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An equally great problem is the Latino vote. I give George W Bush tremendous credit for both political acumen and common sense in his (unfortunately unsuccessful) attempts at immigration reform.

What follows isn’t precisely related, but I think it’s the most compelling anti-abortion video I’ve ever seen. About a 20 second spot.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA

Blacks voted for Obama in by a slightly larger margin and in slightly greater numbers than they did previous Democratic candidates. It was Hispanics that put Obama over the top.

I’d have to say it’s the apathetic, not-interested-in-politics Americans. People who get their political opinions fed to them from Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, E!, MTV, MTV2, VH-1, Keith Olberman, The Daily Show, and so forth.

Pretending that there is absolutely no racial issues within the Republican Party or pointing fingers at the Democratic Party of fourty years agos ain’t going to cut it either.

It’s really simple, Democrats promise them the most free stuff. The males get the fun and the females get government child benefits. Not complicated.

The last election proved the point, it’s really easy to make idiot voters out of ignorant people by promising them free stuff. Communists have been luring people into Communism using exactly this formulaic for ages. Obama is just good at the act. And the media didn’t want to break the spell by actually asking a simple question — Who pays — The failure point of all communist systems.

Hey Obama even has the Kenyans thinking his being elected means they get free stuff in Kenya.

We would affectionately call what Obama says ‘jive talk’, well understood language in the ‘hood.

Trying to convince anyone that there are racial issues in the Republican party while your own Democrat party is the one with the sordid, racist past is a futile effort.

The Democrat party is currently inhabited by a KKK Grand Kleagle.

Hypocrisy, thy name is Democrat.

Trivia Question:

Name the only serving member of the U.S. Senate to be elected to the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan.

What party does he belong to?

Extra points if you can correctly identify the office he held in the KKK.

Great Post Wordsmith. I think the Republicans lost the black vote post TR. It is interesting however to see all of the traditionally solid southern Democrat states are now Republican.

Wow Aye & Mike, thanks for the textbook examples of blinders and finger pointing.

@Mike’s America:

Oooo….

Oooo….

I know, I know!

Pick me.

@Fit fit:

I know that you find facts and truth to be elusive strangers.

You should be grateful that Mike and I are so willing to help you out where you fall short.

For bonus points Fit fit, tell us which party just swore in a racist Vice President on Tuesday of this week.

No fair Googling the answer.

The point of the original post wasn’t that the GOP is racist. The point is about the importance of altering popular perceptions. This is important because, in every election, the GOP starts out behind. It’s as if it were a football game and the score, before the first kick-off, is Democrats 3/Republicans 0. And, with the explosion of the Latino vote, it is getting worse, more like Democrats 7/Republicans 0.

There are two ways to approach this reality. The first is to ignore it or to say that, public perception be darned, Democrats are more racist than Republicans. The second is to say that, justified or not, Republicans have a real problem, which is getting worse over time. How do Republicans convince both Blacks and Latinos that they have a better future under a government functioning under Republican leadership than under Democratic leadership?

How about just considering it as an exercise? What precisely could be done, given the premise that it should be done, to increase the percentage of the Black and Latino vote which goes to GOP candidates?

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach, CA

It seemed McCain/Palin did well until the financial debacle. It went South after that. Never did pick up steam. The fear factor worked well for the Dems.

I have to laugh at an old friend of mine who loves to complain that “Bush and Cheney used fear against us.” I usually manage to shut her up by reminding her of how Obama and the Dems keep telling us that the country is in the worst shape in history and ready to go under.

As for the Latin vote. Why do you think Hispanics didn’t go for McCain after his co-authoring the Immigration Reform Bill with Kennedy? I held that against him but hoped we’d be able to bring him into some sort of sanity about illegal immigration if he had been elected.

Mike’s Trivia Question: It has to have been Senator Byrd but can’t imagine that he was Grand Wizard.

