Paul Gottfried

July 20, 2009

Watching the GOP?s Voice of Faith, Laura Ingraham, fill in last Friday for the even more tiresome Bill O?Reilly, I was reminded once again why I despise Republican talk-show hosts. Although Laura is attractive, speaks in whole sentences, and according to her biography, is the ?eighth most listened to radio talk host,? what came from her mouth on FOX was intellectually worthy of Oprah. Laura brought on two blacks, one a professor of political science at UCLA and the other a leader of a group practicing GOP outreach to black voters. The black Republican expressed indignation, which Laura hastened to justify, that the president was acting contrary to the wishes of the ?black community? by pushing for a medical program that ?would make us more dependent on government.? This supposedly offended the sensibilities of American blacks ?who [like all good Republicans] believe strongly in family values.? 

The other speaker, who turned out to be a conventional academic leftist, with dark pigmentation, pointed out that American blacks have benefited disproportionately from their connection to big government. They have found employment with the state, receive government social benefits and can count on judges and administrators to look after their being given special access to promotions and college admission. If blacks therefore were opposed to having the state interfere in their lives, this black professor saw no evidence of that trend.

What might have been added to this counter-brief are two other facts.

1) GOP leaders, in pandering to black voters, have not stressed positions that we might associate with the Right. To the contrary, they?ve gone after black votes by muting any opposition to set- asides and affirmative action and by putting into party posts liberal Republican blacks like Michael Steele and, before him, J.C. Watts. Right now Republicans who are going after the Hispanic vote are leaning toward voting for the confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor. The accommodating Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana not only intends to vote for Sotomayor but has already announced his support for the new Democratic hate-crimes bill. Meanwhile media toady Lindsay Graham ?sees something in her [Sotomayor] that very much impresses me.? And Bill O?Reilly?s frequent guest and not very funny GOP comedian, Dennis Miller, is urging Republican senators to back Sotomayor in order to pick up more Hispanic votes in the next election.

2) Much of the ?black community? is so plagued with an out-of-marriage birth rate, soaring into the mid-seventieth percentile, that black ?family values? are becoming pathetic. Blacks have become increasingly the wards of public administration; and although the GOP hasn?t challenged this status quo, blacks, for better or worse, are committed to the Democrats as their source of welfare and compensatory justice. And even those blacks who furnish socially conservative answers on Marist, CNN, and FOX polls are not inclined to vote Republican. In fact they see no contradiction between voting for the Democratic Left and overwhelmingly opposing gay marriage.

Laura, Hannity, and the rest of the GOP-auxiliary troops should take note of political reality. Blacks are not about to vote for the party of Bush and McCain, no matter how much authorized conservatives hallucinate about Martin Luther King and his supposed ?family values? and ?race neutrality.? And the price the GOP will have to pay for trying to push up their Hispanic vote totals a few points, as Steve Sailer has demonstrated repeatedly, may be exceedingly high and may not even work in the end. What did the GOP gain in pr by putting blacks and Hispanics in high-profile federal positions? And how did Karl Rove?s plan, which he was able to sell to the gullible George W. Bush in 2005, to put pressure on banks in order to make sub-prime loans to Hispanics and blacks, turn out for the GOP? The party lost the Hispanic and black votes by enormous margins, after having done its part to wreck the economy, in a desperate effort to win over minorities.

There is an alternative to this pandering, and it begins with the perception that there are certain voting blocs that are not likely to fall to the GOP, no matter how loudly Laura and her friends talk up black and Hispanic ?family values.? The GOP and its hired guns should just give up going after the impossible dream and try to increase their size of the white Christian share of the electoral pie, at least up to that percentage that the GOP had as late as twenty years ago.

And count on the worst happening! At some point the results of this administration mixing socialist economics with cultural Marxist social policies will hit white Americans very hard. When that happens, the Right must be there to assume control. And either the GOP will become something resembling a Right; or else it will remain what it is, a toothless opposition that disgusts the real Right as much as it irritates the leftist media whose favor it seeks. What a hideous prospect if the faux opposition represented by Steele, Lugar, and Graham gained the most from the inevitable reaction to Obama?s disastrous policies!