This article by the always interesting Stanley Crouch centers around an issue that is of great interest to me right now. The bottom line, in my opinion, is that the Democratic party has maybe one or two election cycles left before they start to really loose black voters in large numbers.

There are a lot of reasons why blacks are going to start migrating to the Republican party. First and foremost, as Crouch points out and I agree, black voters perceive themselves less and less as "black voter" and more and more as "voters," period.

At one point it may have been necessary for blacks to perceive themselves as a block to achieve the basic goals of the civil rights movement. To treat black people as a block today, however, is to deny the amazing achievements of that movement. The Republicans have caught onto to this, the Democrats have not.

Unlike so much of what the Republicans do, I don’t think this is a political strategy but an honest-to-goodness ideological difference. Shed a conservative of his racism and what will be left, as far as his thinking about minorities goes, will be an honest belief in the individual as a power in his own life.

As Crouch points out:

“The Republicans have succeeded in making high political appointments that seem to be free of any racial glue and actually recognize the individual rather than color or sex.”

I think this is dead on, and it puzzles (and saddens) me that I don’t think that either Al Gore or John Kerry would have elevated nearly as many minorities to true positions of power as George Bush has. I could very well be wrong, but I imagine that Bush and his people set about looking for the people they want in a particular position, and it just so happens that many of them have been minorities. Now, of course, I think Condi Rice was a horrible NSA and I expect her to be just as bad at State, but I measure her performance by very different metrics than the Bush team does.

To get at the heart of the matter, why are the Democrats still playing footsies with borderline felons, the likes of Al Sharpton, while the Republicans are appointing minorities to head up Education, State, NSA, and Justice?

I would love to hear someone else’s thoughts on this.

- posted by Simon Marcus @ Thursday, January 20, 2005