The Urban Right

No Right to Remain Silent

2012-02-16T17:48:00.000-08:00

What do Republicans say to their gay friends?

How do they explain the fact that so many in the GOP’s base seem to be enthralled by Rick Santorum, who has never said one positive word about an LGBT person in his entire political career?

How do they justify the party’s history of denigrating the gay rights movement and characterizing same-sex marriage in apocalyptic terms?

How do they excuse the talk-radio tirades, the religious right’s ridicule, the punditocracy’s prejudice?

I can’t speak for every Republican, but I know I've made plenty of excuses for the GOP’s homophobia. My logic was pretty simple: to denounce GOP gay-bashing would be to help “the left,” and helping “the left” was simply out of the question.

So I didn’t complain when George W. Bush exploited fears about same-sex marriage to renew his lease on the White House. I didn’t speak up when self-righteous senators and reactionary representatives made noises about passing a Federal Marriage Amendment. I didn’t turn the dial when conservative radio and television personalities insisted that gays and lesbians were grotesque and loathsome.

I kept my mouth shut. For the team.

I am convinced that there are millions of Republican voters opting to keep their mouths shut for the team despite knowing in their hearts that homophobia is not morally right. They are so fixated on having Republicans win federal elections that they have chosen to ignore the reckless rhetoric those Republicans are relying on to win.

They need to speak up. Right now.

Ignoring homophobia is a fundamentally senseless act. Think about it: the Republicans who kept their mouths shut about Bush’s gay-bashing and supported his re-election effectively gave Bush the opportunity to thoroughly wreck the GOP, thus clearing a path for Barack Obama. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to speak out before it was too late?

There’s no downside to standing up against Republican homophobia—but the pain of remaining silent is tremendous. The hurt of conscience is more intense than any physical suffering. It’s a hurt I feel every time I recall the days when I said nothing as Republicans came after gay and lesbian families and denounced them in the cruelest terms possible.

Republicans of conscience—the ones that are still left, that is—must stand up now and call out Santorum and every other Republican who refuses to give the minimum standard of respect to gays and lesbians. The hatred must stop, and it must stop today.

The ends of an electoral outcome cannot justify the means. When a Republican pundit or politician opens his or her mouth to denounce gay rights, they should immediately hear millions of voices responding, “Stop it!”

By doing so, we will hasten the day when openly homophobic figures like Santorum won’t even think of running for President. We will hasten the day when both political parties recognize the importance of appealing to gays and lesbians. We will hasten the day when equality is the guaranteed winner of every election.

I will die regretting the years I declined to speak out against Republican homophobia. I should have realized that any GOP victory dependent on the denigration of gays and lesbians will go down in history as a stolen victory.

I can’t change the past, but I can certainly learn from it. The most important lesson to be learned is the moral necessity of calling out homophobia and opposing the vicious vision of those don’t believe in treating gays and lesbians as equals. Thus, let me be the first to say: “Rick Santorum, shut up already!”

Recapturing Jack

2012-02-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

Hope you enjoy my piece on Jack Kemp's legacy in the newest edition of the Ripon Forum!

Huntsman's Honor

2012-01-17T16:02:00.000-08:00

Hope you enjoy my debut piece for the Huffington Post!

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Journey Into the Past

2012-01-16T13:27:00.000-08:00

Nearly fifty years ago, baseball hero Jackie Robinson sounded the alarm about extremism in the GOP.

None Dare Call It Reason

2011-11-19T02:56:00.000-08:00

I’m not dreaming of a white Christmas, because the upcoming snow will bring yet another year of alleged geniuses declaring that global warming isn’t happening because there’s a blizzard outside.

This annual celebration of cognitive collapse has already started, thanks to “freak” snowstorms that hit Colorado, Texas and Massachusetts in late-October. The phenomenon of conservatives claiming global warming is a hoax because there’s snow on the ground has provoked in me a response I call climate-denial denial: I can’t bring myself to admit that some of these people, people I used to respect, can really be this ignorant.

When one doesn’t know about something, it always helps to ask somebody who actually knows about something. So let’s consult people who actually know a bit about science to explain why snow does not disprove global warming:

· “On a global scale, the most recent decade (2000-2009) has been declared the warmest decade on record since the 1880's, when temperatures were first recorded. But the recent snow storms have led to considerable confusion about how record snow relates to our changing climate. Snowfall is a combination of the moisture in the atmosphere and air temperature. As the Earth’s temperature warms, the oceans evaporate more water to the atmosphere which produces more precipitation—notably more extreme precipitation—including heavy snowfall when conditions are below freezing.” (Union of Concerned Scientists News Center, February 1, 2011)

· “Most don't see a contradiction between a warming world and lots of snow. That includes Kevin Trenberth, a prominent climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. ‘The fact that the oceans are warmer now than they were, say, 30 years ago means there's about on average 4 percent more water vapor lurking around over the oceans than there was, say, in the 1970s,’ he says. Warmer water means more water vapor rises up into the air, and what goes up must come down. ‘So one of the consequences of a warming ocean near a coastline like the East Coast and Washington, D.C., for instance, is that you can get dumped on with more snow partly as a consequence of global warming,’ he says. And Trenberth notes that you don't need very cold temperatures to get big snow. In fact, when the mercury drops too low, it may be too cold to snow.” (“Get This: Warming Planet Can Mean More Snow,” NPR.org, February 15, 2010)

· “The 2009/2010 winter saw a number of dramatic, record breaking snowstorms. Early February saw two ‘once in a 100 years’ snowstorms hit Philadelphia, now being dubbed ‘Snowmageddon.’ Does record snowfall prove that global warming isn't happening? What do observations say? 2009 was the second hottest year on record. January 2010 was the hottest January in the UAH satellite record. Satellites data indicates last month was the second hottest February in the satellite record. Observations tell us that rumours of global warming's death have been greatly exaggerated…If global warming is still happening, why are some areas experiencing record snowfall events? As climate warms, evaporation from the ocean increases. This results in more water vapour in the air. Globally, atmospheric water vapour has increased by about 5% over the 20th century. Most of the increase has occurred since 1970 (IPCC AR4 3.4.2.1). This is confirmed by satellites that find the total atmospheric moisture content has been increasing since measurements began in 1988 (Santer 2007). The extra moisture in the air is expected to produce more precipitation…To claim that record snowfall is inconsistent with a warming world betrays a lack of understanding of the link between global warming and extreme precipitation. Global temperatures in the last few months of record snowfall are some of the hottest on record. Warming causes more moisture in the air which leads to more extreme precipitation events. This includes more heavy snowstorms in regions where snowfall conditions are favourable. Far from contradicting global warming, record snowfall is predicted by climate models and consistent with our expectation of more extreme precipitation events.” (John Cook, “Does record snowfall disprove global warming?” SkepticalScience.com, March 7, 2010)

· “Rising temperature is only one effect of climate change. Probably more crucially, warmer air holds more water vapor than cold air does. The increased evaporation from land and sea leads to more drought but also to more precipitation, since what goes up eventually comes down. The numbers aren't trivial—global warming has added 4 percent more moisture to the atmosphere since 1970. That means that the number of ‘extreme events’ such as downpours and floods has grown steadily; the most intense storms have increased by 20 percent across the United States in the past century. So here's the thing: Despite global warming, it still gets cold enough to snow in the middle of winter…As Jeff Masters, the widely read weather blogger, pointed out last week, a record snowstorm requires a record amount of moisture in the air. ‘It is quite possible that the dice have been loaded in favor of more intense Nor'easters for the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, thanks to the higher levels of moisture present in the air due to warmer global temperatures,’ he wrote.” (Bill McKibben, “Washington's snowstorms, brought to you by global warming,” Washington Post, February 14, 2010)

The next time you hear a cable-news pundit or op-ed columnist poke fun at climate science after a major snowstorm, ask yourself if these folks are even capable of walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time. Then turn the channel, stop reading the column, and ask yourself if ignorance will destroy us before global warming does.

Cain Isn't Able II

2011-10-19T03:09:00.000-07:00

Great going, Mr. Cain!

An Unhealthy Radio Addiction

2011-10-06T01:26:00.000-07:00

Laura Ingraham, what were you thinking?

Cain Isn't Able

2011-09-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

So says Janeane Garofalo, who claims Cain's prominence in the GOP primary helps to offset questions about whether the right's intense criticism of President Obama is based in part on disgust with the idea of a black guy in the White House.

I think Garofalo, who previously suggested that Cain was being paid to run by GOP establishment figures in order to offset allegations that the party is playing to racist sentiments, is stretching things a bit. Having said that, she's not the only one arguing that there is something unseemly about how aggressively the right goes after Obama.

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UPDATE: Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Jay Cost, Sandy Gholston and Booker Rising on Cain's remarks.

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And To Think, I Used to Have a Crush on Monica Crowley

2011-09-21T17:11:00.000-07:00

What was I thinking?

Faux News

2011-09-20T16:04:00.000-07:00

It never stops, does it?

I'm turning the channel to MSNBC...

Rodeo Clown

2011-08-30T17:06:00.000-07:00

Glenn Beck can go screw himself.

Generally Speaking

2011-08-30T03:39:00.000-07:00

The Boston Herald supports Colin Powell in his feud with Dick Cheney.

Something told us that there weren’t many reunion luncheons taking place between Dick Cheney and Colin Powell anyway, but now that the former vice president is out with a memoir taking “cheap shots” (Powell’s characterization) at the former secretary of state, well, the gloves are really off.

The book excerpts began trickling out last week and in the interest of pumping up sales they include what we can only assume are the juiciest bits. And for a man who claims to be horrified by President Barack Obama’s incessant bashing of the Bush administration, well, Cheney apparently makes his own contributions to that effort in print.

He refutes Cheney’s claim that he essentially chased Powell out of a job, arguing that one-term was always his deal. We were also pleased to hear Powell come to the defense of Condoleezza Rice, who comes in for “condescending” criticism in the book, too.

For Powell, yes, there is a healthy element of face-saving here. His reputation suffered mightily when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq after he told the world they were there. But in a steel cage match to measure integrity our money will be on Powell over Cheney any day.

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Don't expect Powell to have any love for Rush Limbaugh either.

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...And the Heat Goes On

2011-08-22T18:37:00.000-07:00

The next time you wonder why black people dislike the idea of voting Republican...

A freshman Republican lawmaker resigned because his wife sent “an offensive and racist” email to the Democratic state Senate campaign of nine-time Olympic gold medalist Carl Lewis, a GOP official acknowledged Monday.

Pat Delany stepped down from the state Assembly this month and said he wouldn’t seek a full term in November because of his wife’s missive to Lewis’ campaign, Burlington County Republican Chairman Bill Layton said. Delany originally cited an unspecified family issue as the reason for his abrupt resignation.

Delany and his wife, Jennifer Delany, are white. Lewis, a political novice who’s among the greatest athletes of all time, is black.

Jennifer Delany’s email to Lewis’ campaign said, in part, “Imagine having dark skin and name recognition and the nerve to think that equaled knowing something about politics.”

Layton said Pat Delany decided to leave office to shield his three children from “a hurtful and embarrassing public spectacle involving their mother.”

“Former Assemblyman Pat Delany’s wife inexplicably sent an offensive and racist email in response to a routine email from Carl Lewis’ campaign; her actions were inexcusable,” Layton said.

Delany said in a statement that he and his wife don’t share the same racial views. He said he was sorry.

“On behalf of my family, we sincerely apologize to Mr. Lewis for any pain this caused him,” he said.

Neither the Delanys nor Lewis could be reached by telephone for comment Monday.

Lewis is running for state Senate in New Jersey’s 8th Legislative District. Delany was part of the opposing GOP Assembly slate in the district.

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West End

2011-08-21T16:04:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson isn't buying Rep. Allen West's (R-FL) claim that Democrats keep black voters on a de facto plantation.

Florida GOP Congressman Allen West, in his trademark shoot-from-the-lip style, made brief news recently when he dredged out the worn term" plantationism" to describe the alleged relationship between blacks and Democrats. The slave inference translated into modern day political vernacular is that the Democrats for the past near six decades have promised blacks everything, and delivered almost nothing. Blacks still have the highest failed public schools, unemployment, poverty, and mortality, incarceration rates. Yet despite the alleged failure to deliver on their promises, blacks still slavishly give the Democrats 80 to 90 percent of their vote.

West's "plantationism" broadside against the Democrats was quickly and eagerly picked up by a legion of conservative talk show hosts and bloggers. A few Democrats were rocked back on defense and forced to parry the attack. An arguable case can be made that Democratic presidential candidates in the past two decades have shifted political gears and deliberately downplayed explicit appeals to black voters on expanded civil rights protections, criminal justice reform, ramped up spending on education and jobs programs, and in some cases out-GOPed the GOP in rushing to hack away at welfare, income support, and affirmative action programs. Some have pushed tax cuts for the corporate rich, and been hawkish in rubber stamping Bush's costly war ramp up in Iraq and Afghanistan. Former President Bill Clinton's election blueprint virtually directed top Democrats to appeal more to the white middle class with tax cuts and decreased government spending to dispel the notion that the Democrats inherently tilt toward minorities at the expense of whites. President Obama repeatedly gets an earful from the Congressional Black Caucus and other blacks for allegedly not doing enough to explicitly tackle the crisis of jobs and poverty among African-Americans.

