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Democrats and the Black Vote

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EXCERPT #1

Democrats and the Black Vote

There was irony and even a little history making in the events that unfolded during the weekend festival in Selma, Alabama the first week of March 2007. Forty years earlier the shocking and brutal attack by wildly swinging baton -welding Alabama state 
troopers on hundreds of black and white civil rights marchers sent shock waves through the nation. It spurred an angry Lyndon Johnson to go on national TV and virtually order Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act. Now forty years later, there were thousands of black elected officials in the South and the nation. In Alabama blacks made up a significant number of state legislators, and held hundreds of local and state officers.

There was also Obama. He was the first African-American presidential candidate who appeared to have a real shot at the Democratic presidential nomination. He was in Selma that weekend at the invitation of black Alabama Congressman Arthur Davis. Davis asked him to deliver the keynote address at the historic and legendary Brown Chapel that Sunday. The famed chapel was the launch point for the civil rights marchers.

Obama, though, wasn’t the only mainline Democratic presidential contender in Selma that weekend for the commemoration. Hillary was there too. She had accepted an invitation to speak at the First Baptist Church. The dueling commemorative civil rights speeches by Obama and Clinton were more than just their tribute to a profound event that marked a racial turning point in American politics. The top contenders were dueling to establish their civil rights credentials. The big prize was the black vote. Their Selma speeches sent an electric signal that they wanted and needed the black vote to win in 2008 and they would do everything within their power to get it.

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EXCERPT #2

Democrats and the Black Vote

In the near-half century since the Kennedy-Nixon bout, blacks have given eighty percent or more of their vote to the Democratic presidential contender. In victory, and even in defeat, Democratic presidential contenders knew black votes could provide the safe cushion they needed for victory. That was the case in the winning effort of Jimmy Carter in 1976. Even in defeat, black votes could make the race respectable in some states. That was the case with Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Top Democrats, however, did not reward that political loyalty. 
Following the smash victories of Reagan in 1980 and 1984, they concluded blacks were a political liability, radically shifted gears, and made a mad dash after white middle class votes. Clinton was unabashed in championing that strategy in 1992.  In a talk to suburban whites in Barton, Michigan during the 1992 campaign he candidly told them he knew that many of them voted for the Republicans because they thought the Democrats didn’t share their values of work and family and believed their tax money was being wasted on social programs for blacks. Clinton assured them that wouldn’t be the case if he got elected into the White House. He was true to his word.

The idea was to neutralize white male support among Republicans, or at least not do anything to swell the numbers of whites who would rush to the Republicans and at the same time avoid being tagged by the Republicans as a tax and spend Democrat who bowed toward special interests i.e. blacks and Latinos. Clinton’s directional shift toward the white middle class, the insurgent independent campaign of Ross Perot that took votes from his opponent President Bush Sr., and the solid support of black voters, enabled him to snatch four Southern states from Bush Sr. and insure victory.

EXCERPT #3

Democrats and the Black Vote

The flight of white males from the Democratic Party during the Reagan years seemed at that point irreversible and posed a colossal challenge to the Democrats. White males make up nearly 40 percent of the American electorate. The second was that a marginal increase in the overall black voter turnout in the key battleground states of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania could partially offset the solid bloc of white male votes that Bush had a lock on. In addition, blacks make up a higher percentage of the vote than their overall 11 percent voter of the registered voters in Missouri, New Jersey, Tennessee, Virginia, and New York. They make up a whopping 30 percent of the voters in Maryland.

Simply hammering Bush as the archenemy of blacks couldn’t fire up blacks to storm the polls in massive numbers needed to offset Bush’s strength in the must-win swing states.

Obama and Clinton’s pilgrimage to Selma the first week of March was in large part homage to the titanic battle that blacks waged for the right to elect Democrats such as Clinton and Obama to the White House. Clinton understood that when she told the audience at the First Baptist Church that the voting rights act gave “Senator Obama the chance to run for president, it gives the same chance to Governor Richardson, and yes it is giving me that chance too.” Because it did, the pilgrimage she and Obama made to Selma was in even bigger part public recognition of the need for the thousands of blacks who fought to make that possibility a reality by turning out on Election Day to finish the job and put one of them in the White House.

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