From the WSJ Opinion Archives

by JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, June 8, 2004 3:55 P.M. EDT

Political Segregation
Blogger Josh Marshall finds it objectionable, perhaps even racist, to comment on the degree to which Democrats are dependent on the black vote. He recounts a two-year-old CNN appearance in which Bill Schneider pointed out that "if no blacks had voted in 2000," George W. Bush would have beaten Al Gore by 187 electoral votes, and that without black votes the Democrats would hold only 37 Senate seats rather than (at the time) 50. Marshall acknowledges that this is "true, of course":

But what's the point exactly? Presumably any political party would [be] put at something of a disadvantage if one of their major constituencies was suddenly struck from the rolls. . . .

I don't like making too much of this. I think the people who say such things haven't quite thought the point out. But their underlying assumption pretty clearly seems to be that blacks . . . aren't quite real voters, and that Democrats who can't quite get the job done with ordinary white voters have to resort to them as a sort of electoral padding.

Of course, one could just as easily look at it the other way around: Democrats start with an enormous advantage in that they have upward of 90% support from an easily identifiable demographic group that makes up some 12% of the population. Yet so weak are they with the remaining 88% that once all the votes are counted, they fall below 50% more often than not.

Marshall has a small point, inasmuch as the idea of black voters being "suddenly struck from the rolls" sounds like a racist fantasy. So imagine instead if black voters suddenly started dividing their votes between the parties in the same proportion as nonblack voters do. This would yield an identical electoral outcome without disfranchising anyone. As it is, though, blacks are extreme outliers in their voting behavior: They vote overwhelmingly Democratic, while nonblacks tend to vote Republican, though less overwhelmingly.

The obvious point is that if Republicans ever find a way of attracting significant numbers of black voters, the Democrats will be in big trouble. Forty years' experience has shown this is easier said than done, but surely it's possible. To say otherwise would be to claim the Democrats can take black voters for granted in perpetuity.

Republican efforts to court black voters, even when they don't prove effective, certainly put Democrats on the defensive. After the GOP convention in 2000--which featured the kind of diversity showcase that liberals applaud when the venue is a corporation or a university--Slate's David Greenberg penned a piece that began by sneering: "Now that its convention is over, will the Republican Party keep pretending that it likes black people?"

But blacks' lopsided support for the Democrats isn't just a problem for the Republicans or a potential one for the Dems. It should trouble anyone who cares about integration.

Greenberg's piece offers some useful history of black voting that helps illuminate why. After the Civil War, blacks tended to be lopsidedly Republican--not surprisingly, since the GOP was the party of Lincoln and the Democrats were the party of slavery and segregation. This started to change with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who in 1932 got 23% of the black vote--an unimpressive number, though today's GOP would be overjoyed to get nearly a quarter of the black vote. FDR "swiftly bolstered his black support," Greenberg recounts:

Gestures such as consulting a "black cabinet" of unofficial African-American advisers surely helped, but more important were his economic relief programs. The Depression hit black Americans disproportionately hard, and FDR's relief programs, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Public Works Administration, gave them much-needed aid and jobs.

By 1948, 70% of blacks were voting Democratic, in part because Harry S. Truman was "the strongest civil rights president the nation had seen." The 1948 election also marked the first serious crack in the Democratic "solid South," with Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond carrying four Southern states.

Still, Republicans remained competitive among black voters through the 1960 election. It was only in 1964, when the presidential race pitted Lyndon B. Johnson, a champion of the Civil Rights Act, against Barry Goldwater, an opponent of the act, that the die was cast. Ninety-four percent of blacks backed LBJ. The Republican numbers went back up a bit the next time around but have steadily declined since. Thirty-six years after the LBJ landslide, George W. Bush did only slightly better than Goldwater, getting 9% of the black vote, according to exit polls.

What's fascinating about this is that in the century between the abolition of slavery and the establishment of civil rights, changes in black political behavior more or less tracked changes in the political behavior of the country as a whole. As blacks voted Republican in the postbellum period, so did the country; FDR was the first Democrat in 80 years to win the presidency with a majority of the popular vote. Blacks became more Democratic with FDR's ascendancy, and so did the country. And when blacks voted overwhelmingly against Goldwater, the country did too. Black voting patterns differed from those of whites, but they generally moved in the same directions.

Since 1964, by contrast, the country has become more Republican. The GOP has won six of nine presidential elections starting in 1968. After the 1964 elections, Democrats held a 68-32 majority in the Senate and 295-140 in the House. Today Republicans hold majorities of 51-49 and 227-208 (counting two left-leaning Vermont independents as Democrats). Yet while the Republican Party has been ascendant, it has gotten virtually no black support.

The result is a sort of political segregation. To judge by voting patterns, blacks perceive their political interests and identities in a way vastly different than other Americans do. And, curiously, this trend dates almost precisely to the extension of full political rights to blacks (Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965). The reasons why this may be the case are a topic for another time, but it shouldn't be considered racist or insensitive to talk about it.

