Voters and Victims: How blacks lost--no matter what
December 4, 2000

By Tamar Jacoby

If you closed your eyes in some parts of Florida in the days following the election, it wasn’t hard to imagine that it was still the ‘60s. According to Jesse Jackson and the NAACP, nothing important has changed since the civil-rights era. They still see a government conspiracy determined to keep blacks down by "suppressing" their votes. "The right to vote came out of Selma in blood," said Jackson. "We can’t afford to lose a franchise."

This tone is nothing new. It is how the Democratic campaign has sounded all year in black America. If it now seems a little ominous to Bush supporters, it has been doing damage-insidious and lasting damage-in the black community for some time now.

In truth, of course, neither Florida nor the rest of America looks anything like the ‘60s as far as race is concerned. The black middle class has quadrupled since then. Three times as many blacks graduate from college. The number of black elected officials has skyrocketed from under a hundred to nearly 9,000, and blacks are one of the most powerful constituencies-if not the most powerful-in the Democratic party. Not surprisingly, these facts are now reflected in the way both parties vie for the black vote, and this year, even more than in the past, both sides mounted Herculean efforts.

The Democratic push was the more expensive and showy of the two. There were ads in black newspapers and on black radio stations. In Texas alone, the party sent out a million pieces of racially targeted mail and telephoned another million registered blacks with tailored messages. Jackson had his own plane, supplied by the party, and according to insiders, his schedule was second in importance only to the candidate’s own: He was that busy and committed. Even the shooed-aside Bill Clinton was allowed to pitch in on this, making trips to predominantly black districts and recording 70 different phone messages that were then piped into the homes of potential black voters.

All of this was supplemented by the NAACP’s get-out-the-vote effort, "Operation Big Vote," which was ostensibly nonpartisan but seen by many as a $9 million soft-money contribution to the Gore campaign. Paid staffers and volunteers scoured the country for black voters, targeting the unregistered in shopping malls, nightclubs, black churches, even southern prisons, where they harvested some 11,000. As the election approached, the NAACP’s army manned telephone banks and knocked on doors; messages urging blacks to get to the polls aired on BET and in Magic Johnson Theaters. All of this was pretty much business as usual-except on a new scale. What wasn’t so conventional were the NAACP’s widely aired "issue ads," which didn’t exactly say, but left little doubt about whom the organization thought blacks should vote for.

Also new this year, the Republican party joined in-big time. The GOP spent $1 million on issue spots that aired exclusively on black radio, and Bush backed up his claim that he was "a different kind of Republican" by reaching out to civil-rights groups like CORE and even the NAACP.

All of this, according to David Bositis of the nonpartisan Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, amounted to the largest and most expensive effort ever to reach out to black voters, with at least ten times as much money spent this year as in any previous campaign season.

The results were dramatic, if largely unnoticed in the tumult that followed the election. Nationally, black turnout was about what it was last time: 10 percent of the total vote (that’s compared with blacks’ 13 percent of the population). But blacks’ enthusiasm for Gore outstripped even their historic outpourings for Clinton: Gore took 90 percent of the black vote, compared with Clinton’s 84 percent last time. Black votes made the difference in several key states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Maryland-all of which Bush would have won if only whites had voted-and, it may turn out, in Florida, where Bush also won the white vote, by something like 55 to 41 percent. Black turnout in these closely contested races was unprecedented and overwhelmingly Democratic. "Bush made no inroads at all," independent pollster John Zogby declared the day after the election-if anything, an understatement. In recent decades, only Goldwater did worse, with 4 percent of the black vote to Bush’s 8 percent.

What accounts for this lopsided rout? Issues and circumstances hold some clue. Jeb Bush’s "One Florida" plan to replace racial preferences had alienated blacks in Florida and elsewhere. So did George W. Bush’s stand on the Confederate flag and his appearance at Bob Jones University. Voters saw bigotry in his support for the death penalty. Paradoxically, among blacks, the Clinton impeachment, too, helped Gore: As much as anything Clinton said or did, it was what many blacks saw as his "lynching" by conservative whites that endeared him to them. (As Toni Morrison claimed unforgettably, this effectively made him black.) But even more than these campaign themes, what brought blacks to vote Democratic was their image of themselves as victims-an image that the Gore campaign played on even more shamelessly than previous Democrats.

Consider the campaign’s oratory and the ads it ran in the black community. Racial profiling was a key issue-with black-on-black crime never mentioned. Hate-crimes legislation was another. When talking about the Confederate flag, Gore tried to imply that Bush had a soft spot for slavery. At the bitter end of the campaign, the vice president insinuated that his opponent was intent on rolling back black citizenship. "When my opponent, Governor Bush, says he’ll appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court," Gore mused, "I often think of the strictly constructed meaning that was applied when the Constitution was written-how some people were considered three-fifths of a human being." One NAACP spot featured vintage footage of the civil-rights struggle-as if Bush were going to bring back police dogs and water hoses. And both the party and the NAACP made prominent use of the family of James Byrd, the black man lynched in Texas in 1998: In a taped ad and at rallies, the family members implied that Bush had somehow condoned that hideous murder.

Occasionally, of course, even before black audiences, Democrats had to make some mention of real issues-as opposed to symbolic ones-but they too were used mainly to make Republicans look like bogeymen: tools of Big Oil and Big Drug Companies, southern conservatives out to take things from the little guy.

In almost everything they did or said, Democrats encouraged blacks to think that whites were responsible for their problems. Gore played brazenly to the conventional black view that the politics of race are a matter of good and evil (the vice president actually used that language)-not a choice between two different visions of how to handle issues like poverty and opportunity, but rather a contest between people of goodwill (invariably liberals) and villainous racists (always conservative). Rather than spur black effort and black responsibility, the campaign only encouraged blacks to believe that they always will be victims-encouraged them to go on flailing at white America and voting for Democrats to protect them from it.

In contrast, Bush and the Republican National Committee tried to appeal to blacks on the issues, addressing bread-and-butter problems and offering practical solutions. True, blacks were rarely a top priority, and spokesmen sometimes suffered from a tin ear. But GOP ads focused on initiatives like school choice and tax cuts for inner-city entrepreneurs-policies that would actually help blacks, as opposed to merely making them feel better, as hate-crimes legislation and more affirmative action might or might not do. Bush’s education proposals and the passion with which he argued for them seemed tailor-made to appeal to poor black voters, who support school choice in overwhelming majorities. Of all the challenges facing blacks, none is more important than closing the education gap. But these Bush ideas fell on deaf ears in a community more interested in hearing the old Manichean catechism.

The horror is that Democrats’ symbolic, emotional politics worked, and so, destructive as they are both for blacks and the country as a whole, we are sure to see more of them in the next campaign and for years to come. This will exact a huge cost. What some black scholars label "victimology" and others call the "racism-forever view" is deeply engrained in the black community. Indeed, in the last 30 years, it has become the bedrock of black identity. But it could not flourish or, in the long run, survive if it were not fueled by whites-whites like those Democratic politicians who pander to black paranoia for their own advantage. Skeptical Republicans who now repudiate Bush’s black outreach are probably right in a narrow sense: There’s no short-term party advantage in following his course. But in the long run, there can be little hope of moving forward on race unless enlightened blacks and whites come together to combat the poisonous attitudes that lie behind so much black failure. Unfortunately, that is not the lesson this election teaches, and whatever the outcome, when it’s finally decided, one thing is already clear: For all its growing political muscle, black America lost.

©2000 National Review

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