“A Half Hearted Attempt”: Mitt Romney Pretends To Court Hispanic Voters
Before 2008, there was a story I used to tell about how presidential campaigns have been waged over the last few decades. It goes like this: The Democrat comes before the voters and says, “If you examine my ten-point plan, I believe you will agree that my ten-point plan is superior to my opponent’s ten-point plan.” Then the Republican comes before the voters, points to the Democrat, and says, “That guy hates you and everything you stand for.” It may not have applied to every election in our lifetimes (Bill Clinton was pretty good at running for president, you may remember), but it rang true enough that when I said it, liberals tended to chuckle and nod their heads.
That changed in 2008, when Barack Obama ran a campaign in both the primaries and general election that reflected a profound understanding that politics is much more about identity than issues. His opponent understood it too, but the statement of identity that a vote for McCain represented just couldn’t garner a majority of the public at that moment in history.
So what kind of a statement of identity does a vote for Mitt Romney represent? That’s a complex question, and it’s one to which I’ll return in the coming months. But I just wanted to highlight one thing, the way the Romney campaign is making a half-hearted attempt to reach out to Latino voters. According to the 2008 exit polls, Obama beat McCain by 36 points among Latinos, which is right about where polls show the current race between Obama and Romney. So what kind of advice is he getting from people in his party? Here’s an article today in POLITICO:
“If you’re looking at an electoral strategy, my sense is that we have got to be able to talk to women and minorities in ways they identify,” [Eric] Cantor told POLITICO on Monday. “When you’re looking at the independent voter, it is, in very kitchen table terms, … about jobs and the economy. It’s about whether there is going to be health care there, whether they’re going to be able to make it through the month, in terms of their limited income in a very practical, results-oriented way.”
He said Romney – and Republicans broadly – need to talk more about the opportunity that their party can give immigrants and minorities. “It is the message of opportunity, of actually chasing the American dream that appeals to everybody across demographic lines,” Cantor said. “Because it’s about the classic entrepreneurship of the country.”
Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho), a Mormon and conservative Hispanic lawmaker, said Romney needs to confront the issue of how he’ll improve the economy head-on.
“What Romney needs to do is start talking about the economy and how it’s affecting all Americans, including Hispanic Americans, African Americans and other ethnic minorities. Under Obama, more people are in poverty, more people are taking food stamps, more people are losing their jobs, more women are unemployed. If you look at every ethnic and gender group, people are suffering more than they did in other times in recent history. What Romney needs to do is go out there and make the case that Republican conservative policies are more fair for individuals, regardless of ethnicity or gender.”
Mitt Romney and his Republican primary opponents just spent a year arguing over which one of them would crack down the hardest on undocumented immigrants, sending a clear message of antagonism to Latino voters everywhere, but now he should just tell them that Republican ideas will help the economy? In other words, the way to counteract those clearly hostile messages that were sent about identity is to just talk about issues. The Romney campaign itself is taking the same approach: http://youtu.be/3VC8McJTdTs
This isn’t going to work. It’s not that the message itself is problematic, but it’s the same message Romney sends to everyone else: elect me because the economy is bad. Saying “the economy is bad for Hispanics” isn’t anything different from saying the economy is bad for everybody. In fairness, I’m not sure what kind of identity message Romney could send at this point that would overcome the last few years of him and his party sending such relentless messages of hostility. But it’s like they’re barely trying. Which leads me to think that this is more about being able to say they’re reaching out to Latino voters than about actually winning Latino votes.
Maybe they should have gone with the animated sombrero-wearing parrot.
By: Paul Waldman, The American Prospect, June 5, 2012
“Letting The Right People Vote”: Control And Power Through Voter Suppression
For some years, the Republican party has tried to convince Americans that they have put their ugly legacy on issues of race behind them, that Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” and Willie Horton have no relationship to the GOP of today. They call themselves the “party of Lincoln,” hoping people will forget that the Republican and Democratic parties were very different in 1864 than they are today. (Consider: If the likes of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and the rest of the leading lights of the GOP had been alive 150 years ago, which side would they have been on? The answer seems pretty obvious.) Sometimes, they may even go as far as the National Review did recently, publishing an unintentionally hilarious cover article claiming that Republicans are the real civil-rights heroes, because the Democratic party was once home to white Southern segregationists, so there! Never mind that those folks, like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, eventually found their rightful home in the Republican party, as part of the realignment process that gave us the parties of today.