Sneer Miss
One measure of Ronald Reagan's greatness is the extent to which his detractors are willing to make fools of themselves to attack him immediately after he dies. We're not going to bother with the truly crude attacks, from the likes of DemocraticUnderground.org and that unspeakable cartoonist whose blog mysteriously disappeared yesterday after the Drudge Report linked to it. (If you don't know who we're talking about, you don't know how lucky you are.)

But we thought we'd mention a few of the noteworthy attacks from more respectable sources. The Washington Post's Marc Fisher offers a hilarious, if unintentional, satire of liberal anti-Reaganism. It turns out, according to Fisher, that one of the air traffic controllers Reagan fired in 1981 for waging an illegal strike, a now dead man named Ray Lamb, ended up "homeless." According to Fisher, Lamb's bad luck exemplifies how Reagan "did what he believed was right and was able to maintain absolute deniability about any pain that resulted from his actions because he filtered out such bad news."

"Towering He Wasn't," declares a smirking piece from one Peter Preston in London's Guardian. This is a rich source of material, but we're going to stick to the biggest howler, Preston's excuse for denying Reagan credit for the free world's victory in the Cold War:

Did Reagan, piling cruise missiles into Europe, dreaming star satellite dreams of zapping bad hats, truly win anything? Didn't he just watch the Soviet Union self-destruct on his watch? Was Reagan around for the Prague spring which told the first story of an empire's disintegration? Did he choose the moribund gerontocracy of Brezhnev and Chernenko?

The plain fact, which nobody discerned, is that everything the west said about unsustainable economic systems and ramshackle bureaucracies was right: the plain fact was that Soviet hegemony couldn't last--and the "war" was mostly one of mutual incomprehension. Give Ronnie credit for not dropping the ball near the basket, but don't make him FDR in the process.

Maybe it's true that "Soviet hegemony couldn't last," though one can easily imagine its having lasted a good bit longer if (heaven forbid) Jimmy Carter had won re-election in 1980. But it's laughable for Preston to act as if everyone knew the evil empire was unsustainable. The truth is that hardly anyone knew--hardly anyone, that is, except Reagan, who was truly prescient in a June 8, 1982, speech to Britain's House of Commons:

In an ironic sense Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis, a crisis where the demands of the economic order are conflicting directly with those of the political order. But the crisis is happening not in the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxist-Leninism, the Soviet Union. It is the Soviet Union that runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens. It also is in deep economic difficulty. The rate of growth in the national product has been steadily declining since the fifties and is less than half of what it was then. . . .

Now, I don't wish to sound overly optimistic, yet the Soviet Union is not immune from the reality of what is going on in the world. It has happened in the past--a small ruling elite either mistakenly attempts to ease domestic unrest through greater repression and foreign adventure, or it chooses a wiser course. It begins to allow its people a voice in their own destiny. Even if this latter process is not realized soon, I believe the renewed strength of the democratic movement, complemented by a global campaign for freedom, will strengthen the prospects for arms control and a world at peace.

Was anyone else saying the same thing way back in 1982?

On the other hand, BusinessWeek has a wonderful tribute by Roger Franklin, a journalist who came from Australia in 1980 to cover then-candidate Reagan, whom he loathed. Franklin describes his epiphany:

It was Christmas six years ago when Ronald Reagan . . . became an unexpected addition to our family, thanks to my son, who was then 11. As every parent knows, kids that age can have strange ideas about what the well-equipped adult really needs, so when Squirt handed me a little box with a mysterious present clunking heavily inside, I expected a clock or cast-iron sock rack or some such equally useless thing. What emerged instead was a small bust of the 40th President of the U.S. . . . A statue of Reagan! A joke, right? . . .

Why had my son bought me this bust? His explanation surprised me, and the gist of it went like this: "Gee, I thought you liked him. You like everything he did."

Turns out, the kid was smarter than his old man, and he really had been paying attention when I'd answered those questions about why Russia wasn't the Soviet Union anymore, and what about this vanished Berlin Wall that they were talking about on TV? My son must have been listening, too, when his American mother reminisced about how, when she was his age, her family stocked the basement with tinned goods and a chamber pot to see them through the storm of nuclear fallout.

Those threats were gone because the Soviet Union was gone--and it was Ronald Reagan who made it so. My son will never have to master the duck-and-cover, and for that his mother and I are grateful.

Franklin also describes a vacation to Grenada, where everyone he met revered him as their liberator. "Somewhere on Grenada there may have been someone on Grenada who didn't like Reagan, but I couldn't find him."

Dems Keep It Up
Many Democrats, including Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton, John Kerry and even Ted Kennedy, had gracious things to say about President Reagan. Even Jimmy Carter tried, as we noted yesterday. But The American Spectator's "Washington Prowler" notes some very small-minded behavior at party HQ (second item):

In Washington, staffers at the Democratic National Committee stopped a couple of interns who were lowering the flags to half mast outside their headquarters.

"The interns were just doing what they thought was right," says a DNC staffer, who heard about the incident. "But somebody a bit more senior told them not to lower the flags until they absolutely had to, I guess when President Bush announced that all flags should be lowered. There was only an hour's difference. It was pretty petty, but that's how bad things have gotten around here."

