Here in Detroit, my husband was actually in business some time ago with Dave Bing...Detroit's newly elected mayor. He is a great guy, wonderful family man, smart and decent. But with complete faith in government. He will never be a Republican.
I think we lost a window of opportunity with RR, I said then that we do not live in a vacuum, and should address the inner city public housing projects...imo, they were/are immoral. To force decent families to live with criminals like that is a sin. I think we could have “saved” some then, we could have smashed the whole idea of public housing.
Anyway, the Rev Wright's “church” and Katrina before that, showed me that it will be generations, if ever, before we can reach those blacks that have been marinating in hate for us, for so long. The MSM/DNC/Hollywood/Academia war room have done their job well.
Well, we had several windows of opportunity. Almost all of the attempts were ill-advised or half-hearted. I believe it was my former Senator (and the then-RNC Chairman) Bill Brock who thought it was a good idea to hold the 1980 National Convention in Detroit. Unfortunately at the time, the emphasis was on pandering, especially to thugs like the then-Mayor, Coleman Young, who perfected the art of baiting Republican elected officials and then giving them nada in return (the buffoonish liberal RINO William Milliken, the Governor, used to jump every time Young got him on the horn - nothing but shakedowns, and if Milliken didn’t follow what he said, Young would pull out the race card).
Another instance of then-DE Gov Russell Peterson who was in office during the turbulent late ‘60s and he pandered and pandered to Blacks, and despite all that, they voted for his Dem opponent in ‘72 (which saw Peterson go down, and a young Joe Biden elevated to the Senate), and he couldn’t believe all his pandering didn’t get him squat (and he alienated White Conservatives, too).
Too many of these guys made the mistake of top-down approaches and basically pandering that lib Dems do, and there’s little way to compete on that front, because no matter what, the Dems can outflank us. What is needed is a bottom-up approach, seeding people in the worst, most hopeless areas, funding activism (use Dem approaches but with Conservative ideas). Blacks know most Republicans won’t come into their urban areas, even though so many can see the Dems take them for granted (but they see it as a choice between a party that’s already there, even if they don’t care for it, versus a party that’s not there at all and seems to care only about the White places - and it’s hard to argue with them that it’s not the case).
As I said, we had opportunities in the ‘90s once we got majority control, we could’ve aggressively gone out and used Dem-style hardball tactics to get more Blacks over to our side (vis a vis their elected officials, because it’s better to be in the majority side), essentially the methods they employed in the ‘30s. Some Black Dems, such as former Queens, NY Congressman Floyd Flake, was begging the GOP to give him a reason to switch parties, and start a movement to bring more Blacks over (it wasn’t like we were going to get 90% overnight, but 25% would be excellent for us, basically getting Blacks back to the voting mainstream of America, which they haven’t been for over 5 decades now), but we just shrugged our shoulders and he quit Congress in frustration.
The party’s approach has been naive and ignorant, they’ll sometimes recruit candidates, point to them and say, “See, we’re running a Black candidate !” But that’s it, rarely will they even give the candidate $$ or mobilize party volunteers on their behalf. I have seen umpteen examples of this in federal races, winnable districts. These candidates are incapable of competing in the general because they have NO $$ support. We had a candidate last November in WV for the Sec of State position being vacated by another Republican, the candidate was an African-born Conservative, he managed to win the primary, and the party thoroughly ignored him and gave him no money. This guy would’ve been an instant star and given Robert Byrd a heart attack, a Black African Republican in almost all-White West Virginia being a heartbeat away from becoming Governor (and the odds-on choice to succeed Gov. Manchin, especially if he appointed himself to Byrd’s seat when he dies), but he was beaten by a Dem who had a boatload of money and party support.
For a party that may claim that it isn’t racist, and I don’t think it is deliberately so, it does clearly give the appearance that getting Black support and supporting Blacks is very low-priority, even when (in the case of WV), it is rather imperative we support them. We’re literally slitting our own throats with this approach. It makes a pitch to Blacks just that much harder.