The protestations would be a little more convincing if every election—every election, without fail—didn’t see Republicans searching for new ways to exploit white racial animus and, more importantly, keep minorities from voting. This year’s election will be no different; Republicans are working harder than ever to make sure that if you’re not their kind of person, you will find voting as difficult as possible. That doesn’t mean that deep in their hearts Republicans are racists. It isn’t about hate. It’s about power.
This isn’t anything new. The history of voting in America is one of vicious battles over who would be able to cast ballots, battles that go well beyond the passage of the 15th and 19th Amendments, which extended voting rights to blacks and women, respectively. For decades, dozens of states had “pauper exclusions” on their books preventing poor people from voting. In some cases that meant that only property owners were allowed to vote; in other cases, going on any form of public assistance meant giving up your franchise. Incredibly, these laws were not finally repealed in most places until the 1960s. As Alexander Keyssar detailed in The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, classes of people with power have always sought to restrict the ability of those without power to vote:
They did so both to defend their own interests and because their beliefs and prejudices led them to view others as something less than responsible or worthy citizens. Most men did not want to enfranchise women until the twentieth century; most whites did not want to enfranchise blacks or other racial minorities in their own states; the native-born often were resistant to granting suffrage to immigrants; the wealthy at times sought to deny political citizenship to the poor; established community residents preferred to fence out new arrivals. There is nothing peculiarly American or particularly surprising about these patterns; those who possess political power commonly are reluctant to share it, and they have easily developed or embraced ideas that justify and legitimize that reluctance.
At various times in their histories, both political parties have sought partisan advantage in keeping certain people from the polls. But it has been some time since the Democratic party had a means by which to exclude whole classes of people from voting. The most reliable Republican voters today are groups like older white men. Even the most creative legislator would have a tough time coming up with some way to take away their voting rights.
But the reliably Democratic groups—blacks, Hispanics, poor people, young people—are easier to go after. You don’t have to stop all of them from voting, just enough to make a difference. And few things work better than voter ID laws, since those who don’t have such an ID are so much more likely to be the kind of people who vote Democratic. The fact that people impersonating other people at the polls is so rare as to be almost non-existent matters not at all. Write a voter ID law, and the cruder methods of keeping minorities from voting become less necessary. You don’t have to spend as much time distributing flyers in black neighborhoods threatening people with prosecution if they go to the wrong polling place, or mailing notices to voters claiming that if they have any unpaid parking tickets they won’t be allowed to vote, or posting signs around the neighborhood saying that the election has been moved to Wednesday.
All those things have happened may times before. But after their success in taking control of state legislatures in 2010, Republicans decided that kind of thing was for amateurs. You don’t need election day shenanigans if you’ve passed a law disenfranchising the right people. Minorities may be at the core of these efforts, but it isn’t just about them. Young people, college students, ex-felons, anyone who might be more likely to vote Democratic has been targeted by eager Republican legislators elected in the 2010 sweep. A dozen states with Republican legislatures have erected new barriers to voting since 2010. These barriers include voter ID laws, restrictions on early voting and same-day registration, and laws barring all ex-felons from voting. And no state’s Republicans have moved as aggressively as Florida, which has a bit of a history with this sort of thing.
You may have forgotten it by now, but the razor-thin margin of the 2000 presidential race there had its roots well before election day, when governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris assembled a list of people who were allegedly ex-felons and should therefore lose their voting rights. It turned out that thousands of them weren’t ex-felons at all, but just had names that resembled someone who had committed a felony. But too bad – they lost the right to vote anyway. In the last few years, Florida has passed an ID law, and passed a law imposing absurdly onerous requirements on those who register voters (voter registration is always a part of liberal and Democratic organizing campaigns). They also restricted early voting, most importantly by eliminating early voting on the Sunday before the election. Why that Sunday? Well, many black churches were organizing “Souls to the Polls” voting drives after church on that day. The Republicans solved that problem. And most recently, the government of Republican governor Rick Scott told local boards of elections to purge tens of thousands of people from the voter rolls, on the grounds that they might not be citizens. Many Florida citizens have already gotten threatening letters from the government, telling them they had 30 days to prove their citizenship or lose the right to vote.
