The Democrats’ Black Problem (Tony Snow)

Tony Snow's Fox News radio website ^ | June 8th, 2005 | Tony Snow

[ajolympian2004]

Howard Dean can’t catch a break. The guy talks about Republicans in precisely the same way other Democrats talk about Republicans, and everybody makes him out to be a raving Sterno bum. Hillary Clinton’s weekend remarks differed little in substance, tone or tenor from Dean’s recent complaints about the GOP, but she didn’t get skewered, except by right-wingers like me. She was feted as a future president.

Dean’s most recent controversial outburst — that Republicans are a bunch of Christian white guys — took place at a San Francisco forum for minority activists and journalists. In his own way, Dean reverted to an old Democratic practice: He was playing the race card. But unlike Democrats in other eras, he also acknowledged — as he has in other recent conversations with black and Hispanic party regulars — that black voters no longer love Democrats as they once did. The party takes them for granted, treating them more like the help than the party’s most indispensable constituency. Dean noted that he intended to address the problem by visiting early and often, rather than in the weeks immediately before the next presidential plebiscite.

In subtle and unstated ways, Howard Dean has aired a dirty little secret. Democrats have a growing problem with black voters, and it stems from three sources. First comes the simple fact that government “help” has proved an unmitigated disaster for low-income black Americans. Eighty years ago, black children in such places as New York, Philadelphia and Detroit were more likely to grow up in two-parent homes than whites. Now, 70 percent of the nation’s black children are born out of wedlock, black men comprise 70 percent of the nation’s prison population, black graduation rates lag far behind white rates —

[Erik Latranyi]

OMG Lynn Swann aka Pittburgh Steeler guy who won 5 Super bowl that dude alright .

I just had the opportunity to fly from Philly to Williamsport with Lynn Swann and while everyone else was talking football with him, I encouraged him to run for governor of PA.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!