This all feeds into West and the GOP's crack about "plantationism." The inference is that it's time for blacks to wise up and cease their knee jerk hostility to the GOP. There was some hope in the run-up to last's November mid-term elections that blacks might get that message. Black Republicans peddled the fantasy that would make history and elect a record number of black Republicans to Congress. More than a dozen black GOP candidates tried. With the exception of West and South Carolina Congressman Tim Scott, they all failed miserably. Scott and West won with white votes, and represent predominantly white districts. They have no political traction among blacks.

The rock solid loyalty of blacks to the Democrats is based on elementary pragmatism. Despite the shots they take at the Democrats for taking them and their vote for granted, most blacks still look to them to fight the tough battles for health care, greater funding for education and jobs, voting rights protections, affirmative action, and against racial discrimination. Civil rights organizations were the only groups that consistently fought back against Reagan, Bush Sr., and W. Bush's draconian cuts in job, education, social service, funding and programs, their retrograde nominees to the Supreme Court appointments that would roll back the civil rights clock, and their peck away at affirmative action, civil rights and civil liberties protections.

This alone might not be cause enough for blacks en masse to repeatedly give their firm backing to the Democrats, especially when the Democrats compromise, conciliate, and flat out fumble the ball when it comes to caving to the GOP in fighting for increased funding and initiatives that help the urban poor. But the real kicker has been the GOP. West, Scott and black Republicans delude themselves that the GOP is a party that has something to offer blacks and delude themselves further in implying that the party has put out the welcome mat for blacks.

The GOP's long, blatant, and infuriating history of racial exclusion, neglect and race baiting, and polarization is smoking gun proof of that. The endless foot in the mouth, racially-insulting gaffes, racially-loaded campaign ads by Republican officials and politicians, and the refusal by mainstream GOP leaders to loudly condemn them, ignore, downplay, or worse defend them hasn't helped. The endless racist taunts, mockery, depictions, and ridicule of President Obama has been a textbook example of how a party that claims to want to break the grip that the Democrats have on the black vote does everything to insure that the Democratic grip is even tighter. This further confirms black suspicions that the GOP is chock full of bigots.

It's hard to deny that Democrats take black voters for granted. It's also hard to deny that Republicans couldn't care less about attracting black voters.

Perhaps that stands to reason, since black voters are less likely to buy into the anti-government rhetoric Republicans love to indulge in, and are more likely to support candidates who acknowledge the need to have government work effectively. Perhaps black voters would consider supporting moderate Republicans such as Jon Huntsman. However, it's impossible to envision these voters supporting folks who seem to believe that government is inherently evil.

Moneyball

2011-08-19T01:58:00.000-07:00

Is GOP candidate Herman Cain on the take?

Liberal activist and actress Janeane Garofalo appeared on Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" show on the Current TV network Wednesday night. Garofalo went on several rants, one of which included accusing the Tea Party, which she calls a "fundamentalist" movement, of racism.

Garofalo also said successful businessman Herman Cain is either being paid to run or is suffering from Stockholm syndrome because he is a "person of color" running as a Republican in the party's presidential primary.

"[He's] in this presidential race because he deflects the racism that is inherent in the Republican party, the conservative movement, the Tea Party certainly. [In] the last 30 years the Republican party has been moving more and more to the right, but also race-baiting more. Gay-baiting more. Religion-baiting more," Garofalo said.

"But, Herman Cain, I feel like, is being paid by somebody to be involved and to run for president so that you go like 'I love that, that can't be racist. He's a black guy, a black guy asking for Obama being impeached.' Or 'it's a black guy whose anti-Muslim. It's a black guy who is a Tea Party guy.'"

Garofalo also had some conspiracy theories as to who may be putting Cain up to this.

"And I feel like wouldn't that suit the purposes of whomever astroturfs these things. Whether that be the Koch brothers or Grover Norquist or any anything. It could even be Karl Rove. 'Let's get Herman Cain involved so it deflects the obvious racism of our Republican party,'" Garofalo said.

"Would that be separate from his delusions of grandeur or are they just taking advantage of him?" host Keith Olbermann asked.

Ms. Garofalo disagreed but had another reason for why she thinks Cain is in the race which includes diagnosing him with Stockholm syndrome.

"He's a businessman," she said sarcastically. "Who ever pays him. And there may be a touch of Stockholm syndrome. There may be a touch of Stockholm syndrome in there because anytime I see a person of color or a female in the Republican party or the conservative movement or the Tea Party, I wonder how they could be trying to curry with the oppressors. Is it Stockholm syndrome or does somebody pay them?"

I do not believe Herman Cain is being paid to run, though I understand why Garofalo would think this way. Michael Steele was clearly selected as RNC Chair to protect the anti-Obama right from charges of racism, and Armstrong Williams, another black conservative, was paid to shill for No Child Left Behind in the 2000s.

However, Garofalo's claims are far-fetched. Why would anti-Obama conservatives hire only one non-Caucasian candidate to deflect racism charges? Why not pay several to run? Why not financially induce Sen. Marco Rubio or Rep. Allan West to run, so that Americans would see a rainbow coalition of Republicans on the debate stage?

Garofalo is right to note that the American right has dramatically ramped up gay-baiting, religion-baiting and race-baiting rhetoric (i.e., Rush "Obama the Burglar" Limbaugh) in recent years. However, she is wrong to suggest, without evidence, that Herman Cain is being paid to run.

No, I don't think Garofalo is a "liberal racist." I see where she's going with this...but there's no evidence to back up her theory.

As for Garofalo saying she doesn't understand why any person of color would have anything to do with the American right, I'd love to have a conversation with her to explain why I became a Republican...and why I'm so disillusioned with the American right today.

Lesson Learned

2011-08-16T17:30:00.000-07:00

Are libertarian activists Charles and David Koch--best known for their efforts to convince gullible people that anthropogenic climate change is a hoax--also trying to "resegregate" American public schools?

At first glance, the billionaire libertarian Koch brothers and the Wake County, North Carolina, school board couldn't be more disparate. Charles and David Koch, the brains behind the massive Koch Industries conglomerate and the funders of so many right-wing political causes, are national figures, credited with (or accused of, depending on your political persuasion) launching the tea party movement and waging war on the Obama administration and its agenda. The Wake County public school board is, well, just that.

In reality, there are deep connections between the Kochs and Wake County, and it's all about the money. The latest installment in the left-leaning Brave New Foundation's "Koch Brothers Exposed" video series reveals how a Koch-founded and funded outfit, Americans for Prosperity, fueled a campaign to "resegregate" the schools of Wake County, a prosperous area in central North Carolina that's home to the cities of Raleigh and Cary, among others.

The story starts back in 2009, when elections were held for four of Wake County's nine school board seats—enough seats to dictate the public school district's agenda if all four board members wanted the same reforms. That's where Americans for Prosperity, a conservative political advocacy group, came into play. AFP swooped in to fund and organize on behalf of four candidates who sought to kill the district's policy of busing to ensure diverse, desegregated public schools. The AFP-backed candidates ran against what they called "forced busing"—a phrase, the film points out, that dates back to George Wallace in the 1970s—and instead stressed that schools should educate only those who lived in the surrounding neighborhood.

Local reporters, some of whom are interviewed in the film, connected the push to eliminate busing with the philosophies of AFP and its funders. "They're definitely pushing an agenda to resegregate these schools, but there's also a real push toward privatization," Sue Sturgis of the Institute for Southern Studies says in the film.

This is a situation with no easy answers...

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Opponents, like the filmmaker and activist Robert Greenwald, say at the heart of the battle is a larger fight over publicly-funded education and the Koch brothers commitment to funding activism, which falls in line with their libertarian agenda.

"I don't want to be a panic or hysteric, but if you can have the Koch brother billionaires, multibillionaires, buying a school board election, where does it stop?" said Greenwald, who this morning released"Koch Brothers Exposed: Why do the Koch Brothers Want to End Public Education?", a short film on the Koch Brothers' role in the Wake County election.

“This money is buying ideology and that has a consequence," he said. "It's such a tough situation because here are local people with a school system that is working, that people are enjoying, that has created a good education, created diversity [and] created success."

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The Washington Post covered this story earlier in the year.

This story is fascinating. Having grown up in the Boston area, I'm well aware that programs intended to foster diversity in education don't always work the way they're supposed to, to say the least. However, I'm highly skeptical of virtually anything the Koch Brothers are associated with these days. Maybe the truth lies somewhere between both sides of this contentious issue.

Robbed of Credibility

2011-08-09T17:28:00.000-07:00

I thank the great author John Wilson for allowing me to write a guest post for his blog about the Rush Limbaugh/Barack Obama "cover controversy."

Conservatives for Obama

2011-08-08T01:52:00.000-07:00

Michael Medved on the sort of conservatives who won't be voting Republican in 2012.

After President Obama's faltering, uncertain performance in the recent debt-ceiling crisis, and with new polling showing self-described “conservatives” outnumbering “liberals” by crushing, consistent margins, Republicans ought to face the upcoming presidential race with eagerness and confidence.

Nevertheless, political professionals uniformly predict that the president could easily cruise to reelection and will, at the very least, wage a close, hard-fought campaign against even the most formidable Republican opponent.

This glaring contradiction between the nation’s ideological tilt to the right and the president’s continued status as frontrunner for 2012 exposes two important secrets about voting patterns of the American electorate.

First, ideological orientation seldom determines the success or failure of presidential contenders. And second, race remains a decisive factor for enough U.S. voters to dictate the outcome of close national elections.

On ideology, Republicans felt powerfully encouraged by the results of an Aug. 1 Gallup poll showing nearly twice as many American adults calling themselves “conservative” (41 percent) as those who see themselves as “liberal” (21 percent). The survey reports that these numbers have remained surprisingly constant since 2009, and that liberals have languished below 25 percent for nearly 20 years.

Similar numbers in all major surveys show that the president would have to do far more than rally his liberal base to earn victory in 2012. If both Democrats and Republicans drew 90 percent support from liberals and conservatives, respectively, Barack Obama would need to carry a farfetched 85 percent of self-described moderates in order to reach a bare majority of 51 percent—a dramatic improvement from the 60 percent of moderates he won in 2008, according to exit polls. No candidate, not even landslide victors like Ronald Reagan and Lyndon Johnson, has ever managed to prevail among middle-of-the-roaders by the unimaginable 6-to-1 margin that Obama would, theoretically, need.

How, then, could the president plausibly win reelection?

By concentrating on one of the most significant but frequently overlooked aspects of electoral behavior: In presidential contests, voters seldom (or never) make final decisions based on ideology....

Considering the strident, hyperpartisan polarization in Washington, it may come as a shock that more than one out of five Americans who use the word “conservative” to define their ideology still think Obama does a fine job as president.

Who are these conservative Obama lovers?

The answer to that question points toward the second revelation that helps explain how an unequivocally liberal president maintains a chance to prevail in an increasingly conservative nation. The voters who support Obama in spite of ideology are to a great extent black, Hispanic, and Asian conservatives who feel drawn to right-wing ideas but remain allergic to the Republican Party.

This phenomenon became painfully obvious in California in 2008, when hefty majorities of both African-Americans and Latinos voted to defend traditional male-female marriage in the bitter Proposition 8 fight. On the same ballot, Obama carried the state in a landslide, powered largely by the same black and Latino voters who disagreed with Democrats on Proposition 8 (known to liberals as “Proposition Hate”).

These black, Hispanic, and Asian conservatives aren’t just expressing solidarity with the nation’s first nonwhite president. In the Republican sweep of 2010, with Obama’s name nowhere on the ballot, Republican candidates struck out once again with voters of color, barely improving their feeble performance of two years before in minority communities. In national balloting for House seats, only 9 percent of black voters backed GOP candidates, along with 38 percent of Latinos and 40 percent of Asians. Despite the successful GOP campaigns of new Latino governors in New Mexico and Nevada, new Hispanic House members from Idaho, Washington, and Texas, and the emergence of dynamic black GOP congressmen in Florida and South Carolina, the reluctance to vote Republican barely budged from 2008.

Depressed turnout among minorities pushed the white percentage of the 2010 electorate to 77 percent. But there’s no chance that the GOP could—or should—rely on a similar victory formula in the upcoming presidential race, when participation is always higher across the board.

Conservatives in the black, Hispanic, and growing Asian communities should therefore become a special target for any GOP challenger to Barack Obama. In every ethnic enclave in America, a significant percentage of the population (many of them loyal churchgoers) espouses right-leaning values but currently feels uncomfortable with the Republican Party. Part of this unease stems from multigenerational family traditions, or from the GOP’s longstanding reputation as a closed country club welcoming only elderly, white, Christian males, or from cynical Democratic efforts to suggest that any criticism of Obama proves the presence of deep-seated Republican racism.