Many of these plainly partisan moves are under legal challenge, but our system unfortunately allows much of what Republicans are trying to do. For instance, when the 2000 election controversy revealed the miasma of corruption and incompetence that was the Florida election system, many people were amazed that the Secretary of State, the person in charge of running the election, could be allowed to serve as state co-chair of one of the competing presidential campaigns. The idea that Bush co-chair Katherine Harris was an objective arbiter of election rules and processes was beyond absurd; it was like going to a Yankees-Red Sox game and learning that the home-plate umpire was also the Yankees’ batting coach. But that’s perfectly fine in America; you might remember that four years later, the Secretary of State in Ohio, Ken Blackwell (the state co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign) responded to a successful Democratic registration campaign by issuing a decree that any registration form not printed on heavy card stock would be declared invalid (his order was overturned by a court). And just recently the Arizona Secretary of State, Ken Bennett, declared that he might not allow Barack Obama on the state’s ballot, since he wasn’t convinced Obama was actually born in the United States. Bennett, who eventually backed off his birtherism, is–you guessed it–the state co-chair of the Romney campaign.
Few things are more absurd than to hear Republicans claim that in enacting restrictive voting laws, they are motivated not a whit by partisanship, but only by their deep and abiding concern for the integrity of the ballot. The Republicans who swept into office at all levels in 2010 had a policy agenda, to do things like restrict reproductive rights, roll back environmental and consumer regulations, and cut taxes. But their political agenda, designed to increase the chances that they will retain power, got nearly as much of their attention. And few things can more effectively ensure that you’ll retain power than making it harder for the wrong kind of people to vote.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 4, 2012
“Still Separate And Unequal”: Mitt Romney Fails To See America
After a third reading of Mitt Romney’s Liberty University commencement speech, I still fail to see how my Post colleague Michael Gerson could have described it as “more than good.”
Romney’s address struck me as standard fare for a college graduation. He hit all the familiar notes: gratitude to school and a nod to parents for sacrifices made; celebration of the virtues of hard work, devotion to principles, individualism, service, family. There was even a little shameless politicking, with Romney telling the audience “what the next four years might hold for me is yet to be determined. But . . . things are looking up, and I take your kind hospitality today as a sign of good things to come.”
It was the kind of speech that could have been delivered — sans the pandering and the references to more-contemporary figures (the late Chuck Colson; the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, who founded Liberty University; and the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) — to college graduating classes in the 1950s or even in 1900.
The Liberty remarks, as seems to be true of many Romney speeches, reflected a rather constricted view of the country. Perhaps it’s because Romney chooses to deliver most of his lines to narrow audiences.
Missing in his Liberty offering, as with some other Romney speeches, is any recognition — not praises, mind you, but simple acknowledgment — that 21st-century America is more than a white, middle-class country.
He revealed no sense whatsoever of knowing that the overwhelming majority of Liberty grads will, in their adult lives, inhabit an America in which they will be the minority.
Romney’s speeches seem tailor-made for audiences that look pretty much like him.
At least that is what one is led to believe after observing where Romney chooses to go and what he has to say.
I tried to imagine Romney’s Liberty address being delivered to the graduates and their families at the 2012 commencement exercises I attended a week ago at historically black Howard University in Washington.
I cannot believe, however, that the Romney campaign apparatus would have allowed the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to tell an African American audience numbering in the thousands that Falwell was “a gracious Christian example” and a “courageous and big-hearted minister of the Gospel who . . . never hated an adversary.”
Indeed, Romney lauded Falwell, who famously said: “I do question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations.”
Romney spoke glowingly of the same Falwell who said of the landmark Supreme Court school desegregation decision: “If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never had been made. The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line.”
The same Falwell who disparaged Nobel Peace Prize winner and Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a phony. (Falwell later apologized for that remark and claimed that he had misspoken.)
And who can forget Falwell’s finger-pointing after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks? He declared on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” show: “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America — I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’ ”
I suspect if Romney spoke at Howard, he would have skipped that part about Falwell.
But what does the man who seeks to lead this country have to say about, and to, this rapidly changing nation of diverse people with diverse interests and needs?
