Mitt Romney will now take advice about black people from a committee consisting of Allen West and some guy who is not Hermann Cain.
This seems like a brilliant move, at least for West and whoever thought up the idea. A recent poll pegged Mitt’s black support at zero point zero percent. Granted, the Willard campaign went over the edge with their BS welfare ads and in general used a bullhorn when most campaigns would stick with a dogwhistle. Even so, does anyone buy that his black support is really absolute zero? We should assume that basic reversion to the mean will bring the next poll to more like the expected one to five percent. When that happens, Allen West and not-Hermann Cain moved the numbers! Draw a trendline on those two points and you have Mitt winning an African-American majority by November. Most effective committee ever!
Roger Moore
Mitt’s going to be given advice by the committee; whether he takes any of it is an open question. Given how well he takes advice from other people, I’m not holding my breath on this one being anything beyond a pure PR move.
MacsenMifune
Romney must have lost Alan Keyes’s number.
dr. bloor
Shhh. Watching the pundidiots chase error variance in polling data like dogs chase their tails is one of my favorite pastimes. Don’t spoil it.
Spaghetti Lee
Well, to be fair, there’s always a margin of error in those things. He could easily be at -3% of the black vote.
Face
And when his AA support goes to 3%, Chuck Toddler will trumpet the eleventy billion percent increase in AA support for
RommellRomney and claim it’s evidence that Blacks hate Obama and he’ll lose both DC and the states of Atlanta and Chicago.sharl
@MacsenMifune:
Beat me to it. When going for the CRAAYZEE, why settle for half-measures?
ETA: Of course, Mr. Keyes could also be invited onto this committee. Problem is, the egos these guys carry around will only fit one to a room. Some in fact may need their own buildings. But could be entertaining, so there is that.
Schlemizel
@MacsenMifune: DAMN! you got there before I could – curses foiled again!
Steve
Republican outreach to black folks is not about winning some negligible number of black votes, it is about creating an impression of inclusion for the folks in the middle who care about such things. Of course, you have to hope the independents don’t notice when Romney gives a speech to the NAACP and the Republican base is all like “why bother with those ungrateful moochers?”
Some Republican strategists may perceive a long game of peeling off a portion of the black vote, but I’m pretty sure they all know this isn’t the year that strategy will come to fruition. About the only actual attempt I’ve seen to win black votes for the GOP in the near-term was on the gay marriage issue.
Hoodie
Maybe he should appoint Boehner to an Orange Leadership Committee.
jibeaux
Hell, I’m not sure Michael Steele is going to vote for Romney.
quannlace
Sure, cause accusing Obama of buying black people’s vote couldn’t have offended anybody.
Robin G.
It’s not about black votes. It’s about convincing squeamish white voters they wouldn’t be pulling the lever for a racist.
eric
can a brotha help me out: is it understood within the african american community what the mormon religious interpretation of “blackness” is?
flukebucket
And will be rewarded with a shower of peanuts!
Violet
I’ve loved watching white pundits mention that polls show Romney has 0% of the black vote while a black Republican like Michael Steele or Juan Williams is sitting right there at the pundit desk. The white pundit usually looks at them pointedly, and the black pundit kind of shifts in his seat and looks uncomfortable. Yeah, motherfucker, go on and look uncomfortable. Are you REALLY going to vote for the Team of Idiots? The ones that are being opening racist? Really?
Chris
Cue the screams and howls of “BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWW why do black people get a leadership council why isn’t there a White Leadership Council? Yer RAAAAAAAAAAACIST!”
sharl
@Robin G.:
Yeah, pretty good chance that you’re right. And for that same reason, it also gives right-wing radio talk-jocks someone of color they can quote, whenever it suits their agenda.
MacsenMifune
@sharl: @Schlemizel: Just the luck of the draw, plus originally I was going to say Clayton Bigsby’s number.
Steve
@Chris: I believe the GOP’s White Leadership Council would be known as a “Committee of the Whole.”
Chris
@Steve:
Exactly.
