Senate Democrats thumb nose at blacks

Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush has screamed long and loud that the Senate's bash of disputed Illinois Senate appointee Roland Burris is racism. Burris took the cue and chimed in that he also whiffed race in the Senate Democrats' obsession with keeping him out of the Senate. Rush and Burris took much flack for dragging race into what Senate Democrats say is simply their ire at disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich for making a legally and ethically questionable appointment.

The Senate Democrats rap against Blago might fly if not for the revelation that Nevada Senator Harry Reid did his own back room political meddling and implored Blagojevich to appoint three candidates he chose. None of them were African-American. Reid's explanation for butting into the mess was that he wanted to get someone in office who could get re-elected; presumably he meant that a black candidate could not get white votes in conservative, central, and downstate, rural Illinois.

There's political logic to this. Obama's bipartisan, non-racial, centrist, pitch played well with many conservative white voters in the state. It also didn't hurt his Senate bid to have as his opponent political gadfly Alan Keyes, an African-American. However, a scandal tainted African-American candidate, such as Burris, running for election to the seat in 2010, wouldn't be so lucky.

But political logic is one thing, racial politics and sensitivities is another. Reid's intercession to get Blago to appoint a supposedly winning Democrat put him and Senate Democrats in the disastrous position of opposing a legitimate black appointee. This raises deep suspicions that Democratic Party leaders back black candidates only when it serves their interests. The massive support that top Democrats gave Obama's winning White House drive didn't dispel that suspicion. 

A history reminder is in order to make that point. Blacks are the most loyal of Democratic shock troops. In every election stretching back to Lyndon Johnson's landslide victory in 1964, they have given the Democrats more than eighty percent of their vote. Even as an increasing number of Latinos, Asians and trade unionists defected to the Republicans, blacks stood pat with the Democrats. But in recent years they haven't got much in return.

"Black president" Clinton radically downsized welfare, toughened federal anti-crime and drug laws, and pared away affirmative action programs. These were all Reagan, Bush Sr. and Nixon proposals that the Congressional Black Caucus and liberal Democrats vehemently opposed, and had languished in Congress. The ranks of the black poor quickly soared, the numbers jailed for mostly non-violent, non-serious crimes jumped, and funds for skill and education programs to permanently break the welfare cycle for the poor evaporated.

Clinton did appoint a handful of blacks to administration positions and increased funding for AIDS prevention, minority business, education, and African relief. But Bush did pretty much the same thing.

Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry spent most of their losing presidential campaigns in 2000 and 2004 avoiding appearances in black communities, and were stone silent on issues such as racial profiling, affirmative action, housing and job discrimination, the racial disparities in prison sentencing, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, health care for the poor, failing inner city schools, and ending the racially-marred drug sentencing policy.

Both got away with this by playing hard on the terror and panic that a Bush White House win in 2000 and his reelection in 2004 stirred in many blacks. But when blacks scurried to vote for Gore and Kerry out of fear of a Bush win they gave the Democrats another free ride.

Obama pretty much followed the same script. He talked tough talk about ramping up military and intelligence spending, making hard target preemptive strikes, and a massive troop build-up in Afghanistan. This was a transparent effort to trump the GOP on their pet national security issue. It was also a big tip off that military preparedness and national security, not civil rights or social issues would remain the Democrats' big campaign focus.

The wrinkle that Obama added to the campaign which ultimately tipped the scales to him was the economy. He ripped a page straight out of the Clinton playbook and pledged big tax breaks for the middle-class. That did two things. It sent a strong signal that the Democrats could also pitch the virtues of the middle-class. It sent the more subtle signal that Democrats would continue to place priority on middle-class needs and concerns, and not those of the black poor. 
 
Clinton and Obama successfully, and Gore and Kerry unsuccessfully, made a deliberate and politically calculated decision that strong security and middle class tax and economic relief is the only way to beat the GOP for the White House. Any hint of a tilt toward minorities by Democrats would be political suicide.

Reid used pretty much the same political calculus in pushing Blago to pick a white Democrat for Obama's vacant seat. The problem is that it's also a perceived and real thumb nose at black voters.