Every few months, the GOP will try and convince the public that it really, really wants to boost the party’s weak support in the African-American community.
Four years after black voters all but ignored George W. Bush at the ballot box, the Republican Party is still struggling to make itself more attractive to them and other minorities.
To improve on his 8 percent support among blacks in 2000, an unusually low level for the winner in a presidential race, the party is wooing African-Americans in battleground states with new advertising campaigns, voter registration drives on college campuses, the appointment of a “steering committee” of prominent black leaders to promote Mr. Bush’s policies and a national tour of party officials with the flamboyant boxing promoter Don King.
There are subtle gestures, such as Bush’s four-year boycott of the NAACP, that lead to some skepticism about the sincerity of such outreach. Likewise, it doesn’t help when the GOP creates a political action to offer “significant, direct financial assistance to first-rate minority GOP candidates,” but then doesn’t actually give minority candidates any money.
Then there are less subtle moments, such as Sen. Trent Lott praising Strom Thurmond’s segregationist platform, Rep. Barbara Cubin comparing African Americans to drug addicts, Rep. Cass Ballenger admitting to having “segregationist feelings,” and Gov. Haley Barbour hanging out with a racist, segregationist group.
And then there are the other moments when Republicans just slap the African-American community across the face.
Democrats on Wednesday denounced a Republican lawmaker quoted in a newspaper as saying the GOP would fare poorly in this year’s elections if it failed to “suppress the Detroit vote.”
Let’s see, 83% of Detroit’s population is black. What ever could he have meant?
Republican State Rep. John Pappageorge, in assessing his party’s chances in Michigan this year, told the Detroit Free Press last week, “If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we’re going to have a tough time in this election.”
Yesterday, Pappageorge acknowledged using “a bad choice of words.” You don’t say.
Aside from surface-level offensiveness, I think the comment offered an unusually insightful look at how some Republicans look at the campaign. It’s not enough to boost turnout with the GOP base, and it seems to be out of the question to really reach out to minorities with a positive message that resonates in inner cites, but the key, as far as people like Pappageorge are concerned, is “suppressing” the vote in African-American communities.
Pappageorge’s remark reflected the GOP’s failure to send black voters a persuasive message, said Rep. Alexander Lipsey, D-Kalamazoo.
“This is the endgame strategy the Republican Party has decided to utilize, rather than positive strategies,” he said. “They are strategizing, ‘How can we get those folks we don’t care about from going to the polls?'”