I remember a moment in Phillip Roth’s novel “The Plot Against America” where a Jewish rabbi of some renown goes and endorses Lindbergh for President by saying he’s totally not pro-Hitler or antisemetic and it’s important to realize that, you know, America First. The Jewish family’s watching in the living room, the dad goes “what the fuck is he thinking, does he actually think he’s going to get a single Jewish vote for Lindbergh with that stunt?” and his kid goes “he’s not talking to Jews, he’s koshering Lindbergh for the goyim.”
Scene plays in my head every time I see a non-White-Christian-Male Republican get on the stage.
Violet
@eric: Back when I worked with all the Mormons, my office mate, an African-American woman, asked our other office-mate, who was Mormon, about her religion. She said, “I heard you don’t allow black people.” (Me: Trying not to laugh out loud at my desk.) Mormon office-mate, a wonderfully sweet woman, says, “Oh, no, that changed years ago. We just had a black family join our church last week!” African-American woman gave her the side-eye.
The following day, the Mormon office-mate shows up with some Mormon magazine with a black family on the cover (along with a zillion white families). “See!” she says, “We do have black members in our church.”
I think I had to excuse myself I was laughing so hard. She didn’t win over the other office mate.
Tom65
@jibeaux: Neither am I. I caught an interview with him after MO’s speech and I thought he was going to start phonebanking for Obama.
CarolDuhart2
I just think what has also happened is this: there was a time when there were a few Black Republicans. Blacks were republicans for the opposite reason that White Southerners were Democrats. Like their white opposites, those folks have mostly died off now, and the next generations don’t go that way. So the numbers are constantly dropping with few replacements.
Think a moment about the Steeles and the Wests and the Condis. Are there any young black Republicans behind them? There’s no future there even if you are a black conservative. Black Democrats have elected a President, at least 2 Senators, 2 Governors and a buttload of Representatives and mayors. The most prominent Republicans are all appointed or members of some think tank. The party indulges in insulting and degrading talk about your ethnic group. Even if you decieve yourself into thinking they only mean those “others” you can’t help but wonder if sometimes they mean you too. So you would rather be a Conservative Black Democrat and be accepted by your party on some things.
Skippy-san
Allen West is a moron. In fact that statement does a disservice to moron’s. The main question one should ask about West is this, ” How many battalion commanders came home from Iraq without getting fired or getting an Article 15?” Answer: “Just about all of them. ( Except for Allen West).”
There are conserative black supporters of the GOP I know some personally who can spout the same lies as Ryan does and they believe every word of it. They just are not a majority in the GOP.
LanceThruster
Ni-Clang please!
Xecky Gilchrist
Typical corporate leech approach to solving a problem: add a layer of middle management.
Brachiator
@Steve:
That’s a very long game. The sun will have burnt out and all life will have ended on the planet before the GOP could possibly peel off a significant percentage of the African American vote, given where that party is now.
@Violet:
Is Juan Williams a Republican? I’ve heard him describe himself as a liberal, and can’t recall his claiming any particular party affiliation, but I don’t really follow him.
Mnemosyne
@Robin G.:
Republicans had better hope that those squeamish white voters weren’t watching their convention, then. Total anecdata, but my friend’s politically unaware sister watched about 10 minutes of the Republican convention and was so horrified by the racism on parade that she went out to register to vote in her new state.
She’s in Mississippi, so voting for Obama will be like spitting into the ocean, but the story is more that those “secret dogwhistles” that the Republicans think they’re blowing are more like air horns these days.
different-church-lady
Do you remember back before they standardized the nutrition labels sometimes there’d be an asterisk in one position which meant something like “under 2% of the daily recommended allowance”? Or, effectively, “so little we can’t measure it in a meaningful way.” They should just do that with Romney’s black support.
Cassidy
I love Robot/ Zombie’s ability to turn normally bad politics into an absolute trainwreck.
Steve
@CarolDuhart2: I think there are a few young black Republicans, sure, like the Congressional candidate from Utah, Mia Love. She might be a true believer for all I know, but remember that this is politics, it’s full of ambitious people by definition, and there’s always going to be some number of people who are enticed by a free shot to move to the head of the line.
