WaPo`s Krissah Thompson Gets Redistricting Wrong—But Who (Apart From VDARE.com) Gets It Right?
Have you noticed how the topic of
immigration turns Main Stream Media journalists`
brains to mush?
Traditionally, reporters like to
think of themselves as sharp-witted wise guys straight out
of a Frank Capra
movie. Yet, the more that
Diversity becomes the big story in America, the more
insipid becomes the thinking.
Simplistic sentiment crowds out intelligence.
Just you watch as the results from
the 2010 Census are unveiled!
Journalists think about population
politics with all the subtlety with which my kids thought
about professional wrestling when they were eight:
Hispanic
politicians are the good guys and
white conservatives are the bad guys. That`s all anybody
needs to know.
For example, consider the orgy of
gerrymandering that`s about to commence now that the Census
Bureau has announced which states will gain and which will
lose House seats in the decennial
reapportionment. (Texas
is the big winner,
getting four additional Representatives.)
Gerrymandering is so
inherently sleazy that if you were going to think about
it at all, you would expect to automatically approach the
players in the game with a cynical attitude. Right?
And, indeed, the topic of
redistricting has sometimes inspired contemporary
journalists, those Diet Coke-sipping Establishmentarians, to
write like the
Menckenesque rye-swilling hellraisers of yore. For
instance, the 30-year long House career of Rep.
Howard
Berman (D-CA), the outgoing chairman of the Foreign
Affairs committee, will be in serious jeopardy in 2012 in
part because the MSM treated his desperate attempts to
gerrymander himself out of facing a serious Latino
challenger with the cynicism it deserves.
Berman is a smart guy. In 1975, he
was my state assemblyman, so when I attended the American
Legion`s
Boys` State in Sacramento, I was taken with some other
local high school hotshots to meet him. I sprang upon him a
clever question about some obscure political issue of the
day, one that I had used all year in high school debate
without anyone being able to think of an answer. Berman
glared at me for about a second, as if to say,
“So, you think you`re
pretty bright, huh?” Then he delivered a response that
logically and empirically flattened my position.
Berman is not, however,
Hispanic. So he`s had to use all those brains to reshape
his
28th Congressional district in the now-highly Mexican
eastern San Fernando Valley in order to survive. Even worse
for Berman, in contrast to all the
minority-majority districts that are gerrymandered
together under the 1982 Voting Rights Act to elect
minorities to the House, the eastern San Fernando Valley
actually has a large population of Mexican-American citizens
who can vote. They don`t find
Berman`s favorite
issues (protecting
Hollywood`s copyrights and
Israel) of much appeal. As a result, he has had to elect
his own district.
During redistricting a decade ago,
Rep. Berman put his brother
Michael in charge of
gerrymandering all of California. As Hillel Aron of the
LA Weekly noted
last fall
“[Michael]
Berman not only stacked his brother`s district with
Democrats, he also made sure that 100,000 Latino voters were
moved next door, in order to reduce the threat of a primary
challenge to his brother by any promising Latino Democrat.”
[Merlin
Froyd Is The Poor Guy Taking On Gerrymandering Congressman
Howard Berman In The Fixed California 28th District
Election, November
1, 2010]
The Mexican American Legal Defense
and Education Fund (MALDEF)
sued, but the Berman brothers` map survived the legal
challenge. And Howard won five more elections.
LA Weekly`s Aron observed that in the
Congressman`s custom-designed seat gluing together Pacoima
and the Hollywood Hills
“… Howard Berman could basically shoot a hobo on live
television and still get re-elected.”
(Now, that`s the attitude that
journalists should have toward gerrymanderers!)
Now, however, at Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger`s request, California voters have passed
initiatives turning redistricting over to a citizens` panel.
And in any less contrived future district, Berman would be
in real danger of losing to a
Latino
Democrat in the 2012 primary.
In an attempt to save Berman,
Haim Saban, the
Mighty Morphin` Power Ranger mogul who is one of the
biggest political donors in America and Israel,
financed Proposition 27 last year to bring
gerrymandering back to California. Prop 27 would have given
the 2011 redistricting job back to the Democrat-dominated
state legislature.
Why did Saban go to the trouble?
Mark Lacter explained in
Forbes that Berman was
“chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a
staunch supporter of Israel, the only thing that Saban
really cares about.”
But what little press coverage
Proposition 27 received was
appropriately cynical. So this Berman-Saban ploy failed
at the polls.
On the other hand, if the
gerrymanderers are Hispanic activists, well, then, for
reporters it`s a simple story of Good Guys versus Bad Guys.
For example, here`s Krissah Thompson
in the Washington Post:
“Earlier this month, a group of civil rights lawyers
gathered at a hotel in San Antonio to discuss their primary
focus for the next year: the mundane but crucial issue of
political
redistricting. Anticipating a big uptick in the number
of Hispanics in the United States … they set a goal of eking
out every bit of political clout they could for the nation`s
fastest-growing minority group. "[With
census growth, Hispanic groups target redistricting to up
political clout,
December 22, 2010]
This may sound like a classic
smoke-filled room to you. But these are, the
Post wants you to
remember,
“civil rights lawyers”.