Image — schmimage: I argue that an “image makeover” for Republicans, at this stage, is akin to polishing a turd. It can’t be done, people. As long as the populace is able to look behind the “image” and see what currently passes as a Republican, conservatives are toast. In other words, please flush the turds. A makeover will do no good whatsoever.

if republicans are turds, then democrats must be the corn.

@Ken Wiebe:

Obama would be so proud of this one, eh? Here we have another example of Obama’s weak, weak leadership. Perhaps its a simpleton who is not able to remember what was preached during the 2 year campaign and in his Inauguration speech. Definately not heeding his leader’s advice.

@Missy: What?

Face the truth. Everyone is a racist to one degree or another. All people want to hang out with their own tribe. It is in the genes.

But to the point. In my county here in California there are 2 Democratic districts side by side. One district had a retired white GOP cop running and the other a well known GOP Latino businessman and former union president (just like Reagan). Both were working hard to win. When push came to shove the white Republican got the party funding. Wow. Who would have thought it?

The Democrat incumbent that the Latino GOP businessman was running against knew the threat of a Conservative Latino in a Latino district. He was running TV ads to protect himself. But the GOP can’t find its back side with both hands and then they wonder why they are a minority.

The republicans are having an identity crisis. Big time too. There is no way they can compete with the democrats. The author is right about the sterotypical image that many minorties have concerning republicans. But I think the bigger issue is how fast minorities are growing in this country. The democrats have captialized on that, and will do so even more in the future if they are smart. Bush saw it, and acted on it here in Texas and got elected as Gov, and the president by appealing to hispanics. One reason he refused to do anything about the border issue. If I was a dem. politician I would refuse to take any action on the border, no action on English as the national language, tax cuts/rebates for the low income people, all kinds of give away programs for those who make under 20.000 a year, do not equire citizenship for welfare, and SSI and disability, etc…. While the republicans are losing ground everyday by catering to those Americans who cannot see the writing on the wall. They want their old supporters but see their voter group getting smaller every year. They are going to have to make a choice and or compromise like Bush did. Sounds cold and calculating but thats politics.

Demorcratic party founders were slave holders. They put justices on the supreme court who routinely ruled that blacks were not equal and against any measure to give them freedom or rights. For decades the democratic party did everthing possible against the black man. When it came to even agreeing to limit slavery to existing areas, they left the union and went to war to continue to keep the black population from being considered as human beings. When democrats lost the war, they formed the Klan and for the next 100 years they went about lynching blacks and limiting them in any way from being considered equal. FDR, the great democrat knew first hand that they were lynching blacks and refused to go against the desires of his party to end lynching by passing anti lynching laws. Thats right, a president knew blacks were being lynched by members of his own party in white sheets and refused to get involved. Why, because democrats care more about having power than any black man. And the white press never reports this in any meaningful way because they want to keep ignorant blacks lined up voting democrat.

When it came time to give them rights in congress, the democrats were led by a former Klan member in filibustering any passage, a man who still serves in the democratic party today in the Senate Robert Byrd. With him was the father of Al Gore, Gore Sr. who did everything possible with many others in the party to fight civil rights acts in 1957, 64, and 65. LBJ has to get some credit for finally doing something when the firehoses being turned on blacks trying to march for freedom were on live TV. JFK did not do so and in fact the so called great friend of blacks had his brother wire tap MLK to try and get dirt on him to silence him. So how did freedom and civil rights come to the Black man? By a Republican president and Republicans in Congress acting in their behalf for decades.

