Mitch Albom—Bush, GOP Still Losers Among Blacks

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Bob Dole was trying to persuade black folks to vote Republican.

It was, as you might expect, an uphill slog. This was four years ago at a black journalists’ convention, and Dole, who seemed a fundamentally decent man, struck an apologetic tone for the party’s historic ambivalence toward black people.

Searching for examples of Republicans doing anything that benefited African-Americans, he was reduced to invoking the memory of Abraham Lincoln, who, at least nominally, freed the slaves.

And that, in a roundabout way, is the reason I don’t cut George W. Bush any slack on the subject of race.

I recently took a swipe at Bush in a column imploring President Clinton to bestow the Medal of Honor on a heroic World War I soldier who was denied the award because he was black.

It was urgent that Clinton do this, I said, because his likely successor, George W., would probably not “give a rip” for some black soldier who got the shaft a lifetime ago.

Some folks felt that observation was mean-spirited.

Maybe so. But I stand by it. No, I wasn’t calling the Texas governor a bigot, though I understand how that impression might have been taken.

My point, however, was larger than one man’s bigotry or lack thereof: Namely, that Bush is the standard-bearer for a party that has historically been indifferent when not downright hostile to issues of concern to African-American people. So when I say George Bush wouldn’t give a rip, well, I don’t think Trent Lott, Tom DeLay or Jesse Helms would, either.

This is what I believe. More important, this is what most of the African-American electorate believes.

Why do you think black voters give Republican candidates the back of the hand time and time again? Because of antipathy toward a conservative agenda? Please. Go read the polls. You’ll find there’s a strong streak of conservatism in the black electorate good-size pockets of support for gun rights, capital punishment, school prayer.

The GOP’s inability to make inroads into the black vote has less to do with conservatism than with the fact that the party has never made black voters feel that it gave a damn about them.

I know some will decode that observation, simplistically, as a complaint about Republican opposition to affirmative action. They could not be more wrong. I don’t ask the party to change its philosophy to accommodate black folks. Rather, I simply ask it to explain what that philosophy offers in response to our specific concerns.

That seems to me a reasonable request. Yet, for all its talk of a “big tent,” it’s a request the Republican Party has repeatedly spurned.–

No, it is not as if the Democratic Party has always responded to black people’s needs. But at least those needs have always been on the table. At least black folks have been part of the discussion. The GOP, though it keeps professing to want black votes, has never gone even that far toward wooing them. Meantime, there goes George W., pressing the flesh at Bob Jones University, a school operated on racist tenets that would warm a Klansman’s heart.

And yeah, it’s nice to hear that Bush wants to make Colin Powell the nation’s first black secretary of state, but you know something? I am so beyond the point of being mollified by first blacks. What I want to see in my president is a commitment to creating some last blacks.

As in, last black pulled over for driving a nice car. Last black beaten senseless by cops; last black denied a loan; last black who can’t get a job; last black who dies, young, stupid and poor, all because of the color of skin.

Until the GOP understands this, it will not understand how to compete for African-American votes. And it will necessarily stammer into silence whenever black folk raise the Janet Jackson question: What have you done for me lately?

For the record, Abraham Lincoln’s been dead 135 years.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

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