So no skepticism allowed!
Staff writer Thompson`s
Washington Post article was such a product of modern
Who? Whom? thinking about diversity that she gets the
story 180 degrees backward:
“Many of the states that stand to gain seats in Congress and
electoral votes in presidential elections are growing
because of Hispanics. …In those same states, Republicans
made significant political gains in the 2010 election and
will control much of the redistricting process. It`s likely
that they won`t be inclined to carve districts that favor
Hispanics, who are a key part of the Democratic base. “
In fact, history suggests that
self-interested Republican politicians are all too likely to
carve out districts that favor
Hispanic and black politicians at the expense of
white Democrats. That`s exactly what Republicans did
after the Censuses of 1990 and 2000. They piled as many
minority Democrats into as few districts as possible. For
example, after the 1990 Census, future GOP Speaker of the
House
Denny Hastert helped draw up the absurdly-shaped
Earmuff District in Chicago that racial demagogue Rep.
Luis Gutierrez has occupied ever since.
House districts
gerrymandered to elect minority Congressmen like
Gutierrez are the
Special Olympics of politics. Despite (or perhaps
because of) the number of column inches that the MSM gives
Gutierrez to
rant about how “I
have only one loyalty and that`s to the immigrant community",
he`ll never win
statewide office in 65%-white, 76% native-born
Illinois.
Thompson
admits:
“Hispanic advocacy groups, which have faced
what they see as crushing political losses in recent
years, are eager to make inroads. Efforts to lobby Congress
to overhaul immigration law, which has been a primary focus
of Latino civil rights leaders, have
failed repeatedly.”
Hmmhmmh—why don`t these Hispanic
leaders trumpeted in the MSM seem to have as many followers
as their business cards suggest? In particular, why isn`t
Luis Gutierrez, the self-anointed
Martin Luther King of Mexican illegal immigrants,
terribly effectual at promoting anything beyond his own
media image?
It never seems to get emphasized in
all those fawning profiles:
Gutierrez isn`t
Mexican—he`s
Puerto Rican.
The simple reality: the losers from
Republican-controlled gerrymandering tend to be white
Democrats—just as Democratic-controlled redistricting tends
to be used by old white Democratic politicians to
protect old white
Democratic politicians like Howard Berman.
Now, you might assume that a
political reporter for the
Washington Post
(and her editor) would understand the basics of
racial gerrymandering. But it requires so much less
mental energy to just think in terms of the standard
template: Minority Good, White Evil.
In the
Post`s Alternative
Universe, the
Voting
Rights Act of 1982 works to thwart Republican plans to
drive all minorities out of Congress. Thompson credulously
explains:
“In addition to following local redistricting laws, many
states that are adding seats will also have to abide by the
Voting Rights Act, which
requires states with a history of racial discrimination
to draw their districts in a way that does not put minority
populations at a disadvantage.”
Actually, the 1982 Voting Rights Act
encourages even further the creation of
“minority majority”
districts in which
Democrats enjoy such a supermajority that blacks and
Hispanics are likely to win. That justifies Republicans
drawing weird-looking districts overstuffed with minority
Democrats, while concocting as many districts as possible
where Republicans enjoy modest edges.
(When did Illinois
ever discriminate against Hispanics, by the way? But
that`s another story).
Thompson blunders on:
“In Texas, for example, Republicans will probably be able to
create two districts that will lean heavily Republican.”
But why would they? Why wouldn`t
Texas Republicans try to gerrymander
all the districts
so that most lean moderately Republican, while some lean
heavily Democratic enough to elect black and Hispanic
Representatives?
That`s how Republicans have
exploited the Voting Rights Act going back to the 1990
Census. Why would 2010 be any different?
Thompson continues:
“But the state will probably be forced by the Voting Rights
Act to create two majority-Hispanic districts, too. Those
will probably lean Democratic, evening out whatever
advantage Republicans may have been able to create.”
This widespread woozy-thinking on
the part of Democrats provoked Nate Silver, a rare political
pundit who is highly numerate, to point out on his
538 blog on the
New York Times:
“The key is in thinking about not just what happens with the
four new districts, but also how this affects Texas` 32
existing ones. … This stuff is pretty basic, really, but I`m
surprised how often analyses of redistricting suffer from
this logical flaw.”
Before moving into crunching
election numbers, Silver got his start analyzing
baseball statistics, a field that
burns up far more IQ points than contemporary social and
political analysis.
Over all, redistricting is all
pretty inside baseball. It matters a lot to the careers of
politicians, and it corrupts democracy. But the big story
that the Census data will underline once again is the
distinction that I`ve been explaining for a decade:
-
In
the
long run, current mass immigration is
bad for the Republican Party. -
In
the short run, however, the
impact of immigration on the electorate is not so
overwhelmingly rapid that nothing can be done about it
now to make the long run less bad.
But don`t expect Washington Post
reporters to grasp this bafflingly complex idea for at least
another ten years.
[Steve Sailer (email
him) is
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book,
AMERICA`S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA`S
"STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is
available
here.]