With Civil rights passed by republicans, suddenly blacks now had the vote in the south and here come the democratic party to try and win the black vote in the south. They found out that black votes came with baubles passed out at the behest of the government. Never enough to escape poverty where they might not need the democrats for their vote, but enough to say they care. Kind of like giving them their old clothing so the dems could live in all the new stuff. LBJ you see understood politics and he came out with The Great Society at the same time as Civil Rights. Yes, blacks would now get 2 acres and a sad ol mule under their plan. 40 acres and a new mule might give them so much they might just not need uncle on a yearly basis. The republican party actually tried several programs to give blacks a leg up, home ownership, and good schools through choice. Democrats never did want to give black people a choice to go to good schools, but to keep them trapped in schools that everyone knew were bad. Of course they never sent their own kids to those schools. Where are Obama and Clintons and other dems kids going to school? Certainly not with the field hands kids. So over decades they doled out just enough to keep the black man fooled into thinking they cared but not enough to leave them. And a bonus was that with the handouts, it could set up laws that tore families apart. Nothing like single women trying to raise kids on a government dole. Enough to exist, but never enough to escape. The sad fact is that for generations, the government has known that this produced kids that ended up dead or in jail but most were black.

Then came abortion and the racist dems saw this as a way to keep the black population down. Black abortions made up 36% of the abortions even though they made up only 13% of the population and a good percentage of black men were in jail. Over a 13 year period, they killed over 11,000,000 black babies. So why is all of this not viewed by the black community as a pure assult on their very existance as a race? Hitler killed 6,000,000 Jews and it is widely known, museums are set up for rememberance, and the media has put this number out endlessly. So why do we not give credit to the democratic party that keeps abortion alive and legal when they have killed almost twice that number of black babies in about the same number of years Hitler was in power? Why do black churches support the democratic party that has this track record toward the black race. We are not talking about a few years or a few bad policy choices, but slavery and murder well over a century and a half.

@AnnMonterey:

Ann, I’m a strict grader so I can only award you one point out of 4.

Robert Byrd is the correct Senator.

The party to which he belongs is the Democrat Party.

Now, he was never Grand Wizard in West Virginia, but was elected Exalted Cyclops.

The Wash Post did an excellent article on the subject:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/18/AR2005061801105.html

The only cross burning racist to sit in the U.S. Senate is a Democrat but who cares. Everyone knows there are two sets of rules and we just don’t hold Democrats accountable in the same way we do Republicans.

In fact, according to Democrats nearly every Republican, and certainly every conservative is a racist because we don’t endorse the failed social and race policies of the Democrats.

But take a look at every major urban center where race is a problem and guess who runs the show?

Sorry… that last question was just too easy so no points will be awarded for a correct answer.

That was a good article on the Washington Post. I hope no thinks that I was backing the democrats. Everything is perception. And the dems are excellent at perception, and distortong reality. Look at the so called Kennedy years in the white house. You cannot tell a democrat or even some republicans that JK did not walk on water with-out getting yelled at. Did anyone hear thoe recordings of Kennedy on the history channel awhile back. We have friend who refused to believe them. Just like they refuse to believe that Clinton had affairs. Its that kinda insane loyalty that is so dangerous to any nation. Thats why I get so frustrated with Party people from both parties. All presidents make mistakes. Its how they handled the mistakes that count in my book. Admit them, then resign with a little honor and dignity.

http://kliphs-underground.blogspot.com/

95%? I think it’s closer to 99% this time.
The Republican party is for individuals taking care of themselves.
The Democratic party is for the government take care of the people.

Mike: Well, thanks. I read over your trivia question so fast, I missed the line about which party. I do know that Byrd is a Democrat and the oldest sitting Senator. I’ll be more careful next time. 🙂 I remembered there was history of him in the KKK but did not know he was a honcho.

My Grandfather, born and bred in GA during the Reconstruction, was elected Sheriff of his small town as a young, married man and, at that time, father of 5. Two of the locals (KKK members) were seeking some sort of revenge on a couple of black men and wanted Grandfather to join with them. He refused, consequently was not re-elected and soon left Georgia. His family said “under a cloud” but he had to get out or the KKK would have killed him. He had an Uncle in Oklahoma and he was hired by the RR as a Detective. He then sent for my Grandmother and children. They settled in Arkansas and made a good life. He didn’t go back to Georgia for 25 years…until the relevant parties had died. He was a Democrat and yes, he was racist but he was not a murderer.