Violet
@Brachiator: Dunno. Maybe not. He’s on Fox, so I just figured he was at least a “principled centrist”. Har.
Roger Moore
@Steve:
but they’re probably thinking in terms that would classify as a violation of the Geneva Conventions and US anti-lynching statutes.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
That’s what happens when you get so used to interacting with people who agree with you on everything, you forget that there are people out there who don’t, and you’re like a fish out of the water when trying to interact with these people. Hence the increasing inability to separate dogwhistle from airhorn.
There are a lot of reason why Nixon and Reagan did better than their successors are doing now, but a big one in my view is that they didn’t have the luxury of growing up inside a hermetically sealed universe of facts. They may not have liked the fact that millions of Americans disagreed with them, but they realized that they had to acknowledge them and at least try to pretend like they gave a shit about them. Romney and Ryan, and much of the current conservative movement (right down to the voters with their Fox News/PJMedia/National Review/etc) haven’t had that experience. They’ve grown up in a movement conservative bubble for so long they forget that there’s a world outside of it and haven’t got the first clue what to do about it.
That’s also a big part of the reason why today’s conservatives in Washington absolutely refuse to compromise or negotiate on ANYTHING, no matter how trivial.
Brachiator
@CarolDuhart2:
No.
There was a time when the overwhelming majority of blacks voted Republican. The Democratic Party, particularly in the South, was the party of white racists, even when it was populist. During the Civil Rights era, most racist whites moved to the GOP (e.g., Strom Thurmond in 1964 or Jesse Helms in1970).
Herbert Hoover got a majority of the black vote in 1928. But FDR got 71 percent of the black vote in 1936. However, you have these little anomalies:
The passage of the Civil Rights Act and the purge of segregationists from the Democratic Party sealed the deal.
Patricia Kayden
@Chris: That’s what I was wondering. Why a council just for the Black folks? Where’s the White Citizen’s Council?
Oh wait!
GregB
I really think we are witnessing a full and final transformation in America.
The GOP as the old guard is officially on the ropes and are flailing wildly and are embracing the very things they have fought for years. Affirmative action in their speaker selections and an effort at identity politics, only theirs is a veneer to cover up the true monochromatic make-up of their party.
It’s no small irony that this year was the year that demographics gave non-caucasion Americans the birth rate edge.
If we can keep them from stealing this election they are finished as a party in their old composition.
Chris
@Brachiator:
One thing to add to this;
I think the thing is that the Republican Party didn’t really do much for civil rights after the end of Reconstruction. Black people continued to support it for decades partly out of habit and partly because the Democrats were worse, but were taken for granted rather than cultivated as a constituency by the party as a whole. Which explains why so many of them jumped ship for the Democrats when FDR came along and gave them a reason to.
People talk about the “Southern switch” where black people became Democrats and white Southerners became Republicans as something that happened in the sixties. Seems to me it was more of a slow process that probably started as early as 1877 (end of Reconstruction) and went on as late as 1994 (Gingrich’s Congress wiping out most of the remaining Southern Democrats).
Haydnseek
@Chris: Another part of the reason that the cons refuse to compromise on anything is their abject fear of the baggers who elected them. They know full well that if they so much as give a dem the time of day they will get the shit primaried out of them by the always vigilant wingnuts that elected them. As insane as they are, they know that there’s someone even crazier just foaming to take their place back in their blood red home district. Live by the sword…
MattF
If Republicans are really taking advice from Allen West, there’s just nothing more to say.
Brachiator
@Tim F:
You might be accidently hiding something interesting here.
One of the guys not Herman Cain is Tim Scott, a member of Congress from South Carolina. Scott was heavily backed by the Tea Party and the GOP money machine, and has typically dumbass GOP views.
According to ABC news and other sources, going into the November 2010 election,
Scott won a primary runoff against Strom Thurmond’s son Paul, 68 percent to 32 percent. He beat the Democratic Party challenger in the subsequent election 65 per cent to 28 per cent.
