Posted on 02/17/2005 7:00:23 PM PST by SJackson
(FinalCall.com) - The meeting between President George Bush and the Congressional Black Caucus recently grabbed headlines mostly because they spent his entire first term snubbing each other. The Black Caucus and civil rights leaders, most notably the NAACP, waged stealth warfare against Pres. Bush from virtually the moment that he set foot in the White House. They accused him of hijacking the Black vote in Florida, torpedoing domestic programs, and gutting affirmative action and civil liberties protections. But what did not grab headlines, and in some ways was far more significant, was the meeting Pres. Bush had with Black evangelical leaders the day before he met with the Caucus. The great untold story of the 2004 presidential elections was that, while Black evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, they also gave Pres. Bush the cushion he needed to bag Ohio and the White House. But that support did not come about by accident or chance. There were early signs that might happen. The same polls that showed Blacks’ prime concern was with “bread and butter” issues and that Sen. Kerry was the guy that could deliver the most for them, also showed that a sizeable number of Blacks ranked abortion, gay marriage and school prayer as priority issues for them. Their concern for these issues didn’t come anywhere close to that of White evangelicals. However, it was still higher than the concern the general voting public had for these issues.
A Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies poll in 2004 found that Blacks, by a far bigger margin than the overall population, opposed gay marriage. That raised a few eyebrows among some political, pundits, but there were much earlier signs of Blacks’ relentless hostility to gays and gay rights. A survey that measured Black attitudes toward gays published in Jet magazine in 1994 found that a sizable number of Blacks were suspicious and scornful of gays.
Many Blacks also loathed Sen. Kerry’s perceived support of abortion. In polls, he got 20 percent less support from Black conservative evangelicals than Democratic presidential contender Al Gore got in 2000.
In the right place and under the right circumstance, Black evangelicals posed a stealth danger to Democrats. As it turned out, the right places for Pres. Bush were Ohio, Wisconsin and Florida. These were must-win swing states, and he won them with a considerably higher percent of the Black vote than he got in 2000.
In Ohio, the gay marriage ban helped bump up the Black vote. In Florida and Wisconsin, Republicans aggressively courted and wooed key Black religious leaders. They dumped big bucks from Pres. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative program into church-run education and youth programs. Black church leaders not only endorsed Pres. Bush, but, in some cases, they actively worked for his re-election, and encouraged members of their congregations to do the same.
The helpful nudge over the top that the Black evangelicals gave Pres. Bush in Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin has not been lost on his political architect, Karl Rove. He has publicly declared that he will pour even more resources, time and attention into revving up Black evangelicals in the 2006 and 2008 national and presidential elections. Mr. Rove has flatly said that Pres. Bush will try to pay off one of his debts to evangelicals by pushing the languishing federal gay marriage ban. Family groups say they’ll dump gay marriage ban initiatives on ballots in as many states as they can. In some of those states, such as Michigan, where Blacks make up a significant percent of voters, and they backed that states gay marriage ban in big numbers, Republicans will inflame Blacks’ anti-gay bias.
Even if passage of the federal marriage ban ultimately falls flat on its face if it gets out of Congress to the states, the fight over it can still turn the 2006 mid-term and 2008 presidential elections into a noisy and distracting referendum on the family. That will give Republican strategists another chance to pose as God’s defenders of the family and shove even more Black evangelicals into the Republican vote column.
Meanwhile, Pres. Bush officials will continue to ladle out millions through their faith-based programs to a handpicked core of top Black church leaders. They’ve already announced a series of conferences that will be held in various cities starting in February to show Black church leaders and community groups how to grab more of the faith initiative money. That will be more than enough to assure the active allegiance, or at least silence, of some Black church leaders on those Bush domestic policies that wreak havoc on poor Black communities.
Pres. Bush and the Republicans bank that their strategy of bypassing Black Democrats and civil rights leaders to make deals with Black evangelical leaders will finally break the decades long stranglehold Democrats have had on the Black vote. If they’re right, it will spell deep peril for the Democrats in future elections.
(Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. Visit his news and commentary website at www.thehutchinsonreport.com.)
Final Call... moving along now *LOL*
I'll add that some of the guys who sell the Final Call papers are very nice, and are into the Nation because Jesse Lee Peterson is right. Many storefront black churches are filled with emasculating women pastors who hate men. I'll bet AR Bernard would have a lot to say about this since he was a former NOI member.
Interesting...
In Dallas, I knew several followers of Wallace Deen, son of Elijah Muhammad (who broke away from Farrakhan), and even accepted an award from some of WD's followers on behalf of the police department. Their term for Farrakhan was "Farra-con."
In Illinois and Michigan, I've once met several followers of Farrakhan in social settings. I have no use for Farrakan, but the NOI today is markedly different from what I remember of Elijah Muhammad's followers in the 1970's (they were markedly more race-centric then than they are now).
Yeah there aren't as many NOI screaming about white devils anymore *lol*
Wisconsin? I think he lost that one.
I've interviewed Hutchinson several times over the past ten years or so, and certainly find him to be far less extreme than many black columnists.
Black conservative ping
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.
The NOI men are less strident than they used to be.
I don't intend to claim that that one issue delivered the vote. On the contrary, I would argue that most Black voters (the same as most white voters) are multi-issue voters. No single issue will make a Democrat feel comfortable with the Republican party.
And most important of all, Republicans need to avoid stereotyping Blacks (and labor union members and rednecks) as reachable and welcome just on a single issue.
Wow. Now that you mention it, that could very well be true. That issue had slipped by me.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.