What has been the result of all those robust appeals to minorities that Texas Gov. George W. Bush has made? Black voters appear to be rejecting the Republican nominee like a spurned prom date.
That’s one message to be drawn from a new national poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a Washington-based think tank that tracks racial trends. Only 9 percent of black voters backed the man known widely as “Dubyah” in the poll of 1,608 adults, conducted in late September and early October, compared to 74 percent for Vice President Al Gore and 2 percent for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader. (Almost all of the rest were “undecided.”)
That has to be disappointing for the Bush team. Their man has pulled unusually large percentages of black and Hispanic votes in his home state. Under Bush’s watch, the party’s national convention in Philadelphia featured so many non-white entertainers and speakers on its Monday night opening that it looked like “Soul Train” in front of an audience that looked, as one wag put it, as white as “an Osmond family Christmas special in Norway.”
Earlier, Bush addressed the heavily Democratic NAACP and, more recently, he has campaigned with prominent black Americans like retired Gen. Colin Powell and national security expert Condoleezza Rice.
Even so, the Joint Center poll indicates blacks like some of Bush’s ideas better than they like Bush. On the issues, the poll showed blacks and Bush were not so far apart. Fifty-seven percent of the black voters surveyed said they supported the idea of giving vouchers to parents dissatisfied with public schools so they can send their children to private schools, an idea Gore and the teachers unions flatly oppose. And a 45 percent plurality said they supported Bush’s idea of enabling workers to invest part of their Social Security in private retirement accounts that they would own, an idea Gore has denounced as a “risky scheme.”
But with both parties’ presidential candidates focusing mainly on swing voters, there has not been much to lure black voters to the Republican Party beyond the songs and dances on their convention stage and, more recently, a national ad campaign on black-oriented radio stations.
Even the younger black voters who were showing the most movement toward Republicans in 1996 shifted back to the Democrats this year, according to David Bositis, the center’s political research director. “It’s not going to happen this year,” Bositis said, of Republican hopes to lure large numbers of black voters. “It is going to take more than one campaign season for Republicans to convince black voters.”
Indeed, a lot of suspicions have been built up by previous campaigns that, since the early 1960s, have used issues like “state’s rights,” “crime in the streets” and “welfare queens” as not-too-subtle racial code words to lure white votes.
Despite his party’s mixed history on race, Bush does have some racial achievements to brag about. After a federal court ended affirmative action in college admissions in Texas, for example, Bush signed a bill that set up a new system that has led to higher black and Hispanic enrollment in the state’s top universities. Unfortunately, his argument for “affirmative access,” as he calls it, sounded lame during his final debate with Gore, as if his heart wasn’t really in it.
Similarly, his refusal to sign a bill that would have included hate-crime protections for homosexuals has provided ample material for critics to call Bush soft on bigots.That image has not been helped by his own declaration that two of the Supreme Court’s most conservative justices on civil-rights questions, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, are his kind of appointments.
Black voters have been the Democratic Party’s most loyal ethnic bloc since the New Deal days of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Unfortunately, such loyalty has meant black voters too often have been taken for granted by one party and ignored by the other. .
In the final days of a campaign, politicians usually head back to their base.
An unfortunate color line still divides the parties. As an African-American I know I am not alone in my wish to see both parties compete for my vote the way they compete for other constituencies, like, say, Social Security recipients. For now, the Grand Old Party at least offered African-Americans a few good songs. Unfortunately the tune still is off-key.
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Clarence Page is a member of the Tribune’s editorial board. E-mail: cptime@tribune.com