The weird thing is that I cannot find any exit polls that detail how much of the black vote Scott received. I could look harder, but I got other stuff to do today.
But the larger point is that few of these black politicians seem to have much in the way of broad black support, and as Republicans their views aren’t much different from that of any other wingnut. There is not much point to Romney’s moves here.
ThresherK
Is Blackwell not available? Or is he busy setting up the voting booths?
JoyfulA
@Brachiator: C-SPAN has an antique TV commercial they run every so often with Ike urging a young black man to vote for him.
Jay C
@Brachiator:
Tim Scott’s from South Carolina? That explains it, then: SC is about as viable a two-party state as North Korea: if the state GOP Establishment is behind him (as, say, they have pushed the converted-Sikh Nikki Haley as Governor), he’s pretty much set. Color, in this instance, being second to ideological/partisan “dependability”, as usual with the GOP.
sharl
For those who are interested, there is a lot of material on the opportunistic and moral shape-shifter Artur Davis – a recent convert to the GOP – from one of my favorite lefty blogs operating inside of deeply red turf, Left in Alabama. (That link goes to posts at LiA that are tagged for Artur Davis.)
Chris
@Haydnseek:
Yeah, and to me that’s part of the same living-in-a-bubble phenomenon.
For the teabaggers on the one hand, because they’re dumb enough to believe they can get candidates who’ll never have to compromise and always give them everything they want (even in places like the East Coast where if you put that kind of demand on a candidate he’s clearly going to lose and you’ll be left with someone who agrees with you on nothing, when you could’ve had someone who at least agreed with you half the time).
And for the candidates on the other hand because they’ve been living in that same bubble long enough to think the teabaggers are the only constituency that matters. They don’t stop to think that 1) now that you’re the candidate and your enemy is a Godless Liberal Socialist Muslim Sympathizer, how many of those teabaggers do you think will really stay at home on election day when push comes to shove? 2) there are other voters out there besides teabaggers; if you alienate teabaggers in order to win moderates, the teabaggers will stay home, but if you alienate moderates in order to win teabaggers, the moderates will actually go vote for your rival, so the smart move is actually that second one.
This is all common sense that most politicians figured out eons ago, but the current GOP is so out of touch they’ve managed to forget it.
Brachiator
@Chris:
Republicans didn’t just take black voters for granted. They betrayed them.
A somewhat heated, but basically accurate historical summary notes:
One the other hand, Democratic President Woodrow Wilson was just as bad as Taft, and expanded segregation of federal offices.
Black voters were in a jam. They didn’t have anywhere to go until more progressive Democrats began to see that they could win without embracing segregation.
1badbaba3
Zero percent. That’s less than nein, nein, nein, innit?
Linda
I personally know a couple of black people who will vote for Romney. Maybe West and notCain will cop credit for them and command even higher fees the next time Republicans want to pick off some votes.
Chris
@Brachiator:
I stand corrected.
Although you could probably trace the Republican betrayal all the way back to 1877, when they agreed to end reconstruction and let the Confederacy take over again, racial terror, one party state and all.
Randy P
A friend of mine, an entrepreneur who I admire a great deal, ran as a Black Republican for a new congressional seat in MD in the early 90s. Her choice surprised me, but I think it was partially a political calculation, that the Republican field was less crowded. She won the primaries but lost the general.
I don’t think she has anything in common with Keyes or Ken Blackwell or any of the current crop of AA Republicans.
Chris
@Randy P:
Early 1990s = last era before movement conservatives completely took over the Republican Party (Gingrich 1994). If she did it now I’d say she’s crazy, but as late as the early 1990s I still think it’s reasonable.
toned
So from zero percent to 4.5 % , otherwise known as the margin of error.
Heliopause
They’re well aware that they won’t come within a parsec of a majority of the African-American vote. They’re doing this because
1. it shows the media that they’re trying,
2. best case scenario is that they steal a couple percent of the African-American vote, but in an election this close that might be very consequential.
sharl
@Randy P: I’ll bet you’re talking about Michele Dyson, whom I’ve never met personally, but whom I voted for in the general election (US-HoR, MD-4) whenever she ran. And that was well before the incumbent (Albert Wynn) went over to the dark side. I would have kept voting for her, but she recognized the futility of the situation, and wisely dropped out.
