The Deck Is Running Out
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BY JAMES TARANTO
Thursday, September 8, 2005 4:15 p.m. EDT
He may be whiter than Strom Thurmond's ghost, but Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean is responding to Hurricane Katrina by putting himself forward as black America's tribune, reports the Miami Herald:
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Dean on Wednesday sought to turn the chaos of Hurricane Katrina into a benefit for Democrats, decrying Republican priorities and telling black pastors in Miami that race played a "significant role" in the storm's death toll. . . .
Dean, in remarks interrupted several times by applause, charged that Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration have not done enough to combat poverty. The pictures of primarily black storm evacuees huddled at the dank Superdome and stranded on rooftops, Dean charged, showed "the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not."
"The question, 40 and 50 years after Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, is: How could this still be happening in America?" Dean said. He later added: "We have not swept poverty away in this nation. We have simply swept it under the rug."
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USA Today, meanwhile, reported this morning that MoveOn.org--which, as we argued in June 2003, seems to be populated primarily with people of pallor--"plans to unveil a TV ad on Monday" that uses "televised images of poverty-stricken evacuees from Hurricane Katrina" as "part of a provocative, last-minute effort . . . to divert federal Judge John Roberts' path to confirmation as chief justice." (The group later denied that it plans to use the Katrina images, though its ad will cite "the plight of the mostly African-American evacuees in New Orleans" and "suggest that minorities could suffer if the Senate confirms Roberts.")
Dean and MoveOn may be dealing the race card, but they aren't playing with a full deck. The chances that MoveOn or anyone else will succeed in borking Roberts are approximately zero. Democrats were able to use race to great effect against Robert Bork 18 years ago, but Bork was a much easier target. He had actually gone on record in 1964 as opposing the Civil Rights Act (albeit on libertarian rather than racial grounds). In 1964 Roberts was 9.
The Democrats had a Senate majority in 1987, and as we noted in November, depicting Bork as an enemy of civil rights persuaded 15 of 16 Southern Democrats--who cannot win without large black turnout--to oppose him. Today the Republicans hold the Senate majority, and you can perform yubitsume and still count the number of remaining Southern Democratic senators on one hand.
The Dean-MoveOn vision of race is decades out of date. For white Americans in general, the question of race becomes less fraught with every passing year, as the proportion of whites who supported or were complicit in Jim Crow segregation or other racist institutions declines. An exception is liberal ideologues, including Dean and the MoveOn types, who view their putative sensitivity to black people as a sign of their superior moral virtue.
What are Dean and MoveOn trying to accomplish politically by taking this tack? Whose votes are they after? White liberal ideologues are already the most reliable Democratic voters, and whites who aren't liberal ideologues are likely to be mystified, if not offended, by the attempt to racialize a natural disaster.
Could it be, then, that they are appealing to the black vote? But why? Blacks already vote Democratic in proportions approaching 90%. Yet maybe they fear that as a result of Katrina, the Democrats will no longer be able to count on such lopsided support.
This suggestion is highly speculative, so take it with several grains of salt. But here's our thinking: Blacks have been outliers in America's political culture for some 40 years. The 1964 presidential election was the first in which blacks voted Democratic in near-monolithic fashion, and that's hardly surprising, given that Lyndon Johnson had succeeded in passing the Civil Rights Act, which his opponent, Barry Goldwater, had opposed (albeit, like Bork, on libertarian grounds). The long-term trend in subsequent elections decidedly favored the Republicans, but this was a trend black voters bucked.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964, that is to say, cemented a political relationship between black voters and the Democratic Party. The ideological basis for this relationship was a belief in activist government at the federal level. Blacks were quite reasonably distrustful of state and local governments, which had resisted efforts at desegregation.
Now consider the Katrina narrative that has unfolded: that the hurricane visited great suffering on black Americans primarily as a result of government failure. If black Americans accept this version of events, it may undermine both the political and the ideological underpinnings of their support for the Democratic Party.
The Democrats may think they are merely being partisan when they assail the federal response to the disaster, but it's hard to see how they can avoid subverting Americans' faith in the federal government itself. After all, since we do not live in a one-party state, how can we trust federal institutions if they function well only when one party holds power?
And of course the responses from Louisiana and New Orleans authorities, led by Gov. Kathleen Blanco and Mayor Ray Nagin, were hardly better than the federal response. Blanco and Nagin are both Democrats, and Nagin was elected by a majority-black electorate. If this was a government failure, it was not a failure only of Republican government.
Black voters could respond to the devastation of Katrina by asking themselves: Is this what we get for supporting Democrats for 40 years? That in itself may not be sufficient reason to vote Republican, but surely it's enough to worry Howard Dean.
Notes From the Reality-Based Community
"The police chief boasted that 7,000 more military, police and other law officers on the streets had made New Orleans 'probably the safest city in America right now.' "--Associated Press, Sept. 8
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