Your Black Republican
I knew who Michael Steele was, and had some rough perimeters of the race for the Senate from Maryland before today’s New York Times Magazine article on the man who would supposedly realign politics by forging a Black Republican voting block.
But now I ponder the imponderables of political coalition shifting. If you’ve paid attention to this blog, you’ll see that I claim to have discovered the originating point of when Black Americans shifted from Republican — the Party of Lincoln to Democrat — there is no party of Lincoln anymore. Spurious that 1924 splitting of hairs on what the Klu Klux Klan meant to both parties, but there you go.
In 2004, Bush won a handful more black votes than he did in 2000. I sarcastically quip that he won about 3% more, as he won an average of 3% more votes in any demographic you can throw at me. The slight increase in attributable to the War on Gays. Note that this was in the campaign literature for Oregon’s anti-gay marriage Amendment Proposal:
here.
Post-election, Bush’s stock in Black America slipped. Down to 2%. The racial dimensions of his lacking aid to Katrina spotlighted the problem.
Ponder the imponderables and I arrive at no answers. A blip on the radar, and Karl Rove knows what he’s doing… even if the men he elects don’t. Republicans insist that Democrats are playing up race and class. Democrats insist that Republicans can only win by pitting one group against another. If Black Americans voted for Bush at an increased clip of 3% over 2000, I wonder if maybe it’s a victory for color-blind prejudices. Reportedly, Bill Clinton suggested to John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign that he would gain political support if he come out against Gay Marriage, and reportedly Kerry decided he couldn’t do that. I have no way of knowing whether this is true or not (what? I’m going to call in and check my sources at the DNC? Yeah… okay), but if true it does say some things about Bill Clinton and some other things about John Kerry. And some things about the electorate. My guess is Kerry would not have been helped, because by that point everything out of his mouth was thought to be political pandering — flip flop redux… Kerry’s problem was not necessarily attached to any issues per se.
In his book on the 2004 campaign, Spanking the Donkey, Matt Taibbi meets up with the Florida Republicans’ token black activist (in a stunt where he is working with the Republican Party, and has his friend call pretending to represent a magazine doing an article on Republican Diversity. Matt Taibbi is a third-class Hunter S Thompson, and he knows it.). The black Republican states that if the Republicans only print up the two partys’ positions on social issues and distribute them in black churches, Republican share of the black vote would double. It’s difficult to disagree with this, even if such things as Katrina will invariably throw the spotlight on our other troubles, but I have to wonder if Joe Trippi is a bit too hysterical here (a quote that makes for an obvious pull-quote):
If the Republicans can win in a state like Maryland because they pried away some of the black vote from the Democrats, Trippi said, “It will be over.” Over for whom? I asked. “The Democrats,” he responded. He didn’t mean just in Maryland — he meant in the whole country, because the electoral math for Democrats begins with an assumption of capturing something like 90 percent of the African-American vote.
At the moment it relies on 90%, and this formulation is obviously shaky considering that the Democrats don’t control anything nationally. Theoretically, under Karl Rove’s Theory of the Coming Permanent Republican Majority, we are in the stage the two parties found themselves in from Reconstruction to the man Karl Rove idolizes: William McKinnley. The Republicans won all but two presidential elections — those to the Conservative Democrat Grover Cleveland. And they won by close margins. The Democrats kept trying to figure out how to win the swing state of New York or Florida… and couldn’t. McKinnley brought about that great “Permanent Republican Majority” where the races were no longer close — the majority was shattered with the Great Depression and FDR. But, for the case of Democrats relying on 90% of black voters to be in the game — must it for all eternity? No way of appealing to the great masses in general, and various groups in specific, while losing a few percentage points of one group that’s made up your base due to the Politics of Wedgies as well as the Politics of Upward Mobility Projection. By the latter I refer to… In the old formation, the poor voted Democratic — until they entered the middle class at which point many/most decided they could start considering a vote for the Republican, projecting themselves onto the upper class. Today, there’s a much bigger tendency to project ourselves upward, due to the war on class warfare, and crass consumerism. Surveys show that 10% of Americans believe that they are in the Top 1% income bracket. Obviously the poor don’t believe such a thing, but it’s endemic enough.
By the way: Millionaires vote Republican. Billionaires have an advantage toward the Democrats. Figure that one out. I guess there comes a time when you really do have enough money in this society to not conern yourself with working tax-loopholes into the system.
Also worth a gander is the Letters page, and those on the article about Virginia Governor Mark Warner. The editors employ a typical magazine technique, which is to have one opinion diametrically opposed to the last opinion and on and on.