As I recall, not long after that final 1994 attempt to unseat Wynn, she and a few other old-school sensible Republicans made a last gasp effort to prevent the MD GOP from going totally bonkers, but the wingnutty faction (e.g., Ellen Saurbrey, and I think Alan Keyes was still here in MD at that time) won out. Damned shame.
This is her, I assume (.pdf). I hope she’s doing well, and it’s our loss that she couldn’t still be in politics somewhere. I’ll vote Dem, as usual, but the state Dem party machine here is way too powerful and comfy for its own (and our) good. There are a few good ones like current MD-4 incumbent Donna Edwards who jab them with a sharp stick on occasion, but having a sane and loyal opposition party with some strength to it would be very welcome. That will be a long time in coming, apparently.
sharl
@Randy P: I’ll bet you’re talking about Michele Dyson, whom I’ve never met personally, but whom I voted for in the general election (US-HoR, MD-4) whenever she ran. And that was well before the incumbent (Albert Wynn) went over to the dark side. I would have kept voting for her, but she recognized the futility of the situation, and wisely dropped out.
As I recall, not long after that final 1994 attempt to unseat Wynn, she and a few other old-school sensible Republicans made a last gasp effort to prevent the MD GOP from going totally bonkers, but the wingnutty faction (e.g., Ellen Saurbrey, and I think Alan Keyes was still here in MD at that time) won out. Damned shame.
This is her, I assume (.pdf). I hope she’s doing well, and it’s our loss that she couldn’t still be in politics somewhere. I’ll vote Dem, as usual, but the state Dem party machine here is way too powerful and comfy for its own (and our) good. There are a few good ones like current MD-4 incumbent Donna Edwards who jab them with a sharp stick on occasion, but having a sane and loyal opposition party with some strength to it would be very welcome. That will be a long time in coming, apparently.
Heliopause
They’re well aware that they won’t come within a parsec of a majority of the African-American vote. They’re doing this because
1. it shows the media that they’re trying,
2. best case scenario is that they steal a couple percent of the African-American vote, but in an election this close that might be very consequential.
sharl
@Randy P: @Randy P: I’ll bet you’re talking about Michele Dyson, whom I’ve never met personally, but whom I voted for in the general election (US-HoR, MD-4) whenever she ran. And that was well before the incumbent (Albert Wynn) went over to the dark side. I would have kept voting for her, but she recognized the futility of the situation, and wisely dropped out.
As I recall (and to echo what Chris @52 said), not long after that final 1994 attempt to unseat Wynn, she and a few other old-school sensible Republicans made a last gasp effort to prevent the MD GOP from going totally bonkers, but the wingnutty faction (e.g., Ellen Saurbrey, and I think Alan Keyes was still here in MD at that time) won out. Damned shame.
This is her, I assume (.pdf). I hope she’s doing well, and it’s our loss that she couldn’t still be in politics somewhere. I’ll vote Dem, as usual, but the state Dem party machine here is way too powerful and comfy for its own (and our) good. There are a few good ones like current MD-4 incumbent Donna Edwards who jab them with a sharp stick on occasion, but having a sane and loyal state opposition party with some strength to it would be very welcome. That will be a long time in coming, apparently.
Randy P
@sharl: Yep, that’s who I mean and yes that’s her company.
She said it was a terrible experience and vowed never to get into politics again. I remember her talking about strangers rooting through her garbage. She was not prepared for the loss of privacy and it really shook her.
portlander
I think the xkcd comic you were looking for was this one:
Extrapolating
http://xkcd.com/605/
sharl
@Randy P: I wonder if those were ‘journalists’ or Wynn’s operatives rooting through her trash. If the latter, that would indicate that ol’ Corporate Al was a scumbag long before most of us caught on; just one example (assuming that ancient link works for others…)