LITTLE ROCK — Many expect the Democratic Party to get walloped in November to the point of losing the House and possibly even the Senate.
Facing such calamity, Democrats have already resorted to doing what they do best-playing the race card as a means of firing up their black/Hispanic base.
Michelle Obama did her part in a speech before the NAACP in which she prodded its members to turn up the “intensity,” a suggestion given more tangible form shortly thereafter when that organization issued its now infamous condemnation of “racist” elements within the tea-party movement.
That the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People failed to provide any credible evidence on behalf of that charge has already been noted, but the significance of that failure generally glided over. It shouldn’t be that difficult to find something that smacks of racism somewhere in a movement as open and massive as the tea-party movement is, particularly when one looks in every nook and cranny and begins with a definition of the thing so capacious as to render the concept meaningless.
Racism of some kind can always be found if one looks hard enough, including almost certainly within the ranks of the NAACP, an organization that has over time become largely indistinguishable from a union of race hustlers.
Either the research skills of its staffers have deteriorated in tandem with the NAACP’s reputation or the tea-partiers have been on their best behavior on this score, perhaps in anticipationof the kinds of accusations that liberals can be expected to fling at anyone who opposes the agenda of the Obama administration. Running the same play over and over again doesn’t work any better in politics than in sports, in part because the other side sees it coming and adjusts accordingly.
Just as Joe McCarthy’s demagoguery on communist infiltration ended up making it easier for genuine communists to infiltrate American institutions during the Cold War, too reckless and too frequent liberal charges of racism allow the real racists still among us to breathe easier. The old story about the boy crying wolf comes readily to mind.
If mobilizing black voters through crude racial appeals is crucial for minimizing Democratic losses in November, more important in the long run will be mobilizing the Hispanic vote, an observation that directs us toward the administration’s lawsuit against Arizona.
Behind that lawsuit are, to be sure, some legitimate issues pertaining to federal/state authority, but one suspects that electoral politics are the far more powerful motive. If blacks have for some time been the most loyal component of the Democratic base, a larger and more rapidly growing Hispanic demographic represents the party’s long-term future. As the Democratic Party increasingly comes to bea party of ethnic and racial minorities, it will increasingly see politics through racial/ethnic lenses.
Vladimir Lenin, a man as politically astute as he was morally despicable, once asked one of the key questions in politics: “Who benefits?” His query seems relevant in light of perceptions that the administration is more interested in an amnesty policy on illegal immigration than it is in controlling the nation’s borders. At the least, the suspicion creeps in that for many Democratic Party activists each passing day of uncontrolled national borders means more prospective Democratic voters.
The election of Barack Obama was supposed to represent a significant step toward racial healing in our country, but it is difficult to achieve racial redemption when one of our nation’s two major political parties routinely plays the race card as a means of boosting its electoral fortunes or uses the racist label to slander anyone interested in limited government or properly enforcing the nation’s laws.It also is difficult to have a debate over ideas when one side sees every idea it disagrees with as racist.
In the end, though, apart from their morally repellent nature, it is difficult to see how Democratic tactics will actually be rewarded at the ballot box. Even white voters who voted for Obama less than two years ago and don’t have a racist bone in their body might catch on to the game that is being played at their expense.
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Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 81 on 07/25/2010