Yesterday during a speech at DePaul University, RNC chairman Michael Steele was surprising candid about GOP efforts to reach African-American voters:
Steele was asked Tuesday night during a speech to roughly 200 students at DePaul University why African-Americans should vote for GOP candidates.
“You really don’t have a reason, to be honest,” Steele responded, as was first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times. “We haven’t done a very good job of giving you one.”
That’s about right. The GOP has mostly positioned itself as the party of white grievance, and by definition, that means a certain amount of indifference (or even hostility) towards the priorities of black voters, as well as a willingness to exploit white grievance for electoral gain. Indeed, Steele wasn’t shy about admitting the extent to which the Republican Party has relied on white grievance to propel its electoral success:
“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans,” Steele said. “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties. Their parties walk away from them.
“For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”
It’s incredibly rare to see a prominent Republican admit this much, but it’s true. From the 1960s until quite recently, the GOP relied on subtle — and not so subtle — racial appeals to win elections. Reagan was a master of this technique. In his narrative, the Voting Rights Act was “humiliating to the South,” Federal aid recipients were “welfare queens,” unemployed men collecting benefits were “strapping young bucks,” and criminals were vicious “predators.” This isn’t explicitly racial, of course, but considering the targets — poor, urban-dwelling Americans — it’s clear what color he was referring to.
In any case, Michael Steele deserves credit for owning up to the GOP’s legacy of playing on white racial fears. Now let’s see if he can convince his fellow-travelers to do the same.
Surprisingly? Really? Steele has been surpassingly good at telling the audience in front of him whatever it wants to hear. The national media has already bought into the narrative that he’s unpredictable so they’ll give him press but won’t call him out for inconsistency, and the base’s hatred of him hasn’t motivated the RNC to fire him yet–what has he got to lose?
All well and good, but can I offer one challenge to the notion that this is solely a GOP problem, historically speaking? Silliness about him being the “first black president” aside, Bill Clinton was also a master of the artform. His Sister Souljah moment was precisely a coded appeal to white Southern (and not just Southern) Americans anxious about minorities. And he doubled down the Southern Strategy, taking it from the realm of purely symbolic gestures into the real of actual policy–witness his policies on welfare reform and crime. These were certainly intended in part to play on fears of “poor, urban-dwelling Americans.”
Yes, it’s not a mirror-image of the GOP’s old Southern Strategy, but it is certainly an effort to profit politically off of the same fears in a way that Carter, for example, refused to.
You won’t find disagreement from me there.