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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (49581)	6/9/2004 12:16:49 PM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

"The Republicans can't be the party of both black opportunity and anti-black resentment, no matter how big the tent. " Just walk down the streets of our cities and see how much progress in race realtions there has been. Blacks are skeptical that the republicans can so quickly lose "anti-black resentment". But as more and more enter the middle class and play by the same rules and succeed on their own, they will begin to move toward the republicans much like many Jews have. No, they wont go from less than 10% to a majority any time soon. But i think over time they will go from single digits to 20%. The implications in just that gain for republicans will be great. Mike

To: JohnM who wrote (49581)	6/9/2004 12:22:01 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

Marshall sometimes makes good points. But the straw man he set up here is too large to swallow: Several days ago I wrote this post about the odd habit which many people have of talking about Democratic 'dependence' on the votes of various racial minorities. As I argued in that post, this frequent framing of the issue often contains within it an unspoken (or perhaps even unconsidered) assumption that the votes of racial minorities aren't quite real votes somehow -- second class votes, you might say. This is totally ridiculous. Votes are votes. Your vote is just as important as that of an uneducated idiot anywhere in NJ. They are equivalents. The issue is how a party schemes to obtain the largest number of votes. If the Dems think it best to court the inner city vote, good for them. But this doesn't detract from the fact that votes are mathematically equivalent. Unlike success in other fields--academia comes to mind vbg--success in politics is simple to discern: did you, or your party, win the election? Thus, Dems must court the largest number of voters they can. They have not succeeded because the country's political orientation has drifted to the right since the end of the Carter Presidency while at the same time [with the exception of Clinton] Dems are perceived as liberals. Blacks vote overwhelmingly Democratic because they perceive, rightly or wrongly, that the Dems will cater to their interests, an assumption that they should seriously question after 8 years of Clinton and the control of their party by the DLC. Because they cannot control enough votes to keep the Democratic party from drifting to the right as American voters drift to the right, liberal African-American voters are in a genuine pickle. I don't think racism on the part of the GOP is the issue, unless, of course, Marshall is ready to claim that the country as a whole is racist. The fact is that the Dems have utterly failed to convince African Americans that their political interests are best served by abandoning their advocacy for tired, unpopular liberal policies. The Democratic leadership should know this in its bones, but they failed to act on this obvious bit of iformation. As a result, their party has been phenomenally unsuccessful in the past few years. For beter or worse, the Dem party is perceived by voters as the party of three windbags--Carter, Jesse Jackson, and Teddy Kennedy--and until that changes, it will not be a voice for the expression of mainstream American hopes and aspirations. African Americans have hitched their star to a falling comet, to mix metaphors, though saying that GOP racism is the reason for their troubles is easy and cheap, yet untrue.