Medved makes an interesting point. Since the GOP has made it clear that it doesn't give a crap about attracting minority votes anymore, perhaps Obama's re-election is assured, his current difficulties notwithstanding.

Talent on loan from the devil

2011-08-05T02:42:00.000-07:00

Rush Limbaugh embraces old-school bigotry.

50 years ago, when Barack Obama was born, the idea of a black president in America was unthinkable. The fact that he is president shows how much racial progress has been made in America. But there is still a large core of racism in this country, reflected in the open bigotry of leading conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh.

I just received the August issue of “The Limbaugh Letter” (Rush's highly profitable 16-page “magazine” consisting of ghostwritten pieces cobbled together from his various radio rants).

The cover features the latest in Rush's racial provocations: “Obama the Burglar.” Obama is dressed as a burglar with a black cap, carrying a bag of stuff and a silver candlestick as he exits the ransacked home of a rich man—Rush Limbaugh, to be precise, who looks on startled at this black robber in his castle.

Ah, yes, Obama as the dangerous black man coming to steal the white man's property. It's an ancient racist image.

In the article, Limbaugh accuses Obama of “robbing this country blind” and proclaims: “He's a burglar. All liberals are burglars. All liberals are thieves. That's what they do. It is who they are.”

Limbaugh depicts Obama's critique of tax loopholes and breaks for corporate jet owners as an attack on technology itself, predicting that he would go after the iPad 3 and the iPhone 5 and “tax the hell out of it so it ceases to exist.” According to Limbaugh, “You leave it up to Obama, and we won't need to be defeated by al Qaeda; we'll end up in the seventh century on our own.”

Of course, I'm sure that Limbaugh and his defenders will claim that he is not a racist because he believes that all liberals, black and white, are burglars. That's true. But it's no coincidence that Limbaugh depicts the black guy as the stereotypical burglar. Limbaugh hates Obama because he's a liberal, not just because he's black. But Limbaugh's racism shapes the bigoted way that he talks about Obama.

I can't defend Limbaugh anymore after seeing that sickening image.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

2011-07-25T03:26:00.000-07:00

Who will win the Latino vote in 2012?

Virtually any time President Obama has opened his mouth in public this month, it has been to talk about the debt ceiling. On Monday, he shifts his focus — at least for an hour — to address the National Council of La Raza, the largest Hispanic advocacy group in the country.

It's the latest effort in the president's intense campaign to win the hearts and minds of Latinos. In the White House, he has met with Hispanic celebrities, activists and policy groups for summits, lunches and parties.

Last month, Obama became the first sitting president since John F. Kennedy to make an official visit to Puerto Rico.

The month before that, the president delivered what was billed as a major immigration speech on the U.S.-Mexico border. The policy proposals were not dramatically new, but this attack on Republicans for blocking comprehensive immigration reform was:

"You know, they said we needed to triple the Border Patrol. Now they're going to say we need to quadruple the Border Patrol, or they'll want a higher fence. Maybe they'll need a moat — maybe they want alligators in the moat."

But some Latinos still don't feel that Obama has done enough. "It was at our annual conference at [the National Council of La Raza] when he was a candidate that he did make a promise that comprehensive immigration reform would be an absolute top priority," says Janet Murguia, La Raza's president and CEO. "And I think it's been disappointing for many of us in the Latino community."

When President Obama speaks to women's groups, or gay and lesbian audiences, he can point to a list of things his administration has accomplished for those communities. He can tell Latino groups that he appointed the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

But beyond that, there's a long list of unfinished business. Republicans see an opportunity to make inroads into the fastest-growing minority group in the country.

But will they take advantage of the opportunity? I'm not holding my breath...

Marketing Purposes

2011-07-15T01:48:00.000-07:00

Aaron Laramore on the Michele Bachmann pledge controversy. (Hat tip to Booker Rising)

Ham handed invocations of slavery like this one are proof positive that both the GOP leadership and rank and file still do not regard blacks as a political constituency necessary or essential to their aspirations for governance. If we did, we would figure out the right communication and enforce some goddamn messaging discipline just like we do for all other messaging we think is important. Its just not that hard. Because the GOP doesn't really give a damn about blacks as a political constituency, we continue to be subjected to unforced errors like this. Lazy, small bore attacks that aspire to depress a portion of the black vote by demoralizing attrition, all the while deriving what I can't help but believe is a certain savage subconscious satisfaction at rubbing the incompetence of the first African American president in the black communities' collective face.

Know Where You Are

2011-07-11T01:46:00.000-07:00

Coby Dillard is tired of black conservative pundits engaging in blatant pandering. (Hat tip to Booker Rising)

I’m feeling some kinda way about my fellow black conservatives, so...this is for us.

Over the last year or so, I’ve noticed that more and more of us are stepping out into the public eye. While that’s great, a couple things over the last week have also really disturbed me...[including] the defense of the Family Leader’s pledge that Rep. Bachmann signed (that, of course, has now been edited).

Why are these things disturbing to me? Because they’re showing that we’re trying too hard to be down for the cause…and in that trying too hard, we’re losing ourselves and forgetting where we come from.

I get the emotion, the passion, the conviction. That’s needed. What isn’t is the-calling it by its name-pandering. We don’t have to prove our conservatism-be it urban, social, fiscal, whatever-to anyone. Our message, on its merits alone, can resonate anywhere, without having to play to the sympathies of those who are, too often, our biggest supporters. And if that’s the sole reason we do it-appeasement-then what will that really say about our “conviction” when the support’s gone?

Second, we’d all do well to remember one thing as black conservatives: we are still black. Some of y’all won’t like that, but walk with me:

Our experience is both uniquely American and uniquely black; it’s always going to be. We can try to focus on the American more, and I believe that we should. But at the end of the day, we are still black men and women in America, with all the positive and negative that comes with.

We can’t forget that, because the people we’re hoping to reach out to, who we want to win over to our side-they haven’t forgotten it…and in too many cases, they’re closer to its reality than many of us are.

Let Michele Bachmann defend herself.

Marco Solo

2011-07-09T01:49:00.000-07:00

Looks like Florida Senator Marco Rubio isn't the GOP's great Latino hope, according to Ruben Navarrette of the Washington Post.

Poor Marco Rubio. Florida’s junior senator could have been a contender. Instead, he’s become a caricature.

In parts of the Hispanic community, Rubio is thought of as just another ambitious politician who is willing to sell out Latinos to curry favor with Anglo colleagues. That’s what you hear from Internet chatter, letters to the editor, Latino listservs and comments on Spanish-language media.

Just seven months after taking office, the Republicans’ great Latino hope has squandered the one thing that made him unique, interesting and valuable to his party: the potential that he could help mend fences with disaffected Latino voters alienated by the GOP’s simplistic and mean-spirited approach to the immigration issue.

In a recent poll by Latino Decisions and ImpreMedia, immigration was the No. 1 issue for Latino voters, topping jobs and the economy by more than 15 points. More than half of the respondents said they know someone who is undocumented. This issue hits close to home.

Over the past few years, Republicans have dug themselves into a hole with Latino voters, and Rubio was supposed to help pull them out. It’s one reason that Beltway pundits continue to speculate whether he could wind up as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2012 and whether this alone would be enough to persuade Latinos to give Republicans a fair hearing.

This is what Rubio was supposed to bring to the party. Otherwise, what good is he to his colleagues if he can only deliver votes — for instance, from Tea Partyers — that would probably go to Republicans anyway?

Former Florida Republican Party chairman Al Cardenas believes that Rubio could do the GOP a lot of good in 2012. Now head of the American Conservative Union, Cardenas recently told Politico that putting Rubio on the presidential ticket would “almost guarantee” a Republican victory.

Cardenas needs to get out more — out of Florida and, better yet, out to the Southwest.

Rubio is becoming persona non grata among Latinos outside of the Cuban American community, which represents only 3 percent of the Latino population in the United States. Specifically, he is becoming intensely disliked by many naturalized Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who make up as much as 67 percent of the U.S. Latino population. Those voters could affect the electoral outcome in battleground states such as Colorado and New Mexico, and in vote-rich states such as Texas and California.

All this has happened because, since arriving in Washington, Rubio has followed his party’s pitiful example of dealing with the immigration issue in a clumsy, reactionary and unimaginative way.

Man in the Mirror

2011-07-08T17:01:00.000-07:00

Michael Stafford on the GOP's diversity dilemma.

Earlier this year, a tape of NPR's head fundraiser, Ron Schiller, making remarks critical of the GOP and the Tea Party surfaced. In the tape, Schiller referred to the Republican Party as "anti-intellectual" and described the Tea Party as "racist," "Islamophobic," and "xenophobic." He went on to opine that "Jews" control America's major newspapers.

Schiller's bizarre and conspiratorial anti-Semitic remarks are disturbing and offensive. His remarks about the GOP, though, warrant further analysis for a simple reason - they are perceptions widely shared in our society.

Conservatives reacted to Schiller's comments with anger. In their eyes, it was just one more example of a liberal establishment standing ever ready to portray Republicans and conservatives in a negative light.

That reaction was a mistake. In truth, Schiller created an opportunity for discussion and critical self-analysis about racism within the Republican Party. This was an opportunity, not for anger, but for self-examination.

Simply put, it's time for the Party of Lincoln to take a good look in the mirror.

Although conservatives were quick to dismiss Schiller's remarks, there is ample evidence available that would lead reasonable people to such conclusions. One can point to examples such as Sharron Angle's 2010 anti-immigrant campaign television ads, and to more recent comments by Kansas State Representative Virgil Peck suggesting that unauthorized immigrants should be hunted down and shot like feral swine.

And then there are the e-mails. Nationally, Republican staffers and local party officials have made headlines forwarding racist e-mails about President Obama to friends and colleagues. Most recently, the reaction within Republican circles to an offensive cartoon distributed by a local GOP officer and Tea Party activist, Marilyn Davenport, led a prominent African American leader active in the California GOP, Ken Barnes, to leave the Party. Writing in the Sacramento Bee about his decision, Barnes' noted that the cartoon at issue "depicted President Barack Obama and his parents as chimpanzees, while simultaneously implying that the president is not a legitimate American, but rather an African-born interloper." For Barnes' "[h]ad this been an isolated event, it could be set aside as a mere aberration. However, when placed in the context of similar offenses by the same self-identified tea party-conservative Republicans, there emerges a disturbing pattern of extreme intolerance."

How did the Party of Lincoln come to such a pass? I think the answer is simple. For far too long, we have refused to confront, and condemn, the vestiges of political racism that have, over the course of the past 30-40 years, found a new political home within the Republican Party. I'm speaking here primarily of the movement of the segregationist Dixiecrats (and kindred ideological spirits) out of the Democratic Party, and into the GOP- a movement personified, in some ways, by the late Senator Strom Thurmond. This alliance has poisoned the very soul of American conservatism by tying it to belief systems that are reprehensible, and indefensible. It has permitted a dangerous pathology to survive, and today, at a moment of great social stress, despair, and anxiety about the future, to move back towards the political mainstream. It was, and remains, a fundamental betrayal of the founding ideals of the Republican Party.

Someone tell Michele Bachmann!

GOP presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann has signed a conservative pledge called "The Marriage Vow -- A Declaration of Dependence Upon Marriage and Family." It's not surprising that it's anti-abortion, anti-same sex marriage and anti-divorce. But one particular piece has everyone up in arms over the idea that she and other signatories think that black people were better off during slavery:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.

Do Bachmann and others who signed the pledge actually think we were better off without freedom and with all of the other emotional and physical horrors that accompanied being enslaved? We don't know, quite honestly doubt they care, and don't believe that's actually the point (and the very accuracy of the statement -- including whether living arrangements during slavery are what we'd consider "two-parent households" -- is a whole different conversation).

What's actually disturbing here is the total willingness to invoke slavery -- as well as the current state of the black family -- to serve as a cheap emotional hook to promote a conservative agenda that has nothing more to do with African Americans than it does with anyone else (not unlike the infamous "The most dangerous place for an African American is in the womb" billboards).

Sometimes I think the GOP is a lost cause...

No Joke

2011-06-19T02:38:00.000-07:00

Wonder what Herman Cain thinks about this...

A President Obama impersonator was pulled off the stage Saturday at the Republican Leadership Conference, after telling a string of racially themed jokes about the president.

The impersonator, Reggie Brown, took the stage at the annual presidential cattle call to the Bruce Springsteen song “Born in the USA” — an apparent allusion to the birther controversy. He proceeded to tell a series of off-color jokes poking fun at Obama’s biracial heritage and a gay member of Congress.

Eventually, RLC President and CEO Charlie Davis made the decision to pull him offstage, and a man came onstage to physcially escort Brown off.