@gramps:

Gramps, sir, you hit the nail right on the head.

Absolutely. Spot. On.

we are living in the end times, imho,. what is right is wrong, what is wrong is right. all i can say is, if you are a believer, you should get your soul right with our LORD. if you want prove of this read the book of Daniel or Revelations. if your not a believer, just read it and see what you think. the king version of the Bible is hard to understand, the Living Bible is a good interpretation.
our country has to made weak inside for a take over, our military is too powerful. the uniformed, the power grabers, and the welfare crowd is who voted for this guy and now he has filled his cabinet with the same people that helped set up 9/11 by doing nothing about the ME threat.

i don’t pretend to know when this will happen, maybe in my lifetime, that is for our GOD to decide, however, i do know a storm is coming and the only way the US will be taken down is within.

Maybe the perception problem isn’t with blacks, but with (white) racists.

While not every Republican I know is racist, every (white) racist I know is a Republican. I’ve known a lot. They were in my family, I went to school with them and even now I work with them everyday. They seem to think the GOP is the party for them…

Happy to say my history is the complete opposite of yours fit fit. Even as a child my father often invited his black co-workers to dinner at our home way back in the 50’s, we were taught early on of the value of each and every human being God placed upon this earth, color did not matter to any of us. Unfortunately, my democratic in-laws were quite different. They often scolded us for allowing our children to bring their friends into our home for over-nites and birthday parties. My employment history was also free of racism until I worked briefly for Head Start, there I experienced reverse racism, not toward me, it was toward the children. My 20 year history of volunteer work in our public schools was much the same even though our school system went through a deseg case for quite a few years. Not only did we work for our own schools, we expanded our fund raising efforts to upgrade the schools in the poorer neighborhoods and a group of us tutored minority students, I personally had 12 students at one time.

The majority of people I worked with were Republicans before I became one. I guess it’s all in who you choose to gravitate to. If I had worked in an office with a hint of racism, I would have changed jobs like I did with Head Start.

In the 90s my husband and I built a home in a small community outside of the city. We had racist skinheads as neighbors. Having been my Representitive’s campaign coordinator I had our district’s voter list. They were democrats and they were vile, hateful people. So, maybe you should put that broad brush away and broaden your horizon a bit.

I work in the construction industry in the south. Racism and Republicanism go hand in hand for 90% of the contractors I deal with. My horizons are pretty broad, I know plenty of Republicans who aren’t racist and I know many black Democrats who are extremely racist. I speak only about what I have seen in my life.

Thank you so much, WS, for this piece of history.

*gush

Seriously, I could go on about this post. FA is a powerful place. Alfonzo is powerful, too. We need a July 16, 1864 call to arms, as it were. Not only for this issue, but many. It’s only going to get worse.

Video

Not to mention the two words plaguing every thinking human being in this Country, I say, the World, ‘Executive Orders’.

its simple: if you want to be popular, you need to also be liberal. If you want to be known as a knuckle dragging neanderthal, you should be a republican. Or at least that is what the popular liberals tell everyone. Seems like a catch 22 doesn’t it? Liberals own the comedy industry: get people to laugh about something, it is easier for them to believe it. Liberals own the music industry: get enough people singing your songs, it is easier for them to believe it. Liberals own the movie industry: if you have many attractive, funny, personalities selling the same thing, it is easy to not only believe it but to create mini-salesmen. Does anyone ever watch E! true hollywood stories? If they can’t run their own lives why would we as a culture idolize and follow them? Easy – people are lost and want to find something to fill that hole.

With that said, if a black guy was asked, ‘why are you voting for obama?’ and he answered ‘fo rizzle, you know you gotta support the brother’, that could easily be something that people would shake their head and laugh at. If a white guy was asked that and he said, ‘because I support white people’… case and point.. I think in general, if you turn the world on its head, you then have a clear picture of what is right.

