Rick Santorum is trying to recover from what sounded like one of the more racist statements to come out of the campaign.

Iowa runner-up Rick Santorum said Thursday that he would be “a much bigger player” than expected in the New Hampshire primary and denied saying that he didn’t want “to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

Santorum allegedly made the controversial comments when discussing welfare in an interview Wednesday night with Fox News, but he maintained that people misheard the word “black” when he stumbled on a word.

“I looked at that, and I didn’t say that. If you look at it, what I started to say is a word and then sort of changed and it sort of — blah — came out. And people said I said ‘black.’ I didn’t,” Santorum said.

(Video here.)

Perhaps he’s trying to catch up to Newt Gingrich, who came up with his own dog-whistle about blahs blacks.

And so I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps.

In reality, the majority of people on food stamps are white, and many of them are children. (Of course, in Mr. Gingrich’s Dickensian world, children should be working, too.)

So much for the minority outreach.