how scripted his campaign appearances tend to be. Or his campaign decided that it was time for Romney to play that back pocket race card and remind the Birther wing of his party that he's with them.

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