I understand the black community has gone through a lot of crap. I hate that for them. But so have the chinese and in fact, most non-white immigrants. The only community that has made a big deal about it, are black people. Liberals come to the rescue and ‘help’ them by encouraging things like affirmative action, government dependence, and the idea that the only way out of the hood is through basketball or rapping. Liberals for the most part, are not for liberty but for dependency. The government is one of the most bloated, inefficient, entities in existence. It is filled with corruption from every corner and yet, people would want MORE of it?

With Obama supporting FOCA and international infanticide, are country is quickly turning into pre-WWII germany. Conditioned people in great need, with a powerful orator at the helm.

Your list of historical breakthroughs against racism, spearheaded by the Republican party, is very nice; anyone who wants a sense of the history of racial relations in America should learn some of that history.
On the other hand – you make no attempt to explain why, if all this is true, do blacks still vote Democrat? It’s kind of a big gap in the story. There was a great change which happened in the period of roughly 1964 to 1972; one intro though by no means complete even as an overview is here.
An additional factor is likely the urbanization of the black population during the Great Migration(s), from largely rural areas into urban areas that have been Democrat strongholds for a long time.

I also wanted to point out that anyone who claims that some particular slice of voters had a primary causal role in victory (like fit fit: ‘Blacks voted […]. It was Hispanics that put Obama over the top.’) is just making up stories. All the votes count the same, and last I checked the vast majority of the votes Obama got were from white people.
Of course, someone who is interested in election strategy would want to know which groups of voters (whether racial groups or any other groups that could be identified and targeted) were most likely to change their vote. While a long view of history might give you reason to hope that the black vote can change, in the short term this mostly means targeting centrist white voters, as the number of white swing voters is very large both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the overall white vote.

click on the link or paste it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_in_the_United_States_Congress

Check out this Wikipedia link to Blacks in Congress. There are many great pages on 19th Century Black Republicans.

Bottom line. The GOP has no right to any Black voter. In Southern district after district Black Republican voters were being denied their right to send Black Republican Congressmen to Washington. . . . . and the GOP did NOTHING. The national Republican Party abandoned Black Republicans to lynchings and the KKK.

The wiki link you provide again shows us some interesting history, but it lends no support whatever to your ideas about Republican culpability for black disenfranchisement and victimization. The southern disenfranchisement is correctly described as a Democratic initiative. Even if we wish that the Republicans had done more to stop this, we would still have to assign primary blame to the Democrats for undertaking it.
In any case, judging the parties of the present day on the basis of their predecessors’ actions of a century ago is a tricky business. You would really want to show a continuity of ideology and thought, or at least a lack of remorse and contrition, so as to tie together the past and the present day; that the name is the same is something of a minor matter.

To Missy:

You’re married? Darnit just my luck. Your husband is a lucky man.

Ron

@Ron:

He knows that, I tell him so quite frequently and he believes every thing I say.

Remember that the Democratic party was started by Thomas Jefferson. Not only did he own black slaves, he had sex with atleast one of them.

But as for the Republicans, their downfall with African Americans begins with the ascent of the conservative movement in the 1950s.
William Buckley Jr in the National Review supported segregation (http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/001467.html)
The Republicans at the time who were supporting civil rights on a national level were more of the liberal Weiker/Rockefeller/Chaffee/Mathias mode, than the state rights crowd.

And then there is the Presidential election of 1964:
Democratic candidate Lyndon B Johnson supported the Civil rights Act of 1964.
Republican candidate Barry Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

As for twenty years later, the overwhelming support by the Democrats in Congress is why President Reagan signed a reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. Reagan did not initiate support of its renewal.

We cannot judget 19th Century morals???? Like MURDER! Lynchings.

I suspect “Thou shall not kill” goes back a ways.

