Going for Black

Not content with their November victories, the Republican Party is hungry for more. While Democrats have unsuccessfully approached elections in recent years with a "tightrope" strategy of doing just enough to win, Republican thinking under Karl Rove has tended toward the more ambitious and long term. Rove and company have set their sights on a permanent Republican majority which means chipping away at the Democratic Party's core constituencies. Gone are the days when working-class Americans voted en masse for the Democrats, and now the GOP has turned its greedy gaze to today's most loyal Democratic constituency, a group that consistently votes for Democrats by nearly a nine to one margin: African-Americans.

The Republican Party's next coup is to woo just enough of the black vote from the Democrats to tip the scales even further toward the GOP. Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman is laying the groundwork, courting African-American support for President Bush's political agenda in media appearances and "town hall" meetings across the country. His pitch? "Give us a chance, we'll give you a choice." As former Gore-Lieberman '00 campaign manager Donna L. Brazile has warned, "Among Democrats, Mehlman's efforts should be cause for alarm."

Another cause for alarm for Democrats is that conservatives in the media are doing their part to complement the work of Mehlman and the RNC. Take, for example, the most hotly debated domestic issue in America today, Social Security. The Bush administration has argued that, because of shorter life expectancies, blacks are getting a raw deal under the current Social Security system, and private accounts are the solution. Conservatives in the media such as nationally syndicated radio host and former Reagan administration official William J. Bennett have eagerly adopted and advanced the administration's claim, declaring that "if the Democrats were doing it, it would be called positive affirmative action." More troubling, reporters from the Associated Press, the Washington Post and the New York Times have unquestioningly presented the notion that blacks are "shortchanged" under the current system (see here and here).

For Republicans, convincing African-Americans that Social Security discriminates against them is sort of a "bonus" claim: On the one hand it's an explicit attempt to achieve that conservative grail of partially privatizing one of America's most successful government programs; on the other hand -- the "bonus" -- it's designed to highlight Republican concern for the condition of African-Americans and, quite simply, to parlay that concern into votes. While recent polling suggests that President Bush has a long way to go in selling private accounts to African-Americans, it hasn't stopped him from trying. Bush has gone so far as to cast Democrats and other privatization opponents as racist for expressing concern over lower-income groups gambling their retirement in the stock market: "They say certain people aren't capable of investing. ... Sounds to me like a certain race of people living in a certain area."

As Senator Barak Obama (D-IL) has pointed out: "[the administration's use of life expectancy] disparities as a rationale for dismantling Social Security... is stunning." NAACP chairman Julian Bond expressed a similar sentiment: "It isn't Social Security that's a bad deal for blacks - dying too early is the real bad deal! They would rather play the race card than actually address blacks' shorter life expectancy... The black-white disparity in life expectancies practically disappears at retirement age." These are crucial arguments, to be sure, but the problem is, if it's the only counter-argument from privatization opponents, they run the risk of allowing a consensus to emerge that blacks actually do suffer unfairly under the current Social Security system, when it simply isn't true.