“I pulled him off the stage,” Davis acknowledged afterward. “I just thought he had gone too far. He was funny the first 10 or 15 minutes, but it was inappropriate, it was getting ridiculous.”

Davis added: “We’ve had a great event. Probably the only problem we’ve had was the impersonator.”

A sampling of the racial jokes:

• On Black History Month: “Michelle celebrates the full month. I celebrate half.”

• “My mother loved a black man,” but “she was not a Kardashian.”

That sound you hear is all of Jack Kemp's work going right down the drain...

An uneasy mixture of laughter and groans gave way to boos when Brown began insulting Republican candidates. When he began taking aim at Rep. Michele Bachmann, event organizers cut his microphone and brought up music; a Louisiana Republican Party official came on stage to escort him off, apparently well before Brown's set was complete.

The Louisiana Republican Party had hired Brown for a video in which he sits in a fake Oval Office pledging to serve as chairman of the GOP's voter registration drive. But hiring an Obama impersonator is dangerous, not least because of the racial element it brings.

"Wonder why many minorities have problems with GOP? Hiring Obama impersonator to tell 'black jokes' at SRLC, for starters," tweeted Doug Heye, a GOP strategist who served as the RNC's communications director during 2010. "Our own fault."

UPDATE: From Media Bistro.

Demonic

2011-06-15T15:58:00.000-07:00

I swear, some conservatives don't want people of color voting for the party of Lincoln.

The special election to replace the retired Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) just took a turn for the spectacular. A new web video aimed at boosting the Republican chances for an upset win is
dropping jaws at the Democratic candidate's headquarters and prompting calls for a bipartisan condemnation of the shockingly negative attack.

The election pits Los Angeles Councilwoman Janice Hahn (D) against businessman Craig Huey, a tea party Republican who's second place finish in one of California's first jungle primaries came as a surprise to most. The race to the July 12 runoff has fallen to the national backburner as attention shifted to the NY-26 race and a more general discussion of Rep. Paul Ryan's (R) budget plan.

That could be about to change, thanks to the web ad produced by the brand-new Turn Right USA PAC, which filed its official paperwork last week.

Simply put, the ad is Willie Horton on steroids. The 90-second clip accuses Hahn of being too cozy with gang criminals in the past, a charge she's faced for a while and her campaign says has been thoroughly debunked.

Even Lee Atwater wouldn't go this far.

Outfoxed II

2011-06-14T17:16:00.000-07:00

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.

On Friday, Fox Business host Eric Bolling offered the kind of racist remarks rarely seen on national television, and after some pushback, the right-wing host backpedalled last night.

“On Friday, we did a story about the president meeting with the president of Gabon,” Bolling said. “We got a little fast and loose with the language, and we know it’s been interpreted as being disrespectful, and for that, I’m sorry. We did go a bit too far.”

I don’t mean to sound ungracious, and I’m glad Bolling is “sorry,” but characterizing his unabashed, leave-the-dog-whistle-at-home-style racism as “a bit too far” suggests Bolling doesn’t fully appreciate the situation.

On Friday night, Bolling noted that President Obama will welcome the president of Gabon to the White House, telling viewers, “Guess who’s coming to dinner? A dictator. Mr. Obama shares a laugh with one of Africa’s kleptocrats. It’s not first time he’s had a hoodlum in the hizzouse.” At that point, viewers were shown footage of the rapper Common.

Bolling went on to say, “Smile for the birdie. Our president’s sitting with one of Africa’s most wanted. It’s not the first time he’s had a hood in the big crib.” This time, an image of Ali Bongo with a flashing tooth was aired. Bolling added that Obama and Gabon perhaps “watched a basketball game” together, and asked, “So what’s with all the hoods in the hizzy?”

What was this dude thinking?

Not the best moment for Fox Business.

More from Jeffrey Goldberg.

Turnaround Time

2011-06-13T01:45:00.000-07:00

A veteran black Republican explain why he has left the GOP.

I was one of those rare species: a black Republican, the guy willing to spit into the wind of conventional thought, who was often showcased on camera at party events to prove inclusiveness.

But as a proud black man, I can no longer be a member of the Republican Party.

Being a Republican has long been a part of my personal and professional identities, so leaving the party is a difficult and emotional decision.

In 1998, as a young man searching for what I believed were shared values, I cut ties with the Democratic Party and became a Republican. Democrats, in my view, had become unwelcoming to those holding center-right views not in lockstep with the party, and it was my belief that through hard work, the Republican Party could be utilized as a vehicle for improving our community.

For the next 13 years, I dedicated myself to growing the conservative base of the Republican Party, and in the process bound myself in emotion and deed.

During that time, I worked on behalf of Republican candidates at all levels, from presidential and gubernatorial campaigns, on down to local elections.

I have had the pleasure of serving as president of the Sacramento Republican Assembly, a term as a member of the California Republican Party executive committee, and most recently as treasurer of the Sacramento County Republican Party.

Last year alone, I donated more than 400 hours of my time to the Republican Party and made financial contributions to a number of Republican candidates.

As of late, however, when I look at myself in the mirror there is one question which perplexes me: Can I, in good conscience, remain affiliated with an organization whose message purveyors of racism and bigotry find attractive?

Over the past two years, we have seen Republicans use long-held racist imagery in portrayals of Obama. The president has been depicted as a communist witch doctor, a man inclined to plant watermelons on the White House lawn, and we watched in disbelief as his face was placed on an "Obama Buck Food Stamp" along with stereotyped pictures of fried chicken, barbecue ribs, Kool-Aid and the obligatory watermelon.

What does any of this have to do with public policy or conservative values? Here is a man who excelled academically at the finest schools in the world, has a wonderful in-tact family, worked hard and rose to become president of the United States. Yet in spite of his accomplishments, the president is still labeled an illegitimate, socialist, African witch doctor and has his face superimposed on a chimpanzee.

If this can be done to a black man who is the leader of the free world, how long will it be before fellow Republicans insert my face on a chimpanzee?

Something tells me he's not a fan of Eric Bolling of Fox Business...

UPDATE: An interview with Mr. Barnes.

Outfoxed

2011-06-12T07:44:00.000-07:00

You have to be kidding me.

During the opening of Fox Business’ Follow the Money on Friday, Eric Bolling teased a segment about the White House hosting the president of Gabon by saying, “Guess who’s coming to dinner? A dictator. Mr. Obama shares a laugh with one of Africa’s kleptocrats. It’s not first time he’s had a hoodlum in the hizzouse.” […]

As Bolling said that Obama had previously hosted “a hoodlum in the hizzouse,” footage of the rapper Common aired. […]

Later in the show, Bolling teased the segment again: “Smile for the birdie. Our president’s sitting with one of Africa’s most wanted. It’s not the first time he’s had a hood in the big crib.” This time, an image of Bongo with a flashing tooth showed up as Bolling said, “Smile for the birdie.”

Bolling began the segment itself by saying, in part, “So what’s with all the hoods in the hizzy?”

Not the first time this sort of language has been used...

Not only is this stupid and offensive, it's not even the best way to criticize President Obama! My goodness...

School Daze

2011-06-08T16:02:00.000-07:00

Is there a connection between education spending and student performance? In Massachusetts, it appears the answer is no.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts could cut more than a billion dollars from education spending without measurably affecting the performance of public schools. This is a finding of a study released today by the Beacon Hill Institute and entitled, Why Massachusetts Should Spend Less on Education.

This finding is the result of an econometric analysis that BHI performed on a database that combines school level data from the Massachusetts Department of Education for the Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests from 1999 to 2008 and financial and demographic data from the National Center for Education Statistics. We use the Composite Performance Index (CPI) which allows us to apply a new methodology to our panel of data on exam results for several hundred schools for nine years.

The purpose of the analysis was to determine how a small increase or decrease in state education spending would affect school performance, as measured by scores on the standardized MCAS test. The state provides data on school performance in mathematics and English for 4th and 10th graders and in English for 8th graders.

For traditional public schools, the Institute found that a 10 percent cut in school spending would:

• Worsen 4th grade performance in mathematics by 0.43% and have no effect on 4th grade performance in English.
• Worsen 8th grade performance in mathematics by 0.72% and
• Improve 10th grade performance in English by 0.91% and improve 10th grade performance in mathematics by 0.61% percent

In Fiscal Year (FY) 2010, Massachusetts state and local governments spent $10.4 billion on public school education or $11,068 per student. To ensure equity, the state mandates a “foundation budget” that sets minimum levels of per pupil spending. School spending exceeds this foundation budget by about $1.326 billion.

The Institute recommends paring back state aid to education by enough to bring actual spending into line with the foundation budget. By taking this step, the state could use the funds to reduce its structural deficit. A cut of this magnitude in education spending would have no measurable effect on school performance.

The convention wisdom is that more education spending leads to better scholastic performance. Perhaps the conventional wisdom needs to be challenged--in Massachusetts and in other states?

A-Paul-ing

2011-05-14T06:07:00.001-07:00

Oh, not this again.

Last May, then-candidate Rand Paul’s (R) Senate campaign in Kentucky ran into a little trouble. The self-accredited ophthalmologist explained in newspaper, radio, and television interviews that he disapproved of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because the private sector should be allowed to do as it pleases. “[T]his,” Paul said at the time, “is the hard part about believing in freedom.”

Asked specifically by Rachel Maddow, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say, ‘We don’t serve black people’?” Paul replied, “Yes.” Seven months later, he won easily.

Almost exactly a year later, Paul’s father, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, explained his nearly identical beliefs about the milestone civil rights legislation.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Jack Kemp and Everett Dirksen are spinning in their grave.

The Next Time You Wonder Why People of Color Are Reluctant to Vote Republican, Part II

2011-04-29T01:51:00.000-07:00

Un-freakin-believable.

The Republican-controlled Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a proposed constitutional amendment yesterday that would eliminate Affirmative Action in state government. The offical GOP reasoning for the change is that while “discrimination exists,” “I don’t think Affirmative Action has been as successful as we like to believe,” the bill’s sponsor, state Rep. T.W. Shannon (R), explained. But perpetual extremist state Rep. Sally Kern (R) offered her argument for ending the system that helps minorities advance: “blacks” simply don’t work as hard as whites:

Rep. Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City, said minorities earn less than white people because they don’t work as hard and have less initiative.

“We have a high percentage of blacks in prison, and that’s tragic, but are they in prison just because they are black or because they don’t want to study as hard in school? I’ve taught school, and I saw a lot of people of color who didn’t study hard because they said the government would take care of them.”

Kern said women earn less than men because “they tend to spend more time at home with their families.”

Rachel Maddow can't believe it either.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

There are good arguments against quotas. Sally Kern's arguments are NOT good ones. To say the least.

Cape Fear

2011-04-23T05:53:00.000-07:00

A new documentary asks: why are there so few black Republicans?

Could be one of the year's most interesting documentaries.

The Next Time You Wonder Why People of Color Are Reluctant to Vote Republican...

2011-04-17T05:58:00.000-07:00

...think about this story.

A tea party activist and elected member of the Orange County Republican central committee said she will not heed calls to resign because she emailed a picture of President Barack Obama's face on the body of a chimpanzee.

Marilyn Davenport of Fullerton recently emailed a picture of Obama's face superimposed over a baby chimp's face with the caption, "Now you know why — No birth certificate!"

OC Weekly political blogger R. Scott Moxley reported on the email, causing civil rights activists and some Republicans, including county GOP Chairman Scott Baugh, to call for her to resign from the county central committee.

Baugh told the Los Angeles Times he received the email Friday afternoon and sent a reply email telling Davenport it was "dripping with racism and is in very poor taste."

He said he thought the Orange County Republican's ethics committee should take up the matter.

"I saw the e-mail and I thought it was despicable,'' Baugh told the OC Weekly.

When Moxley reached her for comment, she said, "You're not going to make a big deal about this, are you? Oh, come on! Everybody who knows me knows I am not a racist. "It was a joke. I have friends who are black.''

City News Service was unable to contact her Saturday.

Earl Ofari Hutchison, a Los Angeles commentator and president of the L.A. Urban Policy Roundtable, said "Davenport's vile, crude, racist depiction of the president and his family demands immediate action by the GOP.''

The Times reported that Baugh sent an email to committee members Saturday saying Davenport called the Obama photo a "joke" and wanted to know who had leaked it to Moxley.

She called the leak "cowardly" and added, "Anyone brave enough to come forward?"

She described the hubbub as "much to do about nothing" and said she would not resign.

"I'm sorry if my email offended anyone, I simply found it amusing regarding the character of Obama and all the questions surrounding his origin of birth," she wrote.

"In no way did I even consider the fact he's half black when I sent out the email. In fact, the thought never entered my mind until one or two other people tried to make this about race.

"We all know a double standard applies regarding this president. I received plenty of emails about George Bush that I didn't particularly like, yet there was no 'cry' in the media about them."

If Davenport refuses to step down, she should be expelled, Michael Schroeder, former chairman of the state Republican Party and an Orange County GOP activist, told The Times.