It's kind of funny that the Dems were waiting for orders from George W. Bush, of all people. Blogger Tom McMahon, meanwhile, raises a good question: How come there's not a word about Reagan's death on the Web site of General Electric, which employed him for years as a spokesman and actor?

Say What?
This correction ran in today's New York Times:

Because of an editing error, an obituary of former President Ronald Reagan yesterday referred incorrectly in some copies to the Nicaraguans known as contras, to whom his subordinates secretly diverted profits from selling arms to Iran. They were rebels fighting the Nicaraguan government, not the Marxist Sandinistas who ran the government.

Wow, that's really nuanced! How could they fight the government without fighting the Marxist Sandinistas who ran the government?

Penelas Gets Gored
As far as we know Al Gore has not had any comment on Ronald Reagan's death, but he has been in the news this week for his comments on another politician. The New York Times reports Gore told the Miami Herald that Alex Penelas, mayor of Miami-Dade County, Fla., and a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, is "the single most treacherous and dishonest person I dealt with" during the 2000 campaign. Why is Gore lashing out? Here's the Times' explanation:

Mr. Gore's animus toward Mr. Penelas is rooted in the showdown around Elián González, the 5-year-old Cuban boy who was found clinging to an inner tube off Florida's coast on Thanksgiving Day 1999. Over the furious objections of Miami's large Cuban community, the Clinton administration seized Elián from his relatives here and returned him to Cuba to live with his father, setting off some of the fiercest protests this city has seen. Many Cuban-Americans took out their anger on Mr. Gore, vowing not to support him in the presidential race and creating a sticky situation for Mr. Penelas, a Cuban-American reluctant to alienate the exile community.

Though Mr. Penelas spoke warmly of Mr. Gore through much of the 2000 campaign and raised money for him, he distanced himself from the vice president as Election Day approached, when Mr. Gore most needed his help. Mr. Penelas skipped the Democratic National Convention, which took place while he was campaigning for re-election. After he won, he spent the last two weeks of October in Spain, missing Mr. Gore's final campaign events here.

The funny thing is, Gore himself, with an eye toward carrying Florida, also dissented from the Clinton administration's decision to condemn Elian to a lifetime of communist oppression. So he's bitter at Penelas for following his own lead.

You almost have to feel sorry for Gore, though. This is clearly a guy who just can't cope with a loss, and one cringes to watch him come unglued in public. After Gore's gracious concession speech, Slate's Jacob Weisberg complained:

Is it ungracious of me to discern something false in Gore's upbeat tone and presentation? He seemed to me like a man who smiles to keep from crying. Of course, it wouldn't be appropriate for Gore to curse the gods or hurl imprecations at the victor. But by entirely burying the emotions he must be feeling--anger, outrage, and the sense that he was the victim of massive injustice--I think Gore failed the test of sincerity.

Be careful what you wish for there, Jake.

Metaphor Alert
"This struggle to see the true will of the people is like a fight between David and Goliath. But the sword of Damocles will go down against those preventing the opening of the ballot boxes containing the election returns because this will open up a can of worms."--Philippine senator Loren Legarda, quoted in the Manila Bulletin, June 8

Reuterville Goes to Pot
Here's the first paragraph of a Reuters dispatch: "Close to half of all epilepsy and multiple sclerosis patients in Canada have tried using marijuana although few of them believe it helped their symptoms, researchers reported on Monday."

Now here's the headline for the selfsame dispatch: "Epilepsy, MS Patients Swear by Marijuana--Study."

Kinda makes you wonder what they're smoking over there at Reuters.

Not Too Brite--CXLVI
"An Italian magistrate warned against the growing lure of Antichrist cults in Catholic Italy Monday after the discovery of the bodies of two teenagers killed in a satanic sacrifice," Reuters reports from Rome.

Oddly Enough!

(For an explanation of the "Not Too Brite" series, click here.)

Dewey Defeats Tampa
"Gil Thelen, the publisher and president of The Tampa Tribune, apologized for the newspaper's error in publishing an editorial that said the Tampa Bay Lightning lost the Stanley Cup final," reports the Tribune's Web site:

Thelen said the Tribune had prepared two editorials prior to Monday night's Game 7: one to be published if the Tampa Bay Lightning won, the other if it lost. The Lightning won the game 2 to 1.

But for "reasons we don't understand now," he said, the wrong editorial was published. The newspaper is investigating how the error occurred. A corrected editorial will be published in Wednesday's Tribune, he said. The corrected editorial was published on TBO.com Tuesday morning.

Do these guys really think they can fool us? This is an obvious hoax; they don't play ice hockey in Florida!

(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Lawrence Auster, Bruce Fitzgerald, Aaron Ammerman, Tom Macke, Ray Hendel, Aaron Dickey, Kevin McNally, Edward Morrissey, Robert Ellison, Barak Moore, Cliff Thier, Michael Segal, Thomas Dillon, Mark Peterson, Matthew Beck, Robert Brooks, Ted Olsen and David Bookless. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)

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