Republican voters were being MURDERED for daring to vote. In violation of the Constitution they were prevented from voting for a Republican Congressman.

The GOP cut a deal with white Southern Democratic racists for “peace”. Selling out Black Americans for racists to murder.

No, we can’t judge actions like that. It would be wrong.

@Fit fit –

You must not visit America’s deep south very often. White Southern Baptist men and women are the most racist individuals I have ever met. Many of these still hold a Civil War grudge, Reps and Dems alike, but the racist Dems outnumber racist Reps by about two to one. I lived in Dallas from 1975 to 1981, and still keep in touch with a few friends, and I can assure you that the white male racist Democrat is in no danger of extinction!

JV

I just have to relate my own most significant confrontation with the Racism demon; your responses are solicited and very welcome:

On the outside, I am (obviously?) caucasion, and have always represented myself as such when filling out employment applications and other forms, and my family history had not led me to believe otherwise. My mother is half German and half Scandinavian (Norwegian and Swedish); my last name is believed to be of French origin, but otherwise my father is all Italian.

Or so we thought. Recently, one of my uncles reported that his study of our geneology revealed ancestors from the African country of Morocco. Once this information was confirmed, it became easier to see why my dark-skinned father and his siblings (especially his brothers) were “mistaken” as African-American (“Negro”, “Colored”, or “Black” in those days). It also helped to exain the difficulties my family experienced moving into the “white bread” far western Chicago suburbs.

Consequently, I was genuinely concerned that my application on file with my employer at the time, so I explained the situation (including my family’s discrimination experiences) to the woman in charge of Equal Employment Opportunity in personnel – a young, upwardly mobile African-American. Her response was simply “Don’t go there.” She walked away, and I stood stunned By yet another example of the one-way street called Discrimination in America. Apparently, you haven’t experienced discrimination unless your skin color is darker than some arbitrary “standard” (how’s that for an oxymoron?).

JV

Dang, Wordsmith!

When you said “partial list” I thought you were going to post a partial list! That’s the whole damn history of the Republican party. It’s ok, though. It bolsters the point I made over at your blog that it is altogether possible to create a new political party with a strong grass roots effort. That’s how the Republican party was created, and they didn’t even have the advantage of the internet!

All we need is a catalyst, and the election of Obama certainly seems to qualify as a catalyst. We need a Conservative party. One that espouses the values and convictions of the American Conservative. McCain, of course, would only be considered for membership if he can convince us he has changed his ideology. As will most of the other so-called Republican lawmakers in Washington.

Numbers from the 2009 U.S. budget

End homelessness in one year.
Number of homeless: Less than 900,000
HUD budget: $38.5 billion
Divide that by $400,000 and multiply the common legal limit of 10 people per household and there are 962,500 slots. If the average home bought was $300,000 it would be over 1.8 million slots. Over 100,000 foreclosed would be bought (using the later number) would be purchased. To relieve pressure, more houses would be bought. This should also help ease the housing crises.

Health insurance for all.
Obama said 47 million were uninsured. 10 million of those are illegal aliens. 17 million make $50,000 or more. $224 billion Medical and $70.4 billion from United States Department of Health and Human Services adds up to $294.4 billion. divide that by $5,000 and it can fund 58.88 million people. In 2002 there were 39.9 million people on this program. This would fund 18.98 million more. $5.25 billion to fund the rest could come from the $17 billion in farm subsidies that mostly go to rich farm companies.

Overcrowded prisons? A prison costs about $500 million to house 5,000 and this doesn’t include operating one. $20.3 billion goes to the United States Department of Justice. That could make 10 prisons a year to house 50,000 new prisoners. Much of the job could be picked up by homeland security and the states. Eventually there will be more beds than prisoners and the DOJ could be revived or the money could be used to pay for operating costs. Some of the prisons could be built on old army bases (federal land) to skirt zoning laws.