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 From The Desk Of
Ron Walters
Columnist Page
Friday, December 10, 2004; Page 19
Red and Blue or North and South?
I looked at the recent Democratic Governor’s Conference on C-SPAN recently and they were talking about what kind of person should head the Democratic party. The consensus of this group was the new Chair of the party should be a “centrist.” This was a cold wind coming from the Governors to suggest that the Democratic party be given over to the Right wing of the party, which will employ Right wing thinking and if they get back in office, will give us Right wing public policy.
Bill Clinton was essentially a “centrist” who fed Blacks a lot of Black symbolism at the same time he was weakening Affirmative Action and sponsoring several other retrogressive measures that we are paying for now. But this was all covered up by the fact that the economy was so good that no one paid any attention – and the Blacks in the Cabinet and in other high government positions just went along.
A centrist is a politician who tries to govern from the center, but since the center has moved to the Right in the last three decades, it means that Democratic leaders are tempted to go in that direction, dragging our community along with them.
This was a strong signal to Democratic members in the House and Senate – and in state houses all around the country that they should be prepared to look like Democrats, but walk and talk like Republicans. So, Democrats all over the country are learning to talk “values” and “morals” talk, get their hair cut shorter, wear dull clothes and dump on unions, poor people and gays. In other words, the message coming out of the Democratic Governor’s conference was - give up, they’ve won, join them!
Much of this is not surprising. Politicians worry about the next election and how they can stay in office and if Fat Albert was popular, they would be trying to be big, fat and Black. But what about the rest of us? I have witnessed so much despair about the outcome of the elections, especially by those who went to vote. And they are asking what do we do now.
I say we should fight. We would have had to fight even if Kerry had won because Kerry is a “centrist.” So, now the targets are clearer, but first, we should get something right. The country may be divided up Red and Blue for convenience sake, but the real divide is still North and South. John Kerry won the election in 37 Northern states by 2.5 million votes and George Bush won the South by 5 million votes. The new “solid South” was the key and just like the era of Booker T. Washington, there is an attempt to nationalize a politics that has been coming out of the South – especially on social policy.
So, Democrats must concentrate on the South if they want to return to being the dominant party. They will have a chance to become the dominant party again because the White population is growing less and the Black, Hispanic and Asian populations are growing more. But the South is a strategic region and for Democrats to win, they have to crack the solid South, and that means empowering Blacks and Hispanics. It also means finding liberal and progressive Whites and cultivating them to join the base and win some elections. You can’t do this by walking away.
Rather than giving away the party to the Right wing, Democrats must admit that their campaign strategy has been wrong. They just walked away from the South for two straight elections and gave it to the Republicans. Then, they gave their voter registration and Get-out-the-vote mobilization to political organizations like the 527s that were too arrogant to work with the Black organizations or share resources with them. And even though the Black Vote increased by 25%, it is not clear they were the only reason. In fact, what we can say is that their campaign strategy was wrong, because they were badly beaten in the suburbs and rural areas. What kind of narrow campaign strategy was that which focused only on counties and precincts that were heavily minority?
Instead, they should have provided the resources for the Black organizations to work their own communities and then pulled their own weight in the White communities where they were strongest. This election was a learning experience that should be corrected as the mid-term elections come into view.
Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, director of the African American Leadership Institute in the Academy of Leadership and professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland-College Park. His latest book is “White Nationalism, Black Interests” (Wayne State University Press). |
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