Posted on 06/07/2003 10:21:50 AM PDT by Drew68
June 7, 2003
Leave it to The Denver Post to smear a large portion of the Denver electorate with unrebutted charges of racism.
Why did John Hickenlooper crush Don Mares this week in the mayor's race? Because whites were sick of 20 years of minority rule and determined to take the city back, according to an "election analysis" that appeared Thursday in that paper. One day later, a column quoted other analysts saying the same thing.
"We have seen over and over again people talking about wanting a white mayor," the president of the Denver Area Labor Federation told the Post after supposedly running into a legion of these in-your-face bigots while out stumping for Mares.
Funny, I somehow missed this widespread pining for white supremacy in my Denver neighborhood. Do these people conspire under the full moon? Or is their bile only triggered by a knock on the front door from a labor official?
The worst of the alleged white offenders, apparently, are well-off newcomers and the nouveau riche. As the Post explained, some analysts "see (Hickenlooper's) landslide as a sign of class shifts in Denver, where widespread gentrification helped double the median price of a home from 1990 to 2000." This accusatory tone pervaded Thursday's entire article, which repeatedly suggested something ugly lurking beneath Hickenlooper's overwhelming popularity among whites.
"It seems somewhat interesting that white folks, even if they're liberal Democrats, are more likely to support a white candidate for mayor than they otherwise would," another political observer ominously remarked.
Yes, it is somewhat interesting, if true. But are white folks, "even if they're liberal Democrats," really more likely to support a white candidate in Denver? As it happens, we have four examples since 1983 of a runoff election for mayor between a white candidate and a minority: Federico Peña-Dale Tooley in '83, Peña-Don Bain in '87, Wellington Webb-Mary DeGroot in '95 and Hickenlooper-Mares this year. And yet in only one of those contests, the current one, did the minority candidate fail to garner significant white support (of roughly 40 percent or more).
Who were those whites voting for Peña and Webb if not, in many instances, the liberals now being smeared? Must they support a minority every time in order to shake a charge of racism? Are three of four times really insufficient?
To be sure, plenty of newcomers just voted in a Denver mayoral race for the first time. But surely no serious analyst outside the pages of the Post would maintain that rich out-of-state whites moving to Cherry Creek, LoDo and Park Hill are likely to be more bigoted than existing residents. Indeed, the recent national voting habits of highly-educated professionals are a big reason liberal strategists such as Ruy Teixeira and John B. Judis believe in "the emerging Democratic majority," which also happens to be the title of their book.
Sure enough, it turns out that many counties populated by well-heeled professionals voted for Al Gore in 2000. As conservative analyst David Brooks noted after the election, "The lesson seems to be that if you run a campaign under the slogan 'The People Versus the Powerful,' you will not do well in the places where 'the people' live, but you will do fantastically well in the places where 'the powerful' live."
Yes, I know: Even in racially tolerant Denver, people still tend to vote in ethnic blocs when a candidate of their group is available. But it so happens that during the past 20 years whites have been least likely of the three major groups to follow this pattern in lock step. What was remarkable about the recent election is the support Hickenlooper garnered across the full political and ethnic spectrum. He is the first white candidate in 20 years to appeal to liberal, moderate and conservative whites to nearly the same degree, while attracting (apparently) a majority of black voters, too. Even a significant minority of Hispanic voters seem to have cast ballots for him. Yet in the pages of the Post, this achievement is twisted into The Revolt of The Angry White Voter.
"They (whites) wanted a change," a Regis University professor told Post columnist Cindy Rodriguez. "No one wants to talk about that."
Yes, it's remarkable how few of us are eager to impute the worst motives to our fellow citizens in the absence of clear and convincing evidence; thank goodness for the likes of this professor, so willing to do the disagreeable finger-pointing on our behalf.
Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com
And Hickenloony will continue to press the case rather than dropping it like he should.
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