The Political Logic Of Pandering
With 90 percent of black voters and
65 percent of Hispanics supporting Vice President
Al Gore in the 2000 election, Mr. Gore`s successor
as the Democratic presidential candidate has to
understand that he can`t possibly win this year without
similar support from both groups. Indeed, John Kerry, as
recent polls suggest, will win just such support, but
that doesn`t mean black and Hispanic leaders are not
badgering him for not paying them more attention.
Late last month the Washington
Post reported that "African Americans …
experienced in getting out the
vote say the candidate has done little to energize a
constituency that could ensure [Mr. Kerry`s] election."
[Kerry
Urged to Do More to Get Black Votes By Darryl
Fears, June 29, 2004]
The experienced black
vote-getter-outers included the
Rev. Joseph Lowery, formerly of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who
told the Post "he is ready to get off the
bench and into the game for Kerry, but no one is
asking." When was the last time Mr. Jackson felt
that someone paid him too much attention?
Hispanic leaders have
rumbled similar noises, whimpering that Mr. Kerry
just hasn`t courted them enough. For his part, Mr. Kerry
was quick to make up for his insufficiencies in
pandering.
Only 24 hours after the Post
story appeared, he popped up at the Rainbow/PUSH
Coalition convention in Chicago, where he vowed to do
more for blacks. Just before that, he
spoke at the
National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed
Officials, where the chief such official
complained that neither presidential candidate has
courted them enough. Finally (at least for
midsummer) Mr. Kerry traveled to the national conference
of the
Hispanic racist organization, the National
Conference of La Raza (The Race), where he
prostrated himself yet more shamelessly.
The point of rehearsing all these
tales of Mr. Kerry`s epic efforts to court the
non-white blocs that are the mainstay of the
Democratic Party is to emphasize that this election will
change nothing. Back in the fall, when the now-forgotten
Howard Dean was muttering about the need for Democrats
to appeal to white
"guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks"
and was thoroughly denounced by his comrades for even
suggesting such a thing, it sort of looked like some
Democrats might possibly take or maybe just think hard
about Mr. Dean`s advice. It is now clear that nothing of
the kind happened or will happen.
Indeed, it can`t happen because the
Democrats have
created their own constituency through decades of
delivering on their pandering to the very kind of
organizations to which Mr. Kerry spoke earlier this
month. At the La Raza rally, for instance, he
virtually promised a full amnesty for
illegal immigrants, a position he had long endorsed
but which he found expedient to repeat again.
Having constructed for the last 40
years or more a party that serves up civil rights laws,
affirmative action, liberal judges who enforce and
create more
civil rights laws and more affirmative action,
hate crimes laws,
welfare of
all descriptions, and more immigration and more
"rights" for immigrants and other minorities, the
Democrats have built their party around an agenda that
caters to blacks and Hispanics and the ever-dwindling
number of whites willing to support that agenda. It
would be astonishing, similar to the moon leaving its
orbit and circling around the Sun, for Democrats not to
appeal to such interests or for those to whom they
appeal to support a rival candidate or party.
Nevertheless, that is precisely
what the Republicans seem to expect both blacks and
Hispanics to do. Hence, every year (and this year is no
exception), Republicans boast of how much black and
Hispanic support they`re getting and how they`re finally
going to break through and start winning majorities.
This year they`re especially excited because
Arnold Schwarzenegger in California won all of some
30 percent or more of the state Hispanic vote last year,
a marginal improvement over what previous GOP candidates
had won. Therefore, the Republicans have convinced
themselves, Mr. Bush will win even more this year
nationally.
But Mr. Bush is no Arnold
Schwarzenegger, and the rest of the nation is not
California (yet). And even if the Republicans
really wanted to win non-white votes, they simply
don`t have the track record of pandering to them to
match, let alone beat, the Democrats.
They don`t have such a track record
and cannot create one for the simple reason that the
Republicans` base is
middle class white people who
intensely dislike the Democrats` agenda and the
interests to which it appeals. There is no way for the
GOP to imitate that agenda and attract the non-white
votes Democrats attract without
alienating and perhaps losing its own
white base. Nevertheless (again), if the Republicans
keep pandering, alienating their base is exactly what
they might accomplish—even as Mr. Kerry solidifies his
own.
COPYRIGHT
CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
[Sam Francis [email
him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection
of his columns,
America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The
Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available
from
Americans For Immigration Control.
Click here
for Sam Francis` website. Click
here to orderhis monograph,
Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American
Political Future and
here for
Glynn Custred`s review.]


