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

To: LindyBill who wrote (79468)	10/21/2004 9:32:13 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793964

BATTLE AT THE BALLOT BOX: RUDY'S LESSON BY COLLIN LEVEY NY POST October 21, 2004 -- YOU know Election Day is near when John Kerry be gins invoking scripture in African-American churches, as he did last Sunday. But as long as he's there, he might as well pray that Republicans behave as predictably. Over the years, as Democrats regularly allege that the GOP is out to disenfranchise minorities at the ballot box, Republicans have done little more than complain about the racial smear campaign. Fearful that even the spurious charges of racism might stick, Republican ballot-integrity monitors are left reluctant to engage even in the most fair-handed vigilance. That was the subtext of a Democratic poll-watchers manual that surfaced last week, urging, "If no signs of intimidation techniques have emerged yet, launch a preemptive strike." Pundits are now poring over swing-state minutiae and Nixon-Kennedy parallels, but some of the best historical lessons for Republicans in photo-finish elections come from right here in New York City. Just look at Rudy Giuliani. In 1989, Giuliani lost his first mayoral run against David Dinkins in a dead-heat race that many deemed one of the most racially divisive in eons. Giuliani won two-thirds of the white vote and only 5 percent of the black vote, losing by one of the smallest margins in the city's history amid rumblings that Democratic operatives had stolen the election. When Rudy ran again in 1993, no expense was spared on election monitors. And the charges that dogged Giuliani then should sound familiar to those watching the racial demagoguery in Florida and elsewhere: Republicans tried to "intimidate" and "harass" minority voters, critics said. Giuliani's focus on crime was a "code word" for white hostility toward blacks. Then-New York Democratic Chairman Al Gordon growled that Republicans were requiring such abominations as signature and identity checks. That is, a man later seen as one of the city's greatest mayors ever might never have taken office if Republicans hadn't shown real guts in 1993: Rather than just complaining after the fact about what old city hands once called "red zones" — the mysterious areas of 120 percent turnout — Republicans put the manpower into polling places to make sure all was orderly and on the up-and-up. The vigilance still stands out as, unfortunately, exceptional. More typical was the saga of Attorney General Dennis Vacco's 1998 loss to Eliot Spitzer: Not until after results were tallied did Republicans really begin to cry foul. But then, about the best Giuliani's agents could have hoped for was a clean election. Democratic election monitors seem to be after something more. In Ohio, GOP Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has been pilloried for trying to enforce voting provisions designed, for instance, to exclude ex-Ohioans who try to return to the state to vote. One blogger, alluding to Jim Crow, called the enforcement of residency rules "a move that would make a Mississippi election board in the 1950s proud." Clearly life is not going to be easy on Republican politicians willing to stand up to the paint-by-numbers racial "intimidation" maelstrom. But as the Giuliani example shows, in a two-party system, each side has to take seriously its duty to hold the other side honest. Suppressing votes is never the goal, says former state Republican Chairman William Powers: "You don't have time to stop someone else from voting, it's all you can do to get your own people out to vote." And there's the rub for Kerry: The racial focus on voter disenfranchisement now is the transparent tactic of a campaign afraid its candidate has failed to connect with usually reliably Democratic black voters. Despite Kerry's stated desire to be the "second black president," fewer than half of African-Americans in a recent Washington-Post ABC News poll said they were "very enthusiastic" about his candidacy. Meanwhile, polls show President Bush doubling his own share of the African-American vote from the 2000 election. While "minority disenfranchisement" has become a staple of Democratic rhetoric, black voter turnout has been higher than the national average in three of the last four elections. That's wonderful — a statistic Republicans should celebrate too. And everyone who goes to the polls has an interest in not having their vote cancelled out by what should have been an ineligible ballot. Republicans should not allow racial stinkbombs to deter them from enforcing the rules. And the time for that is before people vote, not afterward. Few politicians have endured as many accusations of racism as Giuliani did — yet he more than quadrupled his '93 share of the black vote in 1997. The Bush campaign and GOP state officials should show the same resolve in this election — or consider themselves complicit in their own demise.