The Politics of Personal Destruction, Capitol Hill-Style, Part II

By Stuart Rothenberg

Is it hypocrisy, payback or a simple case of media “gotcha?” It’s probably all three.

But no matter what you call it, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) words as quoted in a new book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin have had the nation’s capital and the national media abuzz since the weekend.

The authors wrote that the Nevada Democrat was “wowed” during the presidential campaign by Barack Obama’s “oratorical gifts” and believed that the country “was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate.” They then quoted Reid as citing Obama’s assets as being a “light-skinned” African-American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

In politics these days, it’s out of fashion to give your opponent the benefit of the doubt. Attack, attack and attack again is the way things are done. If your adversary says something that can be used to brand him or her as a racist — or some other intolerant, discriminating boor — so much the better.

So it isn’t surprising that Republicans and their talk show allies are on the attack, even demanding Reid’s resignation.

As far as I can tell, Reid made two mistakes. First, he used the word “Negro,” which was how African-Americans were described years ago, when both Reid and I were much younger. That word has fallen out of favor and is now regarded by many as a racist term. The Senate Majority Leader should have known that.

And second, Reid offered a perfectly reasonable analysis of part of the reason why Obama was a credible candidate for president.

Of course, it’s a huge mistake these days to tell the truth if you are a politician. Stick to the script of repeating mindless platitudes and talking points. Journalists will complain privately about that approach, but they’ll jump on you the minute you actually say something “off message.”

During the campaign, many of us who regularly talk and write about politics commented about Obama’s appeal, noting that most white Americans, who still constitute about three-quarters of the electorate, felt comfortable with him — with his speaking style, thoughtfulness, apparent coolness under pressure and emphasis on bringing people together.

Obama and Tiger Woods, both of whom have mixed race ancestry, transcended race in the white community, even though the election returns demonstrated that African-Americans viewed the Illinois Senator as a black political figure.

Reid’s reference to “Negro dialect” drew some chuckles on Monday morning’s “Morning Joe,” an MSNBC program that doesn’t exhibit the strong ideological bias that the network’s prime time schedule has.

Host Joe Scarborough seemed to mock Reid when he laughingly asked Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson, an African-American, “What is a Negro dialect?”

“You tell me, brother, I don’t know,” said Dyson, never at a loss for words. “Is it like this ... What’s up, you know what I’m sayin’...”

The exchange was odd, to say the least, considering that Dyson was described by Georgetown 16 months ago as “a renowned scholar and cultural critic on issues of race, religion, popular culture, and contemporary issues in the African American Community.” He was hired as a “university professor,” according to the Washington Post, which “gives him free reign across academic departments.”

Black English (or black dialect) has been a topic of discussion for the past few decades, at least in some academic circles. It wasn’t that long ago that “Ebonics” generated considerable discussion in the mainstream media.

New York University’s Linguistics Department currently offers a course, African American English II, which the department describes this way: “African American English is a dialect of American English that has influenced U.S. and world cultures.”

Linguistics 605 in the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State University is titled “An Introduction to African-American English.” According to the course description, it is an “Introduction to the structure and history of the varieties of English used by African-Americans and the relationship between language use and socio-cultural context.”

Professor John R. Rickford, the Martin Luther King Jr. centennial professor of Stanford University’s Department of Linguistics, whose books include “African American Vernacular English and Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English,” has made a career of writing about black speech.

And last year, the Center for the Study of African American Language at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst hosted a Summer Dialect Research Project that addressed a number of questions, including: “What rules and principles govern the sentence structure, sound system, and meaning and pragmatics of AAE [African American English]? To what extent is it really different from other dialects of English spoken in the Southern United States?”

Anyway, it’s pretty clear to anyone without a partisan ax to grind that Reid was noting that unlike Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who often speak with a black preacher’s cadence and emotion, Obama rarely does.

Yes, on rare occasions during the campaign, I heard Obama fall into more of a preacher’s style when he was in front of an African-American audience. But more often than not, he sounded like your neighbor if you are a middle-upper-class white who lives in the suburbs. I assume that’s exactly what Reid meant.

I can’t imagine Reid being forced from office or from his post, and he shouldn’t be. That won’t stop Republicans from using Reid as a punching bag, the way Democrats wailed on then-Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) in 2002 after he uttered some meaningless words of flattery on the occasion of an aged Senator’s birthday. What goes around, comes around, I guess.

This column first appeared in Roll Call on January 14, 2010. 2010 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

GOP’s Race Problem Doesn’t Always Include Debates

By Stuart Rothenberg

A shot was recently fired across the GOP’s bow about the cancellation of the scheduled Nov. 4 presidential debate co-sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute and Fox News, and you can bet more shots will be fired over the next few months.

Writing less than a week ago, Huffington Post political reporter Michael Roston commented that “it appears that some GOP frontrunners are once again letting an opportunity to appear before African-American voters lapse, just as they decided to sit out a black voter forum hosted last month by Tavis Smiley.”

