Republicans Diversity

End of the Rainbow 

GARY YOUNGE / The Guardian  (UK) 6sep04

In 2000 the Republicans paraded their diversity. But now the party is showing its true colour — white

[ Below: Despite the double-speak, Bush's message is clear ]

General Colin Powell is missing in action. At the Republican convention in 2000 he led from the front, opening a line up that could have been set up by Jesse Jackson's Rainbow coalition. Of the three co-chairs in 2000 one was black and another Hispanic; national security adviser Condoleezza Rice kicked off prime-time coverage one night while Chaka Khan serenaded George Bush.

"Make no mistake about it," said a Republican strategist at the time. "Bush is personally obsessed with diversity." That obsession, even at this cosmetic level, seems to have long passed.

Powell, the secretary of state, was absent last week — not just from the podium but from the entire convention. The White House says his absence was a matter of "custom and tradition" that prevents the national security team from attending. This must have been news to Bush's father, who had secretary of state James Baker at his side at the 1992 convention. Powell did not come either because, given his misgivings on the war, the party did not want him there or because, given his misgivings about the party, he did not want to be there.

Either way, this year the most prominent black speaker was the education secretary, Rod Paige — whose low public profile only a Google search could save from oblivion. And it was downhill from there. After Paige came the lieutenant governor of Maryland and finally Erika Harold, last year's Miss America.

The promotion of so many black faces four years ago was essentially symbolic. Its aim was not to woo the African-American vote, but to soothe the consciences of moderate whites who would not vote for a party that went openly negative on race. The absence of prominent black figures on stage this year was equally symbolic. For Bush's reelection effort marks the virtual completion of the racial realignment of the Republican party.

In the last presidential election Republicans received only 8% of the black vote — the lowest percentage for 40 years. Recent polls indicate that this year the figure will reach 4% — the lowest ever. Black Americans make up 12% of the national population. Yet Republicans have no black congressmen and fare only slightly better at a local level, where African-Americans comprise 0.4% of all Republican state legislators.

So the party of Lincoln, the president credited with freeing the slaves, is now essentially the White People's party — a race-based initiative that has reestablished the segregation of American political culture. Ethnically they are less exclusive. With around a third of the Hispanic vote (Hispanics may be black or white) Republicans still have a toe-hold there, although they are struggling to keep it.

But there are only so many people you can alienate at one time, and the decline in black supporters was not an accident. This was the intended consequence of Richard Nixon's "southern strategy". The party put race at the centre of a project to radically reconfigure its base after the civil rights era by appealing to racist white southerners who felt betrayed by the Democrats. It worked, handing the south to the Republicans and forcing black voters into the arms of the Democrats.

Now Bush is closing the deal. His policies and platform will ensure all but the most negligible support from African-Americans, and transforming the Republicans into a monoracial party in one of the world's most multi-racial nations.

To hear the gathering at the African-Americans for Bush rally at the Waldorf Astoria last week you wouldn't know it. They pointed to the sharp increase in black delegates to the convention (the highest presence on record) as proof that they are making strides. Showcasing polls indicating black Americans are more likely to attend church regularly, oppose abortion and gay marriage and support school vouchers than their white counterparts, they claimed that the Republican party was more in tune with black values than the Democrats could ever be.

Ask any of them why more than 90% of African-Americans will vote Democrat and they claim that their friends and family members have simply been duped.

"Most African-Americans grow up in a family where their parents are Democratic and it's so easy to follow the group rather than think of what is in their best interests," says Don McLaurin, a black Republican from Trotwood, Ohio.

Such statements are ironic since they echo precisely what many liberals say about black Republicans — namely, that their inability to fathom their own interests is the only rational explanation for their misguided political choice. Both are wrong. People's interests are not determined by their melanin count but shaped by their experience. To suggest otherwise is both obnoxious and patronising.

Moreover, it offers little help in understanding the Republican party's racial exclusivity. The rise in black convention delegates is a diversion. It came from a pathetically low base (2.6% in 1996, 4.7% in 2000) and tells us little. Shortly before South Africa's first democratic elections 20% of the delegates to the convention of the National party, the architect of apartheid, were black. The fact that, both there and in the US, the rise coincided with negligible black support at the polls simply suggests a growing dislocation between black people in their chosen party and those outside it.

It also suggests that African-Americans have the same narrow understanding of "values" as the Republican party. They don't. In particular, they seem to value honesty and hard work sufficiently highly to frown upon on a president who took them into a war based on lies, while marshalling an economy that denies them jobs. Unemployment among black people remains double the percentage for whites, while one in four African-Americans lives in poverty.

Meanwhile, polls show three-quarters of black Americans agree at least somewhat with the proposition that Bush intentionally misled the country into war. Finally, black Americans are understandably keen on racial equality, a cause not best argued by the party which opposes affirmative action and harbours the likes of the racist Mississippi senator Trent Lott, who lamented the end of segregation less than two years ago.

In fact, black Republicans are right on only one count: the Democrats certainly take the black vote for granted. The Democrats have only won one election (in 1964) with a majority of white support since the second world war. This time round African-Americans make up more than 10% of the vote in a third of the crucial battleground states. "When the public is anxious or angry, turnout tends to increase," argues David Bositis of the joint centre for political and economic studies in a recent report. African-Americans are clearly angry with President Bush and want him out." The question is not who they will vote for but whether they will vote at all. Bush has given them several reasons to loathe the Republicans; they are still waiting for Kerry to give them some to love the Democrats.

g.younge@guardian.co.uk

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1297870,00.html 13sep04

Despite the double-speak, Bush's message is clear:
The Republicans' rhetoric show how nasty they can be

MARTIN KETTLE / The Guardian (UK) 4sep04

The books used to talk about how the American Republican party was really two parties. The first of them was very decent and sometimes very grand indeed, and could answer truthfully to the term compassionate conservative. It was the party of Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller. The second party was decent too, in its way, but it was decidedly not so grand as the first. It was the party of people like Dwight Eisenhower and, stretching a point, Richard Nixon.