"I looked at it and my jaw dropped," he said.

I mean, goddamn...

Minority Report

2011-04-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

Michael Barone is confident that the GOP can survive demographic changes in the US.

Are whites on the verge of becoming a minority of the American population? That's what some analysts of the 2010 census results say. Many go on, sometimes with relish, to say that this spells electoral doom for the Republican Party.

I think the picture is more complicated than that. And that the demise of the Republican Party is no more foreordained than it was a century ago when Italian, Jewish and Polish immigrants were pouring into the United States in proportions much greater than the Hispanic and Asian immigration of the past two decades.

The numbers do appear stark. The census tells us that 16 percent of U.S. residents are Hispanic, up from 13 percent in 2000 and 9 percent in 1990, and that 5 percent are Asian, up from 4 percent in 2000. The percentage of blacks held steady at 13. Among children, the voters of tomorrow, those percentages are higher.

But it's a mistake to see blacks, Hispanics and Asians as a single "people of color" voting bloc. The 2010 exit poll shows that the Republican percentages in the vote for the U.S. House were 60 percent among whites, 9 percent among blacks, 38 percent among Hispanics and 40 percent among Asians.

Simple arithmetic tells you that Hispanics and Asians vote more like whites than like blacks. The picture is similar in the 2008 exit poll.

Moreover, while blacks vote similarly in just about every state, there is wide variation among Hispanics. In 2010 governor elections Hispanics voted 31 percent Republican in California, 38 percent Republican in Texas and 50 percent Republican in Florida (where Cubans are no longer a majority of Hispanics).

As RealClearPolitics senior political analyst Sean Trende has written, Hispanics tend to vote 10 to 15 percent less Republican than whites of similar income and education levels. An increasingly Hispanic electorate puts Republicans at a disadvantage, but not an overwhelming one.

The same is true of Asians. In 2010 Democratic Sen. Harry Reid got 79 percent from Asians in Nevada, where many are Filipinos. But the Asians in Middlesex County, N.J., most of whom are from India, seem to have voted for Republican Gov. Chris Christie in 2009...

[T]here is an assumption -- which is particularly strong among those who expect a majority-"people of color" electorate to put Democrats in power permanently -- that racial consciousness never changes. But sometimes it does.

American blacks do have common roots in slavery and segregation. But African immigrants don't share that heritage, and Hispanics come from many different countries and cultures (there are big regional differences just within Mexico). The Asian category includes anyone from Japan to Lebanon and in between.

Under the definitions in use in the America of a century ago, when Southern and Eastern European immigrants were not regarded as white, the United States became a majority nonwhite nation some time in the 1950s. By today's definitions we'll become majority nonwhite a few decades hence.

But that may not make for the vast cultural and political change some predict. Not if we assimilate newcomers, and if our two political parties adapt, as we and they have done in the past.

I'm not as hopeful as Barone. The GOP has been terrible at reaching out to voters of color with a compelling economic message. If the party bothered to convince voters of color that supply-side economic policies offer benefits for them, perhaps they'd be rewarded at the ballot box. However, it seems that the GOP can't work up the energy to do so. Wonder why that is?

An Education

2011-03-24T16:23:00.000-07:00

Can charter schools close the achievement gap? The Beacon Hill Institute, a prominent Massachusetts think tank, says yes--and says the number of charter schools in the Bay State should be doubled.

[O]ur research indicates that charter schools are a viable alternative to traditional public schools. If policymakers desire
improved student test scores without greater costs, they would be well served to lift the restrictions obstructing charter school growth and amend legislation governing traditional public schools to incorporate similar elements of freedom and accountability.

One determinant of the superior performance of charter schools over traditional public schools is likely the autonomy that charter schools enjoy in setting their own curricula. Traditionally, all students in a district are taught the same material using the same methods. The freedom granted to charter schools encourages teachers to experiment and innovate with teaching strategies that would remain underused
in traditional public schools because of bureaucratic rigidity. Not all children benefit uniformly from particular educational regime; charter schools allow teachers the freedom to cater to a variety of student needs that traditional public schools cannot meet. If legislators wish to promote a learning environment responsive to student diversity, it makes sense to decentralize the education structure and give authority to teachers and parents.

Another important factor driving charter schools’ success is the increased accountability they face compared to non‐charter public schools. Charter schools are judged largely by output‐based metrics (such as standardized test scores), and their continued existence depends upon their ability to produce satisfactory results; non‐charter public schools do not face nearly the same degree of scrutiny. Charter schools can have their charters revoked if they fail to meet their sponsors’ expectations, which creates a strong incentive for their administration and faculty to thoroughly prepare students for the standardized tests. This is not an idle threat; six of the 77 charters granted in Massachusetts since 1994 have been revoked or not renewed.

Could an expansion of charter schools in the Bay State lead to similar educational reforms across the country? As goes Massachusetts...

The Urban Wrong

2011-03-16T16:20:00.000-07:00

The Economist on the GOP's lack of interest in urban America.

The Republican Party, as it is presently constituted, is to a great extent the party of rural and suburban white people.

The GOP and especially the various tea-party movements do love their libertarian, free-market rhetoric. But that doesn't mean the right has functioning libertarian, free-market principles. The organising principle of the contemporary right is the identity politics of "Americanism", the upshot of which is that the lifestyle and values of non-city-dwelling white people are (as opposed to the lifestyles and values of urban, non-white people) authentically American. Because, you know, residing in a colossal, heavily-subsidised, detached, single-family compound in a vast exurban development with convenient access to an interstate highway is exactly what James Madison had in mind. Pro-minority, pro-poor urbanism, as lovely as that sounds to my ear, sends all the wrong signals to the American-flag t-shirt crowd.

Depressingly true.

The Powell Doctrine

2011-03-08T01:40:00.000-08:00

Nadra Enzi on Colin Powell, one of the few black Republicans who's not considered an exile in the black community. (Hat tip to BookerRising.com)

Moderates like General Colin Powell, unlike 'righter-than-thou' hardliners, are able to bring a conservative message to a Black community still phobic from conservatism's (quite lively) racist baggage. His recent NAACP President's award, like its recent recogniton of Condoleezza Rice, should be greeted as proof that Black folks aren't as brainwashed by the Left as some claim.

General Powell's lesson to Black conservatives is elegant in its simplicity: one need not isolate oneself from the Black community in order to promote traditional values or alternatives to one-party rule. His 'crossover appeal' to our Democratic majority is proof that so long as a conservative Black doesn't come off as a 'toon' in far right Black face, he/she has many in the community who'll receive this message. Past support for affirmative action and endorsing now-President Obama hasn't earned him friends on the Right's farther shores but has done much to rehabilitate the Black Republican image.

I've had my issues with Powell for years, but I now appreciate what he was trying to do in the GOP: ensure that there was a place for moderates and those who aren't full-fledged right-wing conservatives. He is an American hero, and he has earned the respect of all fair-minded Americans.

Black and Blue

2011-02-12T05:56:00.000-08:00

Chris Ladd on whether the GOP will be able to expand its demographic horizons in the 2010s.

For the first time since Reconstruction there are two black Republicans in Congress and both come from majority-white districts in the Deep South. These candidates point to both the promise and the problem of Republicans’ efforts to broaden the Party’s appeal beyond its overwhelmingly white modern constituency.

Where is the problem in this development? Those two successful candidates represented about 6% of the black Republicans in Congressional races last year. For all the progress on race issues, the GOP still cannot elect a black candidate in a black district. We’re not even close to doing that. Why? There are a lot of reasons, but only one really matters.

No black political figure can get a hearing inside the GOP right now while speaking truthfully about race. Period. An African-American who hopes for a place in the Republican power structure better know which subjects they can and cannot discuss. This problem limits the Party’s ability to build lasting appeal beyond a demographically declining white fundamentalist base and undermines its value to the country.

There are a lot of reasons why conservatives ought to be gaining serious ground in black communities. The old-left political model has betrayed African-Americans without mercy. It has allowed corrupt politicians to fleece majority black districts with near-impunity so long as they turn out votes for the machine. In the meantime its gutted schools and strangled economic development, leaving some of those communities poorer and more violent than they were before the Civil Rights Movement.

They turned their backs on the vital core of black entrepreneurs who managed to survive Jim Crow. By embracing a model for economic development that was almost entirely dependent on government influence, they finished off the old entrepreneur class, weakened an already besieged family structure, and left the black community with little leadership outside the churches and the public sector.

African-Americans’ loyalty to the Democratic Party has been an unmitigated disaster. But where are they supposed to go?

The Republican Party wants to move past the dark history of racism, but they want to do it on their own terms – denying its depth and stubbornly refusing to confront its continuing legacy. For most white Republicans the end of racism means being willing to sit at a table with a black man without asking him to refill your coffee cup. Blacks are allowed to participate fully so long as they make no attempt to talk about the ways that racism impacts their lives. White Republicans fully expect that being “color-blind” means they don’t have to hear about race anymore...

Ideology aside, an African-American who wants to participate in the Republican Party will have to tolerate a steady stream ignorant insults and “Macaca Moments.” An appeal to tone down the insensitive rhetoric will…let’s just say…not generally be warmly greeted.

As a consequence, the only sizable segment of the black community who are currently making the move are religious fundamentalists. It makes sense because they have the greatest ideological overlap with the wildest elements of the GOP. But they are not a group of folks who are likely to broaden the Party’s appeal.

It is good that in a couple of white Congressional districts in the Deep South Republicans have been willing to send a black man to Congress. It would be even better if we were capable of supporting black political figures who could win black support.

If and when Republicans run black candidates that can actually gain significant black support, no one will be able to laugh when Republicans use the "party of Lincoln" line.

Understanding

2011-01-29T05:35:00.000-08:00

The Daily Beast profiles Michael Williams, who's running for the US Senate in Texas.

Can Williams help the GOP broaden its demographic reach? As one commenter notes, it's not likely:

One of the (many) issues the GOP has with attracting actual (voting) black support is the requirement for black candidates to divorce themselves from the Black community or even acknowledge black issues at all.

This requirement is not generally held over Latino, Asian or Jewish GOP'ers. Latino GOP'ers are encouraged to wear their identities to garner support but Powell and even Condi Rice (the most respected Black GOP'er in the AA community) have taken flack for work with black organizations.

Plus even most Black Conservatives are not hard core right wingers. I know more than one who voted for Bush but have been turned off by the hard turn right led by the Tea Party.

As a black conservative who isn't a hard core right winger, I get the commenter's point. It will be interesting to see how Williams' candidacy turns out.

Steele Trap

2011-01-17T04:43:00.000-08:00

Javier David on the mixed legacy of former RNC chairman Michael Steele.

Controversial is almost too tame a word to describe Steele's two-year run as the titular head of the Republican Party, and certainly it's highest profile black man. Despite rumblings on both sides of the political spectrum that the former lieutenant governor of Maryland was undermined by his race, Steele's penchant for inserting his foot in his mouth on a regular basis ultimately proved to be his biggest liability.

Steele had the Sisyphean job of trying to rebuild and rebrand a party that was left battered, demoralized and discredited by two successive election routs. After George W. Bush departed the White House, Republicans lacked a bully pulpit -- which meant Steele was forced to assume the role by default. Having said that, Steele's many gaffes came as a surprise to most of his supporters. He was once widely considered to be media-savvy and had earned relatively favorable press before taking the RNC job.

To his credit, Steele attempted to court non-traditional sources in an attempt to broaden the party's appeal, but he often made all the wrong sorts of news. He gave an ill-advised interview to men's magazine GQ -- whose derision and hostility to Republicans is near legendary -- where he appeared to soft-pedal abortion, a subject of tremendous importance to conservative grassroots. Those problems were magnified by his now infamous interview with D.L. Hughley, where Steele allowed the talk show host to liken the 2008 Republican Convention to Nazi Germany. And who will ever forget his pitched public battle with conservative firebrand Rush Limbaugh?

Republicans' problems with non-white voters have been well-chronicled, and the heat the party often takes from blacks is palpable. At the time of his election to the top job, Steele was considered the best man for the job. But after the election of Barack Obama, Republicans had also hoped to rebuild bridges to the black community and put an end to decades of mutual hostility. Steele's efforts in that regard should be applauded, but his approach was often tone-deaf. At one event with black students, he gave props to the controversial ACORN, widely accused of multiple instances of voter fraud in numerous states. And once his problems began in earnest, Steele appeared to suggest his race was at the root of his problems.

Despite the narrative set by media figures and some of Steele's sympathizers, the former chairman's problems were less racial than financial. Fiscal mismanagement came to characterize Steele's tenure, as did a revolving door of senior RNC staffers. Political tongues were left wagging after a conservative blog unearthed a payment to a bondage-themed nightclub in California. Steele's fate was effectively sealed when a top RNC strategist resigned, and on his way out the door condemned the chairman's leadership and spending habits in a five-page memo.

Speak, Brother!