Roston was referring to a September debate in Maryland that leading GOP contenders skipped, citing schedule conflicts.

But why would Republicans even consider participating in a debate sponsored by the CBC Institute, an arm of the Congressional Black Caucus, which includes 43 Democratic Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and which has been consistently critical of President Bush and Republican policies?

The CBC is essentially a Democratic group — when he was in the House, Oklahoma Republican J.C. Watts refused to join it because of its agenda. Given that, it isn’t surprising that less than a week before Roston’s column appeared on the Internet, the CBC issued a news release announcing that the group was “outraged” by the confirmation of Leslie Southwick to the 5th Circuit Court, a nomination supported unanimously by Republican Senators.

There is no doubt that Republicans need to increase their support in the minority community, including among black voters. That’s not a new observation. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp made that point many years ago, and Ken Mehlman reiterated it during his term as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The problem, however, is more obvious than the solution. While Republicans have recently nominated black candidates for governor in Ohio and Pennsylvania and for the Senate in Maryland, the party has had only limited success wooing black voters.

Part of the GOP’s problem is that the national black political leadership is both generally liberal and joined to the Democratic Party at the hip. That’s good for Democrats and bad for Republicans, since it invariably sets up black political leaders against the GOP when controversies emerge.

To the extent that the CBC (or Al Sharpton) represents African-American opinion, it’s unlikely that Republicans will get much of a break, at least as long as the party holds to its generally conservative views.

Conservative (i.e. Republican) African-Americans have tried to set up corresponding organizations to well-established black groups, as conservatives have tried to do to represent and speak for women and seniors. But any honest appraisal of those groups is that they’ve generally met with only minimal success. And in some cases, that’s giving them more credit than they are due.

It’s difficult to “create” a corresponding conservative leadership in the black community when most African-Americans share the general outlook of existing leaders. And that too is a problem for GOP strategists: The existing black leadership both reflects grass-roots opinion and reinforces existing preferences and assumptions by continually pounding on Republican policies and political personalities.

On certain social issues, black voters (and Hispanics, for that matter) are more conservative than their white, liberal allies. But that really doesn’t matter, since they don’t vote on those issues.

Though it admittedly is a generalization and there are exceptions, the GOP’s fundamental problem is that African-Americans think of the government as a protector and benefactor, while most Republicans (and all conservatives) see government as a problem. As long as that is the case, and specifically as long as affirmative action is an issue, Republican opportunities in the black community are extremely limited.

But isn’t there still reason for Republican presidential candidates to attend a debate where much of the audience is black or where an African-American group is a sponsor? Of course.

Both parties need to reach out to constituencies where they have traditionally been weak (as Democrats have been doing with religious voters), even if their chances of growing support among those voters are modest. But on the other hand, they should not waste their time and resources on voters who are unalterably hostile to them, and they need not further empower leaders who are political opponents.

Republican presidential candidates appearing at a CBC Institute-sponsored event would be a little like Democratic presidential hopefuls appearing at an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. Remember, it was Democrats who earlier this year killed a debate that was sponsored by the CBC Institute because it was to be aired on Fox News.


This column first appeared in Roll Call on November 5, 2007. Copyright 2007 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

GOP Back to Square One

By Nathan L. Gonzales

Republicans are back to square one with black voters. And they don’t have an aggressive plan to reach out again anytime soon.

As head of the Republican National Committee for the past two years, Ken Mehlman made a concerted and aggressive push to reach out to the black community. While his efforts did not result in immediate results at the ballot box, they served as a foundation to rebuilding credibility and trust between black voters and the GOP.

There was a time when black voters supported Republicans. It was Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans who freed the slaves, after all.

Even into the 1960s, the Democratic Party was home to Southern segregationists, and Democrats filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 1966, Ed Brooke (R-Mass.) became the first black elected to the Senate after Reconstruction.

But the country was also on the verge of a seismic electoral shift. Barry Goldwater won the GOP presidential nomination in 1964, highlighting his opposition to the Civil Rights Act and attracting white conservatives in the South and West. At the same time, President Lyndon Johnson (D) supported the legislation, despite opposition from some elements of his party, changing the future image of the Democratic Party.

After a couple of decades, RNC Chairman Lee Atwater started talking about a “big tent party” and his desire to include moderates within the party once again. But for years following his death in 1991, black outreach at the RNC never consisted of much more than a token position.

From 1994 to 2002, then-Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) was the face of black Republicans, although more than a dozen black GOPers have run for federal office over the past three cycles, all without success.

Some candidates, such as Jennifer Carroll (in Florida’s 3rd district), Clinton LeSueur (Mississippi’s 2nd), Winsome Sears (Virginia’s 3rd) and Myrah Kirkwood (Michigan’s 5th), ran in heavily Democratic districts and never really had much of a chance. Other candidate, such as Joe Rogers (Colorado’s 7th), Jackie Winters (Oregon’s 5th), Herman Cain (Georgia Senate), Keith Butler (Michigan Senate) and Winston Wilkinson (Utah’s 2nd), couldn’t get out of the Republican primary to have an opportunity to win a more competitive seat. Still other candidates, such as Vernon Robinson (North Carolina’s 5th and 13th) and Alan Keyes (Illinois Senate), are probably too marginalized to get elected anywhere.