Identifiable traces of these two mid-20th century parties, particularly the latter, still live on in George Bush's Republican party of 2004. But they survive there on sufferance, in a transformed party. Even so, you could argue that the Republicans of today are still based on a kind of alliance, though the new one bears no relation to the old. The first arm, which has all of the power and most of the dynamism, is the religious conservative activist party that gathered in Madison Square Garden this week to acclaim Bush, now himself the de facto leader of the religious right. The second, still necessary to the first for purely electoral reasons, consists of people who vote Republican in the belief that the party is as nice as it portrays itself, when in fact it is no such thing.

One needs to beware of applying the political mores of one culture to those of another. Even so, there was no mistaking the sheer aggressiveness of the Republicans this week. This quality showed above all in the treatment reserved for John Kerry, who was subjected to a four-day stream of orches trated personal insult that makes British politics appear truly gentlemanly by comparison. Nothing that happens in a convention hall happens without the party managers' approval. Every placard they wave has been handed out by party officials a few minutes before. So the sudden outbreak of delegates wearing sticking plasters with Purple Hearts on them - implying that Kerry exaggerated his Vietnam wounds in order to win his medals - could hardly have been an unofficial move either, and stands in marked contrast to earlier denials by the Bush campaign that it was promoting the apparently "non-partisan" anti-Kerry moves by rightwing Vietnam veterans.

Of course, it was not an unofficial move at all. What the delegates expressed with their nasty stickers, the party's leaders actually said, just as nastily, from the platform. Speech after speech besmirched Kerry's military record - a record which he had placed at the centre of his own campaign in an explicit bid for electoral credibility both as a man and as a potential president - none more brutally than the Georgia Democratic senator Zell Miller, who cast Kerry as "wrong, weak and wobbly" and as a man with a "yes-no-maybe" approach to the war on terrorism.

In a truly revealing turn of events, after years in which rightwing America has endlessly celebrated the unquiet Vietnam veterans as a betrayed generation of real male patriots, mainstream Republican demonology has now cast Kerry as a man whose preoccupation with his own exploits in Vietnam make him fundamentally unreliable both as man and potential leader. The fact that rightwing America can so shamelessly taunt Kerry in this way, led by a non-combatant president who refuses to condemn the negative campaign and by a vice-president who fanned the flames in his own speech this week ("I had other priorities" is how Cheney icily describes his own Vietnam years) is a reminder that what is crucially important to Republicans is not, as they like to say, the tradition of armed service but, in reality, their claim to exclusive ownership of the politics of US defence, security and war.

Throughout the week, it goes almost without saying, there was not a single critical reference to the American military, not even in relation to Abu Ghraib. Bush himself probably saw no element of irony in his closing encomium of "our military which finds a way, or makes one". Such self-confidence reminds us how much more vicious American politics since 9/11 would have been if Al Gore had been in the White House when the hijacked planes were flown into the World Trade Centre. Would the Republicans have rallied behind Gore as the Democrats rallied behind Bush that day? Not a chance. Within days they would have begun to blame Bill Clinton for the attack on America. Some of them, indeed, do so anyway. Browsing through a New York Barnes and Noble bookstore the other day I encountered titles like "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror", "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton compromised American's National Security" or "Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11".

For such people, the mere act of imagining John Kerry as their duly elected "commander-in-chief" is offensive. Miller and others have said as much. Cheney, in the speech of great ruthlessness, went further than most. And again, all this provides a glimpse of the vengeful and vindictive way that a defeated Republican party might be tempted to treat a President Kerry. The Republican party today is not at ease in any settlement other than one whose terms it has dictated. You can already sense the impeachment reflex beginning to take on life.

In some ways it is as though the modern Republican party has become the political expression of the "misplaced power" of the military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower famously warned as he left the White House in 1961.

In any other political culture, you would characterise the Republicans as a militarist party, and in that context it would be perverse not to reflect upon whether this central development in American life did not have far more sinister implications, not least when so many references to the war on terror this week have been accompanied by testosterone-fuelled chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A".

Yet the Republican party which Bush leads should really be seen as the party that tries to unite the military-industrial and religious imperatives in American life. If Bush was careful this week not to take the attacks on Kerry too far, he was much less restrained in his meticulous willingness to tick each of the boxes that matter to the religious party he now leads.

But it was not merely his comments about the unborn child and gay marriage that marked this key role. Time and again Bush also deployed his well-established "double-coding" technique, dotting his speech with remarks which may not sound to the uninitiated as though they have a Christian conservative meaning, but which initiates will easily read differently.

"We must win this culture war," the Republican senator Sam Brownback told a private Family, Faith and Freedom rally in New York this week. For many in Bush's party, this is now the central task of a second term. "We ask that you continue to provide strength to President Bush and the first family," intoned the blessing with which the final convention evening began. "Guide, protect, and grant wisdom to him as he leads America and the world against the forces of evil ... And father, we pray your will is accomplished in this convention and throughout this great country." Much of what was said in Madison Square Garden this week was a masterpiece of Orwellian double-speak. A few things, on the other hand, meant exactly what they said.

martin.kettle@guardian.co.uk

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/comment/story/0,14259,1297150,00.html 13sep04