John Kerry's talk with black clergy a portent of fate
Gregory Kane
BALTIMORE SUN
baltimoresun.com
November 6, 2004
THE FIRST inkling I had that Sen. John Kerry would lose Tuesday's election came exactly a week before, when I participated in a telephone conference call that the Massachusetts senator had with about 350 black clergy.
After former President Bill Clinton introduced him, Kerry told the group that the issue of gay marriage was a red herring.
"I ask you not to be diverted from the real issue in this case," Kerry told the ministers. "Fifty percent of the African-American men in New York City are unemployed. ... There are more black men in prison than in college."
As if blowing off the moral issue that would eventually cost him the election weren't enough, we have to look at what else was wrong with the picture: When you're telling clergy folks that things many Christians regard as sins don't matter, you might not want an admitted philanderer to be the guy introducing you.
Earlier in the campaign, Kerry shared a stage with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, another fella not yet bitten by the monogamy bug, who said moral issues in campaign 2004 were a diversion.
Well, not to the 3.5 million voters who provided President Bush his margin of victory, they weren't. Add to that Kerry's sneaky attempt at demagoguery in addressing the black clergy - the number of black men unemployed in New York City and in prison were "acceptable" to Bush, according to the senator - and you may have a reason why the president got a slightly higher percentage of the black vote this year than in 2000.
Clearly, not quite enough black folks were feeling the Democrats' gross misrepresentation of Bush as a white racist from the Theodore Bilbo school of hang-'em-high politics. The depiction is a lie. Democrats knew it. Kerry knows that a 50 percent unemployment rate among any ethnic or racial group is not acceptable to Bush. The good senator knows that Bush wouldn't be comfortable with the news that there are more black men in prison than in college, even if it were true. (Skeptics suggest that among black men of college age only - 18 to 24 - there are indeed more in college than in prison.)
But assuming that Kerry buys into the "more black men in prison than in college" mantra constantly being chanted by black leaders skilled at massaging victimhood, that leaves a couple of questions that might also indicate why the Democrats got creamed not only in the presidential race, but in congressional races as well.
What, precisely, could a President Kerry have done about more black men being in prison than in college than a President Bush has done, or that a President Clinton did in eight years before him?
The truth is: nothing.
When Kerry campaigned on a promise of reforming education from his chair in the Oval Office, he was making a promise he knew he couldn't keep. In all fairness, Bush has made the same promise and knows the same thing. The best thing a President Kerry could have done and President Bush can do for America's schools is to dismantle the Department of Education, not fund it.
And how, exactly, do we separate that disproportionate number of black men in prison from the moral issues of our time?
Aren't most of the black juveniles committing crimes - who will go on to become those black men filling our prisons - from single-parent households where the mother is too poor and too young to raise children? How is that not a moral issue? What Christian church shouts "amen!" and "hallelujah!" to poverty-stricken teen mothers having children out of wedlock?
That was a no-no in the Roman Catholic Church I grew up in, as were abortion, adultery, "living in sin," drug use, prostitution (either on the consumer or provider side) and, at the risk of sounding homophobic and woefully out of step with political correctness, homosexuality.
There are enough devout Christians - Catholics and non-Catholics - who still cling to the traditional list of what is and is not a sin. It doesn't matter if you agree with them. The bottom line is that these folks will go to the ballot box and cast their votes based on what they - not elected officials or journalists or activist groups - feel are the great moral issues of the day.
Kerry must have had some inkling that many black Christians feel the same way, especially about the issue of gay marriage. That's why he attempted to make his pre-emptive strike a week before the election in hopes of steering enough black votes his way to swing the election.
It didn't work. Considering the folks he had stumping for him - Messrs. Clinton and Jackson - it's no wonder it didn't. That should be a lesson learned for Democrats who want to regain the White House in 2008.
Sometimes, people do consider the source.
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