Party learns not to take blacks for granted - the hard way

Baltimore Sun ^ | Originally published Nov 16, 2002 | Gregory Kane

[vannrox]

REP. JOHN Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat recently crowned for the 20th time when voters sent him back to Congress, might be the ambulatory argument for term limits.

Conyers has sponsored much legislation, some of it good, over the years. He has so grown in stature that he has made the error of thinking he actually knows something about Maryland's politics. Here's the congressman speaking at a post-election forum Thursday sponsored by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in the Rayburn House Office Building .

[vannrox]

Hum....

[speekinout]

Kathleen Townsend is just dumb, period. Everything she did as Lt. Gov. and as a candidate was stupid. But Ehrlich and Steele were smart. Steele's race didn't matter all that much. Blacks didn't vote for them. What mattered is that they went out to the Black districts, and had "get out the vote" drives and poll watchers.
Where Steele's race will matter most is in the power he has over the next 4 years. It will be very hard for the Blacks who have been given no power by the Dems to ignore the fact that GOP Blacks have power. And I do not doubt that Ehrlich and Steele will be looking for talented Blacks to have significant positions in their administration.

[Southack]

[no dems]

I read the entire article. It's about time the black community recognized that the Dim-o-rats have taken them for granted for years. I wonder how many of them will vote for Condi Rice for Prez in 2008?

[Guillermo]

Excellent article.

"I'm interested in the psychology of black conservatives," Conyers said. "I want to know 'What makes you like this?'"

Steele's rejoinder was swift.

"What you're saying is that there is no room for diversity of opinion," Steele said. "You're saying, 'There is no room for any thinking not like my own.' Whites can have diversity of thought. Blacks, apparently, can not."

Excellent exchange.

[uncbob]

I read the entire article. It's about time the black community recognized that the Dim-o-rats have taken them for granted for years.

True BUT
Just what can the democrats give the black voters to keep them happy that won't anger more democrats and independents
First of all they are not in power and even if they were are they going to give them reparations

Democrats have no bargaining power left only scare tactics

[Cicero]

Well, frankly, although blacks are beginning to mutter and complain about how they have been treated, 95% of them are still voting for Democrats, the highest percentage ever. As long as they just mutter and complain, or even if some of them stay home, the Democrats will still take them for granted. Until they actually do something about it, these complaints don't mean a whole lot.

[no dems]

Will the scare tactics work or will we POSSIBLY start seeing educated, intelligent, non-welfare recipient blacks and black fathers whose children are not bastards having to be supported by hard working taxpayers, start voting GOP?

[Common Tator]

Well, frankly, although blacks are beginning to mutter and complain about how they have been treated, 95% of them are still voting for Democrats, the highest percentage ever. As long as they just mutter and complain, or even if some of them stay home, the Democrats will still take them for granted. Until they actually do something about it, these complaints don't mean a whole lot.

Let me use change a few words so they would have been true in 1956

Well, frankly, although blacks are beginning to mutter and complain about how they have been treated, 95% of them are still voting for Republicans, the highest percentage ever. As long as they just mutter and complain, or even if some of them stay home, the Republicans will still take them for granted. Until they actually do something about it, these complaints don't mean a whole lot.

Until 1968 nearly all Blacks that could vote voted for Republicans. Every governor, every sheriff with a water hose, evrey state trooper that kept blacks from registering to vote in the south was a DEMOCRAT. Blacks voted for the party of Lincoln. The Democrats were the party of segregated south. It was only in the north outside inner cities that Blacks could vote. LBJ made Blacks into Demorats in less than 5 years.

[fieldmarshaldj]

Not entirely true here...

How Blacks voted varied from place to place and when. Blacks were voting, of course, overwhelmingly GOP from the time of their mass-enfranchisement in the 1870s until the 1930s. In the north after the ascent of FDR, they switched over en masse, though still kept enough a foot over on the GOP side of things (although in places like NYC, Blacks were voting heavily Dem in the '40s on par with today -- a special election for a US Senate seat there in which interim GOP Senator and future Sec of State John Foster Dulles ran in, he received practically no Black votes and lost the election to a Dem). Even down here in the South (where Blacks were and remained far more Republican into the '60s), places like Memphis had Blacks voting heavily Dem pre-'60s (but that was at the behest of political bosses like Ed Crump who "allowed" them to vote as long as they did for whom he directed them to vote for). More Rural Blacks here in TN in the '60 election (those brave enough to vote) helped push Nixon to victory in this state that year. The process of conversion overall took place largely between 1932-68, not just in the '60s. It's a far more complex subject, though, then just addressing it in basic generalities.