Posted on 11/10/2013 12:14:22 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The news is filled with stories about nervous Democrats up for reelection who are worried that the terrible roll-out of HealthCare.gov will force them to involuntarily spend more time with their families. And that’s a valid concern. But Terry McAuliffe’s win in Old Dominion shows that involuntary early retirement can be forestalled if African American voters are fired up.
A truism of American politics is that turnout in off-year elections is low. A corollary is that African Americans especially won’t show up at the voting booth. This belief bled over into the 2012 presidential election because Republicans thought black voters would stay home on Election Day, disillusioned and demoralized by President Obama’s four years in office. They also thought all those voter-suppression efforts around the country would intimidate black folks into staying home.
Anyone who spent just 10 minutes talking to African Americans would have known such thinking was flawed, at best. As we now know, thanks to a Census Bureau report from May, the rate of African American voters in the 2012 presidential election surpassed that of whites for the first time. Still, there was reasonable worry among Democrats that without Obama on the ballot, the old pattern would reassert itself....
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Terry McAuliffe is proof that they do come that big in white.
The GOP needs to win over black and Hispanic votes. Simple as that. No need to compromise principles, no need to sell out, but you cannot win elections when a significant percentage of the electorate goes 90-95% to the other party. The GOP needs a big tent to survive, NOT ideologically but definitely ethnically/religiously. There needs to be a great push to sell conservative values to minority voters.
I was following the marriage debate in Hawaii, thousands of people of all ethnic backgrouds and religious denominations came out and gave it their all. Almost stopped this in the single most liberal state in the union. Why has the national GOP ignored this? Blacks, whites, Hispanics, Asians, Mormons, Christians of every type, atheists, all united for a cause and nobody took advantage of that.
I hope Obama reelection and Virginia are wake up calls. Otherwise 10 years from now the Southwest will start trending purple and the GOP will be shut out of national politics.
Only Conservative Blacks and Hispanics...They're out there, but the GOP pretends they don't exist.
What if whites, or Jews, or Catholics, or whomever took to such a proposition? They would be denounced--and appropriately so--as race/ethnic/religious dividers and haters. The author of this article is a racist and vile demagogue. Any black person (and I count myself among this group) who abides by such tripe is an idiot and a fool. Martin L. King would be rolling over in his grave at any appeal to vote based on racial identity.
This reaction from a black reader of the Washington Post which illustrates what it is like to be black and to be sane. Unfortunately, not even 1 in 10 African-Americans fits that description when he enters the polling booth. The letter to the editor asks, "what if whites or Jews or Catholic or whomever took to such a proposition"? The answer is we would have the breakdown of our civil society.
When a demagogue like Terry McAuliffe plays the race card he moves white Americans another step closer to voting their color. So far, whites have not voted their color to anything approaching this level due to a combination of influences: many are naïve, many are turning the other cheek, many are stigmatized, many are true believers still living Selma, Alabama, many are adopting the values and habits of the black culture.
So far, white candidates have refrained from criticizing the strategy of Terry McAuliffe. One need only think of the campaign, if one can call it that, of Senator McCain in 2008, when he forbade even the use of Barack Hussein Obama's middle name. For the next five or six years it has simply been illegitimate to criticize Obama in the mainstream media and there is no doubt that this taboo exists, not to protect his liberalism but out of excessive concern for his skin color and for the historic credibility of the first African American president. Every Republican politician fears the media because he knows that the media is still living on the bridge in Selma Alabama and will simply destroy any politician who violates the unwritten taboo concerning African-Americans.
I have maintained since during the campaign of John McCain that Brack Obama had to be "morally" destroyed if defeat was to be avoided. That was because Obama was successfully mounting a campaign as an empty suit which the media was converting into an inevitability. Now Obama, five years too late, he has been exposed to the world as a liar and it might be permissible today to morally destroy him. The atmosphere has changed that much.
One of the reasons I chose the nom de plume and avatar which appears with my replies is to emphasize the need to break through this taboo and put American discourse on an intellectually honest foundation.
This is not just a partisan position but a patriotic position. The patience of white America is drawing to an end, one can see that in anecdotes everywhere such as in reaction to the Zimmerman persecution, the lack of sympathy for the flash mobs, the simmering anger against the media which declines to report black on white violence, etc. The hold which the educational establishment and the media enjoy over white voters is slipping. It is contrary to human nature to believe that white voters will continue endlessly to vote against their obvious self interests when African-Americans and, to a lesser degree Hispanic Americans, are voting their race. There is no question that the values of African-American block voters are contrary to the interests of many white voters who vote Democrat.
When the day comes that whites begin to vote their color, perhaps when they recognize they are a minority, the disintegration of America accelerates.
Racists like Terry McAuliffe are to be publicly denounced. If responsible Republican officials wait much longer to do so, they are inviting like kind reaction among whites and that risks our social fabric.
Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics: all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.
Don't hold your breath waiting for the GOPe to do this. Just this week, the GOPe leadership open declared war against the TEA Party, and by association Conservative values. So what is one to do?
Yeah, Bet on Black, even if they don’t vote.
Capehart’s just pimpin’ for more free stuff to be given to “his people”.
McAuliffe won because there wasn’t enough time for Cuccinelli to, following the government shutdown, refocus the campaign onto the issue of ObamaCare.
Which is understandable, given that VA is unique in being a Purple state that has such a high concentration of Federal employees and contractors.
But the numbers were trending Cuccinelli’s way, and had the election been a week later he’d be governor-elect.
But that’s not how the system works. Elections are held when they’re held (ok, except maybe when Dems mount a successful court challenge on some trumped up allegation or another), not the week before or the week after.
But rationally and logically pointing out that had their either been no government shutdown*, or had the campaign had a additional week to run, helps in pointing the way to the next election.
(* this isn’t a dis of the shutdown. I think it provided much more benefit to Conservatives than not. But Cuccinelli was in a very unique position to take a hit from it due to VA’s demographics)
If only someone would let the GOP know where the phone booth is they are having their convention in.
Then someone brought up the subject of cutting back on what is spent on EBT cards and then the room emptied.
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