2011-01-08T05:44:00.000-08:00

Apostle Cleaver touches upon something that has frustrated me for some time--the Fox News Channel's questionable representation of conservatism. (Hat tip to BookerRising.net)

Conservative media outlets must do a better job of reaching out to those who aren't already on the right. It's the only way to create a legitimately center-right nation.

Watch more:

Color Bind

2010-12-31T02:16:00.000-08:00

Chidike Okeem on why the conservative embrace of 'color-blindness' is short-sighted. (Hat tip to BookerRising.net)

The fanciful idea of living in a colorblind society is one of the greatest impediments to sophisticated discussions about race in America. If there is going to be a soothing of racial tensions in American society, there first has to be an understanding that race -- albeit a social construct based on some biological realities -- exists and matters, and it is not just a vestigial figment of centuries-old white racism.

The message conservatives need to be advancing is that race matters vis-à-vis specific issues. By championing the fallacy of colorblindness, the conservative's authority to discuss race in the public sphere is inadvertently ceded to liberals.

Okeem also suggests that conservatives should not wage war against the notion of people regarding themselves as "African-Americans" or "Asian-Americans."

One of the main ways in which the colorblind theory is manifested is through the diligent effort to fight against the manufactured foe of hyphenated Americanism. Rather than simply refuting liberal lies about race head-on, conservatives have lamely adopted the weird belief that somehow dropping the many prefixes of "American" is the magical panacea that ends the reality of racial animosity.

The real conflict is against race-baiting liberals; it is not against an innocuous hyphen. Whether or not people choose to put "Asian," "African," or "Latino" in front of "American" does not change the reality that these communities not only exist, but that they overwhelmingly vote for Democrats.
Moreover, the war against hyphenated Americanism falls into the politically correct trap of running what I call a "dictionary dictatorship," which is the Orwellian prohibition of words -- in this case, words that cannot be used to describe oneself if one desires to be considered "authentically American." This is the left's insidious game that Republicans are playing in the name of improving race relations.

Fighting against hyphenated Americanism also seems inherently problematic inasmuch as it conveys a notion that genial interracial relations are impossible unless all racial and cultural differences are childishly ignored. These racial differences are trivial in the grand scheme of things, but it is the conservative unwillingness to acknowledge these differences -- meshed with a demagogic liberal message -- that creates the artificial appearance of grandiosity.

The sad reality is that the fruitless war against hyphenated Americanism -- unwisely fought by conservatives -- breeds anti-Americanism, as liberals use this as a tool to convince minorities that conservatives are uncultured crazies who wish to scrub society of every last suggestion of ethnic diversity.

It is a profoundly depressing myth in America that the only way race relations can be improved is by pretending that race does not exist. Race does exist and matter, but who is convincingly articulating the conservative side of the story on important racial issues on the national stage? Furthermore, who is shattering the intellectual manacles that liberals have locked on the minds of minorities with their sophistical bromides?

(Answer: Nobody, because conservatives are too preoccupied with politically correct pleas for colorblindness and pugilistically engaging the boogeyman of hyphenated Americanism.)

A must-read piece.

Stay Real

2010-12-23T04:40:00.000-08:00

Nadra Enzi advises conservative commentators of color to go easy on the hardcore anti-Obama rhetoric.

While freedom of speech is probably my most dear natural right recognized by the US Constitution, I'm loathe to support a parade of Far Right Black bobble heads who only echo what distant programmers dictate.

Original thought isn't a crime nor the secular equivalent of sin. The Obama election sent Far Right bobble heads of all colors into overdrive.

He's beatable without blowing dust off the White Citizens Council handbook labeled, " Defaming ' Uppity ' Negroes. "

Attacks on his religion; family and accusations that he's running stealth reparations disguised as Recession recovery serve to send moderate members of the majority electorate surging his way again in 2012.

Instead of trying to prove how paleo-conservative one can sound, why not critique Obama from the perspective of a community member who isn't prostrate before him and raises oh-so-difficult questions that only Black dissenters can pose?

Mr. Enzi's right. Running around screaming about how much Obama sucks--even if one legitimately believes that he sucks--does nothing to change minds that need to be changed.

What's Past is Prologue

2010-12-23T04:09:00.000-08:00

Linda Chavez on the controversy surrounding Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour.

No doubt there are double standards when it comes to judging Republicans, but conservatives are not blameless in the process either. It isn’t just a matter of flubbing their words — many conservatives are either unaware of the pervasiveness of racial discrimination prior to the enactment of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, or they choose, like Barbour, to engage in selective memory.

To put the era in perspective, Abby Thernstrom, in her seminal study of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, Whose Votes Count?, notes that fewer than 7 percent of voting-age blacks were registered in Mississippi prior to federal registrars being sent in after the Act was passed; by 1967, the number of registered blacks had jumped to 60 percent. And it is hard to imagine that Barbour wasn’t at least aware of the murder of three civil-rights activists in 1964 in Meridian, Mississippi, just 140 miles from his hometown of Yazoo City, not to mention the segregation that permeated every facet of public life. Haley and I graduated high school the same year, and even though I was living in Denver at the time, I was very much aware of what was going on in Mississippi. To ignore this history requires an act of will.

I just can't believe Gov. Barbour learned nothing from Trent Lott.

The Right Decision

2010-12-11T05:46:00.000-08:00

Is this the beginning of a trend?

This week, party switching once again dominated Georgia politics. However, some view Ashley Bell's move from the Democratic to Republican Party as the most significant switch of them all. Bell, a Hall County Commissioner, is African-American.

Bell made it official this week. But the Gainesville native says he's always been conservative.

"As I saw the party become more liberal, I became less involved in the Democratic Party," said Bell.

Bell held Democratic leadership positions on the state and national level. But he stopped actively participating two years ago when he was elected to the Hall County Commission. In that position, Bell says his fiscally conservative approach clashed with Democrats.

"I had to make the decision that if I'm going to be arguing with Democrats at some point I realized I might as well do it as a Republican," said Bell.

Bell admits his switch raised eye brows in both parties because he's black.

"Some folks in the Democratic Party are more upset with me about switching because of my race and I think some people in the Republican Party may be more excited about me switching because of my race," said Bell.

Best of luck to Ashley Bell--he's guaranteed to keep the American political conversation interesting.

A Fight for Justice

2010-12-06T01:35:00.000-08:00

A great clip from the Los Angeles Times. As I've argued before, conservatives would make great headway with urban voters if they started focusing more on environmental-justice issues.

Getting Up

2010-12-02T01:51:00.000-08:00

Lenny McAllister on economic issues and urban America. McAllister is interesting as always.

What is an Urban Conservative?

2010-11-22T01:32:00.000-08:00

Vanessa Jean Louis provides an answer.

A fledgling movement under the auspices of conservatism is that of ‘urban conservatism’. These conservatives reside in and/or work in the inner cities and apply conservative solutions towards inner city problems (e.g. inmate re-entry and educational reform). They acknowledge liberal policy failures and are making pragmatic attempts to reduce government waste and redistribute public funds in a way that leads to less government dependency. Urban conservatism is not synonymous with ‘black’ conservatism. The inner cities are a melting pot of different races and cultures; therefore, the urban conservative movement is color-neutral. While many of them are 'black', there are Hispanic and White 'urban' conservatives who are diligently working within the liberal framework. Urban conservatism also has a counterculture component. These counterculture initiatives include discouraging unwed and single-parenthood, promoting marriage, and encouraging self-employment/entrepreneurship (silver rights)- all as a means to reduce poverty.

As of late, urban conservatives have been at odds with other conservatives as a result of certain platform positions that are center-right in nature. Urban conservatives argue that the public-private balance in urban America unfortunately tilts heavily towards the public sector, therefore, having a 'pull the rug approach' is unrealistic. Urban Conservatives point to the Welfare Reform of 1996 as an example of a center-right policy approach which didn't eliminate benefits altogether, but made necessary reforms that placed lifetime caps and encouraged employment. Those reforms weaned people off of the "system", reduced welfare rolls by the millions, and resulted in an overall reduction in the poverty rate. Urban conservatives believe that public-private partnerships in specific instances can be a bridge towards less tax payer expenditures. They point to policy papers from conservative think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hudson Institute to corroborate this point. Many conservatives are sympathetic towards the ‘urban conservative’ movement, while others find the movement to be ‘divisive’ and 'unnecessary'.

It's far from divisive--and it is necessary.

Paying Attention

2010-11-16T18:27:00.000-08:00

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert's message to urban America.

When I was a kid my Uncle Robert, for whom I was named, used to say that blacks needed to “fight on all fronts, at home and abroad.”
By that he meant that while it was critically important to fight against racial injustice and oppression, it was just as important to support, nurture and fight on behalf of one’s family and community.

Uncle Robert (my father always called him Jim — don’t ask) died many years ago, but he came to mind as I was going over the dismal information in a new report about the tragic conditions confronting a large portion of America’s black population, especially black males.

We know by now, of course, that the situation is grave. We know that more than a third of black children live in poverty; that more than 70 percent are born to unwed mothers; that by the time they reach their mid-30s, a majority of black men without a high school diploma has spent time in prison. We know all this, but no one seems to know how to turn things around. No one has been able to stop this steady plunge of young black Americans into a socioeconomic abyss.

Now comes a report from the Council of the Great City Schools that ought to grab the attention of anyone who cares about black youngsters, starting with those parents who have shortchanged their children on a scale so monstrous that it is difficult to fully grasp.

The report, titled “ Call for Change,” begins by saying that “the nation’s young black males are in a state of crisis” and describes their condition as “a national catastrophe.” It tells us that black males remain far behind their schoolmates in academic achievement and that they drop out of school at nearly twice the rate of whites.

Black children — boys and girls — are three times more likely to live in single-parent households than white children and twice as likely to live in a home where no parent has full-time or year-round employment.
In 2008, black males were imprisoned at a rate six-and-a-half times higher than white males.

The terrible economic downturn has made it more difficult than ever to douse this raging fire that is consuming the life prospects of so many young blacks, and the growing sentiment in Washington is to do even less to help any Americans in need. It is inconceivable in this atmosphere that blacks themselves will not mobilize in a major way to save these young people. I see no other alternative.

The first and most important step would be a major effort to begin knitting the black family back together.

Herbert's political views are not mine, but his piece must be read by everyone concerned about urban America's future.

Truth Telling

2010-11-14T11:32:00.000-08:00

Zoltan Hajnal on the GOP's desperate need to reach out to voters of color.

Lost in the GOP's euphoria over its landslide midterm victory is the fact that the Republican Party has almost become a whites-only party. Its strategy may win seats now, but it will lose over the long run.

Republicans won big in 2010 primarily because they won big among white voters. The 60% of the white vote that Republicans garnered last Tuesday is, by most estimates, the highest proportion of the white vote that the GOP has won in any national election since World War II.

Relying on white support is not a new strategy for the party. In 2008, 91% of the votes that John McCain received in his presidential bid came from white voters.

The problem for Republicans is two-fold. First, whites may currently be the majority but they are a declining demographic. The proportion of all voters who are white has already declined to 75% today from 94% in 1960. By 2050, whites are no longer expected to be a majority of the U.S. population.

Second, Republicans are alienating racial and ethnic minorities—the voters who will ultimately replace the white majority and who they need to stay in power. In every national election in the past few decades, Democrats have dominated the nonwhite vote. Democrats typically garner about 90% of the black vote, two-thirds of the Latino vote, and a clear majority of the Asian-American vote—and 2010 didn't fundamentally alter this pattern.

The alarm has been sounded. Can Republicans hear it?

Straight Talk and Common Sense

2010-11-08T01:23:00.000-08:00

J.C. Watts speaks the truth. Will those of all political persuasions hear it?

In the aftermath of the 2010 congressional elections, highlighted by historic Republican gains, the media focus turns to what Republicans in Congress plan to do about such pressing issues as job growth, spending and taxes.

Yet there are two other under-reported issues that Republicans, Democrats and all Americans cannot afford to ignore -- poverty and education. These challenges cry out for redress, as evidenced by these jarring statistics:

-- Barely half of African-American and Latino students graduate from high school. African-American students graduate at 51 percent and Latinos at 55 percent, while their white counterparts graduate at (a still lower than optimal) 76 percent. (This is reported in the gripping new documentary film "Waiting for Superman," a must-see for anyone interested in education reform.)

-- A record 3.7 million Americans fell into poverty in 2009, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The out-of-wedlock birth rate is 40 percent and the African-American out-of-wedlock birth rate is 72 percent. When the so-called "War on Poverty" began in 1965, that birth rate was just 7 percent.

"Waiting for Superman" notes that in Pennsylvania a whopping 68 percent of prison inmates are high school dropouts. The state spends $33,000 a year on each prisoner, and the total cost of the average prison term is $132,000. By contrast, the average private school costs $8,300 per student per year. So for the same amount, Pennsylvania could have sent a prison inmate to a private school from kindergarten through 12th grade -- and still had more than $24,000 left for college.

The story is the same in every state.