Thus far, Romney’s thoughts and policy prescriptions seem focused on America’s largest — and slowest-growing — racial group: his own.
Democratic critics accuse Romney of having values that skew to the rich at the expense of the poor. They say he’s disconnected from the problems of average Americans; that he’s out of touch and just doesn’t get it.
Would that it were only a matter of determining whether Romney is on the side of the rich or middle class.
The question is much broader and more significant: When Mitt Romney thinks and speaks of Americans, do those who don’t look like him even come to mind?
Since he launched his presidential campaign, it’s been hard to tell. And Romney’s Liberty University speech was no help.
By: Colbert King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 18, 2012
“No Excuse For Inaction”: The Awful Race Disparities That Still Haunt Us
Even though a black family lives in the White House, hardly anyone seriously argues that we live in a postracial society. That aspirational description of 21st century America came into vogue about four years ago, as President Barack Obama raced to victory in the 2008 presidential election, and a great number of black and white Americans wanted to believe the nation was finally closing the books on its discriminatory history.
But no. President Obama’s election didn’t suddenly sweep away all the accumulated consequences of past racism in our society. The preexisting racial disparities, so engrained in the fabric of our economy and culture, didn’t erase themselves in the wake of his victory.
As my Progress 2050 colleagues Christian E. Weller, Julie Ajinkya, and Jane Farrell make regrettably clear in their recently released report, “The State of Communities of Color in the U.S. Economy: Still Feeling the Pain Three Years Into Recovery,” racial and ethnic minority groups aren’t living in a paradise free of racial disadvantage. Quite the contrary, their research demonstrates that people of color aren’t benefiting apace with white Americans as our nation gradually rebounds from the financial collapse and economic recession that gripped us all when President Obama took office:
[T]he data we summarize in this report shows that communities of color are substantially less likely than their white fellow citizens to enjoy the opportunities that come from having a good job, owning a home, and having a financial safety cushion in the form of health insurance, retirement benefits, and private savings. This difference exists because economic opportunities eroded faster for communities of color than for whites during the Great Recession—and those opportunities have been coming back much more slowly for communities of color than for whites during the economic recovery.
The disparities Weller, Ajinkya, and Farrell write about aren’t new. Anyone who’s paid scant attention to the drumbeat of sour economic news knows that white unemployment, while at near-record heights, never drew within spitting distance of the chronically high rates suffered by African Americans and Latinos. As a result of this one fact, my colleagues write, a host of other calamities followed for people of color during the economic downturn like toppling dominoes, including:
— Black Americans enjoying fewer job opportunities than all other racial and ethnic groups.
— Poverty rates, already higher for communities of color, rising faster in the recession and declining slower during recovery than for white Americans
— Homeownership, a major source of financial security, disappearing faster for black Americans during the recession and recovery than for white Americans
Those are old, bitter, and racially disparate facts. But what is especially galling is the yawning silence and indifference that seems to accompany the periodic recitation of them. Worse, there exists in some conservative quarters a refusal to acknowledge the truth and an eagerness to embrace discredited notions about postracialism. Acting as if racial disparities don’t exist or believing we’re now living in some fantasy world free of racial divisions is nothing more than an excuse to preserve the status quo. It serves to protect the advantages of those who are already employed and comfortable, while keeping racial and ethnic minorities locked out of the improving economy.
But despite the cloudy pessimism disclosed in the report, there also exists the opportunity for hopeful change. More than a catalogue of racial disparities, the report provides a roadmap for policies that, if implemented, would help equalize the burdens faced by people of color. Specifically, it suggests federal policies that would accelerate job creation, shore up unemployment insurance, raise the minimum wage, increase access to health insurance, and implement comprehensive immigration reform to protect workers’ rights.
Armed with the facts of disparity and a prescription for change, policymakers have no excuse for inaction. Reporting the bad news, as Weller, Ajinkya, and Farrell have done, removes the blinders from their eyes. Policymakers’ indifference to the pain of their fellow citizens can only be interpreted as willing refusal to ensure that all Americans—including communities of color—share equitably in the rebuilding and recovery of the nation’s economy.
By: Sam Fulwood III, Center for American Progress, Published in AlterNet, April 17, 2012
“White Like Me”: The Re-Racialization Of American Politics
The conditions are converging for another presidential election that will sharply divide the country along racial lines, with troubling implications no matter which side prevails.