In March 2001, President Bush’s strategist Matthew Dowd said that to win re-election, the president would have to improve his standing with minority voters. Bush received 11 percent of the black vote in 2004, up 2 points from 2000, and it wasn’t by accident. The Bush-Cheney campaign hired Robert Traynham, a high-level black staffer on Capitol Hill, as a senior adviser.

After helping Bush secure his second term, Mehlman moved from campaign manager to chairman of the RNC and continued the party’s outreach by visiting 17 black groups in the first half of 2005, culminating with a July 14 address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People national convention.

“It’s more than just words, and more than outreach. Republicans are committed to inclusion,” Mehlman told the NAACP. “Outreach is when you show up to ask for the vote four weeks before the election. I’m here four years before the next presidential election asking for your help.”

But a month later, the tenuous relationship between the Republican Party and the black community took a significant hit.

Hurricane “Katrina totally neutralized any ground that was made, if any,” according to GOP consultant Curt Anderson, who worked on the Maryland Senate campaign of then-Lt. Gov. Michael Steele (R) in the previous cycle.

Bush tried to make amends with a speech of his own to the NAACP in July 2006.

“For too long my party wrote off the African-American vote, and many African-Americans wrote off the Republican Party,” he said. “That history has prevented us from working together when we agree on great goals. That’s not good for our country.”

But it was the president’s dismal approval rating that contributed to the defeat of three prominent statewide black Republican candidates in 2006.

In Ohio, while Secretary of State Ken Blackwell survived a nasty primary, he faced anti-Republican trends at the state and national levels, as well as concerns that he was too polarizing. The end result was a 60 percent to 37 percent thumping by then-Rep. Ted Strickland (D). Blackwell received 20 percent of the black vote, 5 points better than Sen. Mike DeWine (R), who lost re-election, and 4 points better than Bush did in the Buckeye State in 2004.

In Pennsylvania, incumbent Gov. Ed Rendell (D) handily defeated former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Lynn Swann, 60 percent to 40 percent. Swann received 13 percent of the black vote, 3 points less than Bush received in Pennsylvania in 2004 and only 3 points more than Sen. Rick Santorum (R) received in his losing effort.

And in Maryland, Steele lost his Senate bid, 54 percent to 44 percent, against then-Rep. Benjamin Cardin (D). Steele ran a good campaign under the circumstances and took 25 percent of the black vote. His former running mate, then-Gov. Bob Ehrlich (R), received 15 percent of the black vote while losing re-election last year, and Bush took only 11 percent in Maryland in 2004.

Even in a “normal” election cycle, there is certainly no guarantee that Steele, Swann or Blackwell would have won. But, except for Steele, their inability to significantly improve their standing among black voters proves that the race of a candidate is secondary. Bush’s appointment of blacks to significant posts in his administration (including Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice) hasn’t done much to persuade black voters, either. And while many black voters line up with the Republican Party on conservative social issues, the two groups couldn’t be further apart culturally.

Republicans could have a handful of black candidates once again in 2008. Attorney Erwin Roberts is seriously considering a run in Kentucky’s 3rd district, and Swann has been asked to consider a run in Pennsylvania’s 4th. Both districts are represented by potentially vulnerable Democratic freshmen. Former Senate staffer Erik Underwood, 27, is an underdog in the June 19 special election in Georgia’s 10th district.

“We’re looking for good candidates everywhere,” said NRCC Political Director Terry Carmack. “If they are African-American, it’s a bonus.”

Just last week, the RNC appointed Shannon Reeves, past president of the Oakland NAACP, to head up its minority outreach. But the African-American Advisory Committee, founded under Mehlman, has yet to meet under the new RNC leadership.

“It becomes a question of consistency and commitment,” said Steele, who replaced Watts as chairman of GOPAC earlier this year. “My attitude is that [African-Americans] won’t vote for you, because you won’t bother.”

On a philosophical level, most Republican operatives do believe that outreach to the black community is a worthy cause. “Of course it doesn’t make sense right now,” according to one GOP operative in favor of an aggressive outreach effort. “It will take at least a generation, if not longer.” But still other Republicans are struggling with the lack of immediate results and are simultaneously enticed by Hispanic outreach that could yield a higher gain.

“The Republican Party will not be whole again until more African-Americans come back home,” Mehlman told the NAACP two years ago.

At the current pace, the GOP will be incomplete for some time. Republicans may benefit in the long term as the voting behavior of the black population evolves, but any increase in the black vote for Republicans will not be a result of any effort from the party.

This story first appeared in Roll Call on April 26, 2007. Copyright 2007 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.