The highly acclaimed movie notes that far too many public schools contain lazy or incompetent teachers protected by teacher unions, so these schools are cranking out subpar students.

Students do better where there is a choice -- and many parents and students are choosing better public charter schools, magnet schools and, of course, private schools where good teachers are often rewarded on merit and where classroom discipline is enforced.

Despite this betrayal of America's young people, growing numbers of taxpayers, parents and students are demanding reform. It is a movement that cuts across all political, socioeconomic and racial lines.

Congress and state legislatures must assist them, and newly ascendant Republicans ought to be in the forefront in reforming poverty laws and education.

(Hat tip to Booker Rising)

Together We Can

2010-11-03T02:33:00.000-07:00

Can Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick teach Republicans a thing or two?

Great Scott?

2010-10-30T06:41:00.000-07:00

NPR profiles Tim Scott, a black Republican from North Carolina who's likely to win a seat in Congress this Tuesday. The story concludes on a sad note, as reporter Kathy Lohr interviews North Carolina resident Jamal Robbins, who says he won't vote for Scott because he feels the candidate's economic policies will benefit the rich. The GOP will never, ever reclaim its legacy as the party of Lincoln until gentlemen like Jamal Robbins look at Tim Scott not as a man who's for the rich, but as a man who's for him.

Isolationism

2010-10-27T17:37:00.000-07:00

After all these years, I’m still fascinated by one of the most stunning ideological turnarounds in recent American history: Glenn C. Loury’s decision to sever ties with the conservative movement.

A quarter-century ago, Loury was one of the right’s brightest stars: along with Thomas Sowell and Walter E. Williams, Loury courted controversy with his declaration that civil rights progressives had no real solutions for the problems facing urban America. Loury became a fixture on the conservative lecture circuit and found favor with the Reagan administration, which in 1987 offered him a position as William Bennett’s second-in-command at the Department of Education (Loury declined the offer due to personal reasons). It appeared that Loury would become, for want of a better phrase, a conservative civil rights leader.

However, by the close of the 1980s, Loury found himself becoming uncomfortable with the right’s refusal to question the efficacy of the War on Drugs, as well as what he perceived to be the movement’s lack of interest in issues facing urban America. The publication of two highly controversial books, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve (1994) and Dinesh D’Souza’s The End of Racism (1995), pushed Loury to the breaking point: two years later, in a New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Cast Out by the Right,” Loury declared, “[I]n the last few years, conservative intellectuals have developed an inflexible, hard-edged dogma when it comes to race….The fact, as chilling as it is unavoidable, is that many among the conservative elite seem tone-deaf on the issue of race. They can't see that our country's moral aspirations – to be ‘a city on a hill,’ a beacon of hope and freedom to all the world – seem impossible when one sees the despair of so many of those Americans who descend from slaves.” (Around this time Loury also attacked Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom’s brilliant book America in Black and White, suggesting that the Thernstroms had a callous disregard for the problems facing people of color, a suggestion refuted by the actual content of the book.)

I’ve always believed that Loury ultimately abandoned the right because of peer pressure; I felt that Loury simply couldn’t bear the burden of being constantly accused of working against the interests of people of color. A January 2002 New York Times profile of Loury—one that emphasized Loury’s relief over not being viewed as a villain anymore by those who once scorned him—seemed to underscore my belief. However, there may be another angle to the Loury controversy.

A 1995 New Yorker profile of Loury noted that in 1988, “…while Loury was in New York for a Public Interest board meeting, he had a revelation. Touring the Metropolitan Museum with Lisa Schiffren (who later wrote Dan Quayle's ‘Murphy Brown’ speech), he lamented the fact that, despite his prominence, he was completely isolated from his colleagues-that, in short, he had no friends. ‘But, Glenn, we're your friends,’ she reassured him. ‘You're a member of a historically liberal ethnic minority, who through your own intellectual evolution have come to dissent from its convictions pretty much down the line. You voted for Reagan, you're pro-life, for family values--you're one of us.’’’

Evidently, Schriffen failed to grasp the extent to which Loury felt isolated because he was a member of a “historically liberal ethnic minority.” Loury was, in short, an outcast among his own kind—and in his mind, the right wasn’t doing enough to alleviate his isolation.

For all my disagreements with Loury, I can’t help wondering if he still would have washed his hands of the conservative movement if the movement had made more of a proactive effort to reach out to communities of color. What if conservatives had taken his advice and been a little less aggressive about the drug war and more sensitive to issues facing urban voters? Granted, the right logically could not embrace all of his suggestions, but it can be argued that conservatives would not have lost Loury to the left had they given a little more consideration to his claims.

In that 1997 New York Times op-ed, Loury noted, “We need a morally astute, politically mature conservatism that acknowledges personal responsibility as one part of the social contract but also understands the importance of collective responsibility. ‘Those people’ who now languish in America's central cities are ‘our’ people, and ‘we’ must build relationships with them. We cannot simply abandon them or leave them to their own devices.”

Loury was right on that point, even if he’s wrong on everything else. It’s conventional wisdom on the right that Loury, like his fellow ex-conservatives David Brock and Andrew Sullivan, is now a moonbat. Yet I can’t help wondering if conservatives could have done something to stop Loury from flying off in the first place.

Right On!

2010-10-23T04:55:00.000-07:00

Hip Hop Republican on two groundbreaking endorsements by the Washington Post.

What's In It For Us?

2010-10-20T17:59:00.000-07:00

Some progressive bloggers are in high dudgeon over a recent report in the New York Times about efforts by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch to push back against President Obama's ideas. The Koch brothers have apparently been holding private meetings with conservative bigwigs in order to work out a gameplan to stop the Obama vision.

It's hard to see what the big deal is about these meetings: as progressive blogger Paul Waldman notes, "Getting this kind of 'rare peek' is always interesting, but there isn't anything particularly sinister about the fact that these people get together to plot strategy. People on the left do it, too; for instance, there's a group called the Democracy Alliance, which is a collection of progressive donors. They, too, occasionally gather in one place, to determine how to best spend their money to advance the causes they believe in. George Soros, the right's bete noir, is even one of the alliance's members."

However, there is something disturbing about the most recent Koch-related meeting, the schedule for which was obtained by the progressive site ThinkProgress.org. According to the schedule, the June 2010 meeting focused on such matters as K-12 and higher education, opposition to Obamacare and defending the free-market system. All well and good--but where was the discussion of how these issues specifically affect urban America?

Apparently, the problems of urban America weren't prominent on the minds of those who attended the most recent Koch gathering. Why is that? This is not meant to be an attack on the Koch brothers, who have been turned into national villians for their libertarian activism. It's merely to point out that issues facing urban America often seem to get short shrift in the elite corridors of the right.

The Koch events are intended to "understand and address threats to American free enterprise and prosperity." Nothing wrong with that...but what good are these events if they do not place special emphasis on bringing the benefits of free enterprise and prosperity to those at the bottom of the economic ladder? What better way for the Koch brothers to slam shut the jaws of their progressive critics than by focusing on efforts to spread the benefits of prosperity to urban America? Maybe their next meeting should be devoted to such efforts.

Breaking Through

2010-10-19T01:44:00.000-07:00

Stewart J. Lawrence argues that the GOP is, slowly but surely, beginning to expand its appeal.

...[I]f GOP candidates like [Nikki] Haley and [Marco] Rubio win next month — and many of them will — the GOP’s “pro-ethnic” wing, led by its controversial African-American chairman, Michael Steele, will gain a stronger hand, and may push the party to reach out further than it has to date.

And that could also shape the kind of presidential candidate that finally emerges from the GOP in 2012. A number of prospective contenders, like Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, are gaining in visibility and influence, and will likely emerge as powerful rivals to the likes of Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney. Daniels won 37% of the Latino vote and 20% of the black vote when he won re-election in 2008, impressive numbers for any Republican, especially in a Democratic sweep year. Fast forward to 2012, in a climate of voter antipathy toward Democrats, and greater openness to the GOP, and a candidate like Daniels might do even better.

Maybe the conservatives who have scandalized Daniels' name because of his call for a "truce" on social issues should get behind him instead. Perhaps he's the only Republican who could successfully compete for nonwhite voters in 2012.

A Right to Life

2010-10-17T03:25:00.000-07:00

Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first African-American woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, has passed away at the age of 84.

Dr. Jefferson is perhaps best known for her work on behalf of the pro-life movement. Red Mass Group remembers her legacy.

UPDATE: More from the Boston Globe.

Chicago Hope II

2010-10-15T16:48:00.000-07:00

Lenny McAllister speaks to Essence Magazine. A must-view.

By All Means

2010-10-15T02:01:00.000-07:00

Nadra Enzi argues that Malcolm X should be viewed as a conservative icon.

Malcolm X embodies the redemptive power of a community conservatism that pulled him up by prison issue bootstraps and offered him new fellowship after release. The same streets he preyed upon were now patrolled by a man on fire to change them for the better!

He in turn urges generations to do the same, minus callousness toward inner city problems exhibited by some majority population-oriented Black conservatives. These folks use the inner city either for publicity purposes as a whipping boy or worse, a meal ticket to establish phony Hood credentials for personal gain.

Malcolm X represents authentic conservatism from Black America's dynamic heart.

I can't imagine Malcolm X being a Tea Partier today, but he was critical of progressives during his time, declaring in a famous 1963 speech that "...[T]he liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative."

Malcolm X as a man of the right? Perhaps it's a stretch, but not as much of a stretch as the implication by such figures as Glenn Beck that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a conservative.

(Hat tip to Booker Rising, who disagrees with Enzi's argument.)

Chicago Hope

2010-10-13T16:26:00.000-07:00

It's only been on the air a few weeks, and already Launching Chicago with Lenny McAllister has distinguished itself as one of the best talk radio shows on the airwaves.

Broadcasting each Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 5:00am-6:00am Central on WVON-AM, McAllister is redefining talk radio, presenting an uplifting, empowering program free of the extreme demagoguery and culture-warrior cackling that has weakened the national talk-radio market. Through his compelling monologues and outstanding interviews with such figures as author Murray Silver and activist Princella Smith, McAllister has made clear his commitment to excellence.

McAllister is one of America's most gifted young commentators, a man committed to an inclusive, community-based conservative vision. McAllister is a man who respects himself and his audience: he will never degrade himself by promoting stereotypes, relying on shopworn talking points or assuming his listeners will accept mediocrity in lieu of excellence.

Here's wishing McAllister the best of luck on WVON. Please be sure to read his articles on TheRoot.com or DailyCaller.com--and make a point of listening to his program online if you don't live in the Chicago area. If you've never read him, or listened to him, you do not know what you're missing, and just how good it is.

Shout Out

2010-10-12T02:15:00.000-07:00

Nadra Enzi describes his vision of "hood conservatism."

Hood conservatism isn't what Project 21 nor the National Black Republican Association practices. A warm embrace from the Pat Buchanans of the conservative world isn't my objective. Coalition building among the inclusive is more my cup of tea...

Saving the inner city is my conservative mission. Conserving our dignity and community institutions is its prime directive.

Standing on stage with Glenn Beck or being a Black Obama-basher for narrow partisan purposes aren't big on my To Do list.

An interesting read. (Hat tip to Booker Rising)

An Inconvenient Truth

2010-10-10T13:21:00.000-07:00

Any serious effort by the GOP to reach out to urban communities would have to entail making environmental justice an issue.

Even if one disagrees with most of the actions of the Obama administration, it’s hard to come up with a rational criticism of the administration’s efforts on behalf of environmental justice. One doesn’t have to be a moonbat to be concerned about pollution in urban communities; it’s not hard to see a link between pollution in these communities and health problems that disproportionately affect residents of these communities.

For the past three decades, the GOP has been perceived as the less vigilant of the two major parties with regard to environmental concerns. It’s a damn shame that this is the case, because for years it was the GOP that had a green reputation. As Morris Fiorina of the Hoover Institute noted in his 2009 book Disconnect: The Breakdown of Representation in American Politics, “The Republican Party had a longstanding claim—dating from the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt—to be the conservation party. A number of the older conservation groups, such as the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, traditionally had their roots in the Republican-friendly upper middle class. Meanwhile, industrial unions were a major component of the New Deal Democratic Party, and the livelihoods of their members were threatened by proposals to clean up industries that employed them.”

What better way for the GOP to reclaim that proud legacy than by committing itself to efforts to combat environmental damage in urban communities? Two parties are better than one on this issue, no?

A GOP-led effort to combat the environmental exploitation of urban communities would be an example of doing well by doing good. It would send a message to residents of these communities that the GOP does in fact understand the unique problems these communities face. Once that message is sent (and followed up on), perhaps these residents would seriously consider other GOP arguments vis-à-vis economic and educational issues.

There’s a clear path to repairing the GOP’s negative image in urban communities. Republicans just need to walk down that path—and not leave too much of a carbon footprint.

Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood

2010-10-08T03:08:00.000-07:00

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson on the GOP's issues with outreach.