From one direction, the Republican presidential primaries have witnessed an epic failure by the GOP contenders to attract and engage minority voters. White voters, especially older ones, are routinely casting 90 percent or more of the votes in GOP contests this year, at least as high a proportion as in 2008.
Simultaneously, despite some recent gains, President Obama continues to struggle among white voters, especially the white working class. In 2008, he became the first presidential nominee ever to lose white voters by double digits and still win the White House. In 2012, as minorities loom larger in the vote, Obama could lose whites even more lopsidedly and still win reelection.
As these trends intensify, the election could reinforce the hardening re-racialization of American politics. Republicans today rely on a preponderantly white coalition centered on older and blue-collar voters, many of whom express great unease not only about activist government but also about the demographic changes swelling the minority population. Democrats depend on a coalition of minorities and of white voters (particularly those with college degrees) who are the most comfortable with government activism and the propulsive demographic transformation.
This year’s tumultuous Republican presidential race has underscored the dominance of whites, especially older white voters, in the GOP. After Tuesday’s contests in Alabama and Mississippi, exit polls have been conducted in 16 states that have held Republican primaries or caucuses. In all but two, whites cast at least 90 percent of the ballots. Indeed, whites delivered at least 94 percent of the votes in all but five GOP contests this year. Whites represented only 74 percent of all voters in the 2008 general election.
Among those 16 states, only Michigan has seen its minority vote share increase by more than a trace (to 8 percent, from 4 percent in 2008). Whites are dominating the GOP electorate even in rapidly diversifying states. In Nevada, whites were just 69 percent of all voters in the 2008 general election, but they cast 90 percent of the votes in last month’s Republican caucus. Similar gaps are evident in GOP primaries from Georgia, Mississippi, and Virginia, to Arizona, Ohio, and Oklahoma.
This year’s Republican electorate shades not only white but also gray. In 12 of the 16 states where exit polls have been conducted, voters over 50 cast at least 60 percent of the GOP primary votes; in the other four, they represented at least 55 percent of the vote. Just 43 percent of 2008 general-election voters were that old. Even compared with the 2008 GOP primaries, the gray tint is much more pronounced.
All of this flags near- and long-term challenges for the Republican Party. The problem this fall will be to attract minority (and younger) voters who are uninspired, or even alienated, by the primaries. As GOP front-runner Mitt Romney has hurtled to the right on immigration, recent surveys have shown Obama’s support against him matching, or exceeding, the president’s 67 percent showing among Hispanics in 2008. Hispanic Republicans such as Jennifer Korn, executive director of the Hispanic Leadership Network, say that if Romney wins the nomination, he will need to vastly expand his outreach “to explain his [immigration] position.” But outreach may go only so far for a candidate who touts “self-deportation” for illegal immigrants.
As population trends continue, the electoral math will grow more daunting for Republicans. If the GOP allows Democrats to continue winning four-fifths of all minority voters—as Obama did in 2008—Republicans will need to attract an implausibly high percentage of whites to win presidential elections. The conundrum is that the party’s current reliance on the most conservative whites constrains its ability to embrace policies attractive to minorities, as the harsh primary debate on immigration demonstrates.
Today, however, the GOP’s white strength can still overcome its minority weakness. Obama could win reelection with backing from only about 39 percent of whites if he duplicates his 2008 showing among minorities (and if their vote share rises slightly). But Democrats couldn’t muster even that much white support during the 2010 Republican congressional landslide. And Obama has no guarantee of crossing that bar this fall. In the Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll released on Friday, his approval rating among whites reached just 41 percent, a meager level that he has exceeded only once in the poll since October 2009.
These contrasting racial patterns signal another tough election in November. Equally important, they show how closely the ideological divisions between the parties track racial lines, with minorities more open than most whites to an activist role for Washington in promoting opportunity and providing a safety net. That divergence is a formula for social tension and polarized debate. But it’s the future that appears increasingly likely as Obama marshals a coalition powered at its core by the diversity reshaping American life, and his Republican rivals compete for an electorate that remains almost entirely untouched by it.
By: Ronald Brownstein, National Journal, March 17, 2012
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