The history of the Republican Party's estrangement from African Americans is well known. In 1960, Richard Nixon won 32 percent of the black vote. In 1964, Barry Goldwater -- who had opposed the landmark Civil Rights Act -- received just 6 percent of the black vote. This dramatic shift made possible Nixon's "Southern strategy," which political strategist Kevin Phillips explained to the New York Times in 1970, using some archaic terminology:

"From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that," Phillips said, "but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."

In other words, the idea was to capitalize on the racial fears and grievances of Southern whites -- by letting black voters drift away from the GOP and even encouraging them to stay away.

Ours is a different era, and I'm not suggesting that the old Southern strategy persists in unreconstructed form. The Republican Party's dominance among white Southerners is not based on the kind of raw, unambiguous race-baiting that we saw decades ago.

What I am saying is that the Republicans have made no serious effort to appeal to black voters. Such an initiative would begin with an acknowledgement of the specific problems that African Americans face -- including the legacy of centuries of oppression and discrimination -- and a proffer of policies to address those problems. But this would contradict the GOP's dogmatic stance that government should be severely limited in its ambition.

Democrats, at least, are much better at talking the talk. But is the Democratic Party offering any new ideas -- or even the promise of meaningful resources -- to eliminate the stubborn, multigenerational poverty and dysfunction in which far too many African Americans are trapped? Are Democrats addressing the vast gap in wealth between middle-class blacks and their white counterparts?

I can't say I agree with Robinson on a lot of issues, but I'm simpatico with him on this.

Decision Points

2010-10-07T17:37:00.000-07:00

Could George W. Bush bring political diversity to urban America?

Bush has largely stayed out of the public eye since leaving the White House nearly two years ago. The 43rd President became a villain in the eyes of urban America for his perceived mishandling of the federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. [I’ve argued that the bad blood between Bush and urban America started much earlier, in February 2000, when Bush made the bizarre decision to speak at Bob Jones University in South Carolina.] Is there a way for Bush to repair his injured image in urban America?

Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush were also perceived to be hostile to residents of major cities, yet neither man could ultimately change that negative perception after they left office. Reagan resented being seen as tone-deaf to the problems faced by residents of our cities, yet Alzheimer’s disease prevented him from having the opportunity to make amends to those he unintentionally alienated. As for Bush 41, he may have felt that his affiliation with Reagan and the lingering controversy over the late Lee Atwater’s actions in the 1988 Presidential election would have made any substantive effort to reach out to urban America pointless.

Perhaps Bush 43 can accomplish what Bush 41 and Reagan could not. Perhaps he can atone for his perceived sins against urban America by becoming a vigorous advocate for GOP outreach, picking up where his father’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the late Jack Kemp, left off.

Prior to Bush’s ill-advised stop at Bob Jones University, I was inspired by his words. Bush talked about those who did not share in the prosperity of the late-1990s, those who attended failing public schools, those who lived in households where the closest neighbors were poverty and hopelessness. He spoke of a compassionate conservatism, a conservatism that provided the disenfranchised with a hand up as opposed to a handout. Bush’s 1999 speeches weren’t about a rigid, hyper-partisan conservatism that blamed Democrats and liberals for every problem in the country; he spoke of a pragmatic, pro-active conservatism that would work to make the American Dream a reality for those who questioned whether America was really all that exceptional.

A combination of bad advice on the campaign trail and questionable decision-making as President led to Bush’s last name becoming a four-letter word in urban America. Yet, it’s still possible for his name to be praised one day.

I’d love to see Bush become urban America’s lobbyist—a forceful voice for public education reform and the fostering of a climate for small businesses to prosper in urban neighborhoods; a supporter of efforts to elect candidates in major American cities who vow to fight the entrenched forces that stand in the way of quality schools and safe streets; a caustic critic of those on the right who regard urban America as a lost cause unmeritorious of the GOP’s attention.

In the eyes of urban America, there was no compassion to Bush’s conservatism, just crony capitalism and callousness toward citizens in crisis. Yet this image can be adjusted. Why shouldn’t Bush use his talents to bring us closer to the vision he espoused in the summer and fall of 1999?

Bush would earn the respect of those across the ideological spectrum if he became urban America’s advocate. If he were to use his clout to compel the GOP to focus on issues facing our major cities, he could win hearts and minds—and his party could win votes in regions long dominated by Democrats.

I think back to the summer and fall of 1999, and how motivated I was by Bush’s speeches. I believed that Bush would lead the GOP to a new era, one in which the party would be competitive in urban regions, one in which those who had supported Democrats in previous elections would find themselves attracted to a positive, inclusive Republican message and policies that promoted prosperity. Can Bush recapture that spirit?

I believe he can. I believe he must—and in doing so, he’ll regain urban America’s trust.

The Power of Positive Thinking

2010-10-05T16:58:00.000-07:00

Blogger and conservative activist Bob Parks isn't hopeful about the GOP's attempts at outreach.

In 2000, blacks faced a dilemma. Activists and Democrat politicians accused Republicans of racism. Over 90% of blacks voted for Democrats. But after the heated presidential election, Republicans controlled all three branches of government. In other words, blacks essentially had no political influence within the federal government.

After years of calling Republicans racists without less than a sliver of evidence to back it up, blacks demanded that the Republican Party reach out to them! Talk about nerve.

Ten years later, blacks find themselves on the same corner. After constant, baseless charges of racism, fourteen black Republican congressional candidates are making a game of it and many may actually win. The question is, how will this affect the Republican Party’s image in the black community?

Not much, seeing how many of these black Republicans will win in majority-white districts. What should the GOP do about it? If I were chair of the Republican National Committee, I’d say fuggeddaboudit.

I’ll venture to say that most black Republicans weren’t born that way. It took some life-altering revelation and a good amount of cojones to put oneself into the pariah column. Remember, blacks may be the only group in this country not allowed to have a diversity of political opinion. It’s Democrat or be damned. If you become a Republican, you can (and will) be ostracized by friends and family and be called racist names by the political left with impunity.

For that reason, GOP “outreach” in the black community is an exercise in futility that also puts the Republican Party in a position of weakness. Why would you be expected to reach out to a group that has consistently maligned your character?

Of course, the problem with this argument is that the GOP will die as a political party if it doesn't figure out a way to get votes from people who aren't older white evangelicals. If the GOP doesn't invest in outreach, the party's assets will soon be worthless, and the GOP will go bankrupt.

Parks continues:

Let’s keep this in mind: almost every elected office in almost every black district in the United States is held by a Democrat. If Democrats are so great, the black community should be a utopia. Instead, it’s rampant with crime, poor schools, high unemployment, and the liberal message that unless you can rap or play basketball, you won’t amount to anything in racist America. So, here’s a check. Vote for us.

Let’s hope the Republican Party doesn’t try to top that.

It is precisely because these communities are affected by the problems Parks cites that the Republicans must make aggressive efforts to reach out to these communities. If Republicans don't offer to help fight these problems, it will only be a matter of time before these problems move from urban America into suburban America, or at least the parts of suburban America that don't already face these maladies.

I understand Parks' cynicism, but to quote a certain governor of Massachusetts, it's time to put that cynicism down.

UPDATE: Eugene Robinson on the GOP and outreach.

Say It Loud!

2010-10-05T01:28:00.000-07:00

You can’t win a battle without a plan for victory. If Republicans are serious about competing for votes in urban America, they’d be well served by consulting the modern-day Art of War: Marvin Rogers’ Silence Makes the Loudest Sound: A Conversation Between African Americans and the Republican Party.

With rhetorical precision, Rogers—a South Carolina conservative activist and former aide to GOP Rep. Bob Inglis—describes the factors that caused urban voters to become alienated from the Republican Party, and the strategies that could lead those voters back to the party of Lincoln. As Rogers notes, “…[W]hen an urbanite in New York City hears [a Republican call for] ‘less government,’ there’s a chance that he or she will think the proposal on the table is to take away the heavily depended upon and government-run public transportation system…However, if a Republican takes the time to go into a predominantly black community that has been devastated by joblessness and explain how small businesses are the engine to economic development and job creation [and goes on to explain] how the government dictating wages can pinch small business owners in a way that could affect their ability to hire…[s]uddenly, ‘limited government’ sounds like a solution to a problem instead of an affliction to the people. Rather than being a way to take away something from the community, the concept of limited government can be seen as a way to add jobs, wealth, and stability to it.”

The book is a masterwork, a must-read for those who want to reform the long-shattered bond between urban America and the GOP. As Rogers asserts, “The reality is that there is not such a thing as Republican and Democratic problems. The Republican is not the Democrat’s greatest enemy and the Democrat is not the Republican’s greatest enemy. Rampant crime, floundering schools, terrorism, poverty, and a moribund economy are enemies to us all—regardless of one’s political stripe.”

I had the pleasure of interviewing Mr. Rogers in October 2009 and June 2010. He’s a brilliant man whose book is one of the best political works of recent years. I strongly encourage you to get a hold of Silence Makes the Loudest Sound; I guarantee you’ll find his arguments compelling and profound.

A Place at the Table

2010-10-03T03:41:00.000-07:00

In order to confront the chronic problems facing urban America, the Republican Party

might have to split itself in two.

Back in 2008, Massachusetts education-reform activist James Peyser suggested that in order for Republicans to regain a foothold in New England, Republicans in the region would have to differentiate themselves from the national GOP. He wrote, “Defining a distinctly Massachusetts style of conservatism may not be enough to change the tarnished Republican brand. A name change might also be in order, to symbolize the fresh start and create some distance from the national party. In Minnesota, the local Democratic Party is called the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. Maybe here in Massachusetts--or across New England--the GOP should start calling itself the Independent Republican Party.”

Republicans who are serious about competing in the major cities and having an opportunity to improve public education and public safety might want to consider doing something similar. The major cities aren’t Democrat-dominated by accident: the political imbalance in these cities stems from the perception by residents that Republicans either don’t know or don’t care about their concerns.

In the urban American worldview, Republicans are cold, amoral, obsessed with cutting vital social services because they believe those services are too expensive and/or unconstitutional. Residents of these cities might be receptive to candidates who propose workable solutions to chronic urban problems, but not if those candidates have a “typical Republican” image.

It is precisely because the Tea Party movement is exerting so much influence on the national GOP that Republicans who want to compete in the major cities must distance themselves from the national party. How many Tea Partiers come from the major cities? It’s wrong to describe the movement as racist in nature, but it’s not wrong to describe the movement as suburban in nature. The anxieties of suburban America are reflected in the Tea Party movement: a concern about excess government spending, a fear that one’s children and grandchildren will be forced to endure a lower quality of life because of increasing taxation. These concerns are distinct from the concerns of urban America, where residents need government to work, where the immediate concern is not about whether one’s children and grandchildren will have a better quality of life, but whether one’s children and grandchildren will even have a chance to live.

The Tea Party vision—the one that has, at least rhetorically, moved the GOP back to limited-government conservatism—and the urban Republican vision are in direct conflict. One vision asks that the government leave him or her alone; the other vision concedes that government services are vital, and seeks to raise the quality of those services. Republicans can, and must, compete in the major cities—but Republican candidates in these cities have to make it clear that the tone of the national party just isn’t their cup of tea.

Welcome to The Urban Right

2010-10-02T02:17:00.000-07:00

They say it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. However, they never tell you that doing the former is much harder than doing the latter.

It is an article of faith on the American right that progressives have wrecked our major cities. Conservatives have long argued that members of the political and academic left are wholly to blame for dysfunctional public schools, rampant crime, an explosion in single motherhood and other social conditions that contribute to the meanness of America’s city streets.

Yet it’s not enough to declare that progressives bear full responsibility for the problems of our troubled cities. Saying that the Democratic Party created these problems doesn’t lead to solutions. Asserting that liberal policies drove capital out of the cities won’t drive capital back in.

We’re in the midst of great political change in this country—but that change is not likely to reach our major cities. Too many politicians in these cities rule without challenge, staying in power for years, even decades. With no real competition, these leaders can afford to turn a blind eye, a deaf ear and a cold heart to the chronic problems facing their locales.

These cities are the places were change is needed the most—but how can that change come?

There must be some way to bring that change to our major cities. There must be some way to bring new ideas, new competition, new standards to areas of the country that cry out for improvement. There must be some way to bring some measure of ideological diversity to cities dominated by one philosophy and one way of doing things.

This won’t be easy. This can’t be easy. Perhaps only a moderate amount of change can be accomplished. Perhaps the major cities, by definition, cannot fully embrace the limited-government vision most conservatives prefer. Perhaps the best one can hope for is a partial victory. Fair enough: that’s better than losing outright.

Our goal is to find a way to make change a reality in America’s major cities. It’s not right that so much political, economic and cultural potential remains untapped because of poor leadership in these regions. It’s not just that so many have to deal with the problems created by one-philosophy rule. It’s not wise for new generations to be held back by old ways.

Hard as it is, it’s much better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. So let’s strike a match.