So Rand Paul went to Howard University yesterday to speak to the student body in what was billed as an outreach to minority and young voters. The GOP has gotten alot of press since November making it very plain that the structural problem with their party is its lack of appeal to minority and young voters. Rand Paul apparently sees himself as helping to fix this problem — first by actually going to the audience the GOP needs to start engaging, and then relying on the media to brand this as a libertarian outreach. The latter is important because it makes Paul look like a leader in a rebranding effort — making the GOP more libertarian — while still pursuing the same GOP goals on behalf of corporations and rich people. And trying to call those goals “freedom” and “opportunity”. If you haven’t seen the speech, I’ve embedded the video (approx. 50 minutes) at the end of this post. RealClearPolitics has the text of his remarks.
I’m going to start with the “freedom” thing. No self-respecting libertarian would be in the business of trying to give a fertilized egg the status of a born person. Especially as a political gambit to stop abortion and the right of grown up women to manage their lives. Leaving women to manage their reproductive choices, their health choices and their family’s well-being looks more like freedom than trying to invoke government intervention into the lives of women and their families. And libertarians who promote Big Government for women’s uterus’ are the embarrassed Republicans that we make fun of routinely. There is no freedom, no opportunity for women in invoking the machinery of government to interfere with your reproductive and health choices.
But Paul pretty much used this speech to do what the GOP does when it tries to reach out to African Americans — they invoke the history of Abraham Lincoln and ignore the more recent history of giving the racist Dixiecrats a permanent home and the routine use of the Southern Strategy to ensure votes from Southern (and some poor) white people. Failing to deal with the whole of their history always indicates to me that the GOP still isn’t ready to expand their coalition. It is in that giant blank space in the GOP’s history with race that African Americans turned to the Democrats. It is in looking at what happened there — not appealing to Abraham Lincoln — that would inform how the GOP needs to proceed to appeal to African Americans. And the first person who will recognize that and be willing to discuss ways to eliminate the utter dependence the GOP has on the Southern Strategy (and its variants) is going to be the first Republican who can be taken seriously in any outreach efforts.
Paul couldn’t even come to this meeting without condescending and disrespecting this audience. Why would you think that the college student audience at Howard University would not know the history of the NAACP? Why would you think that this audience of young African Americans wouldn’t be able to decide for themselves whether Voter ID was discrimination? I’d bet alot of money that every single person in that audience would know alot more about discrimination than Rand Paul ever will. Why would he lie about his opposition to the Civil Rights Act? Why would he invoke his own version of Mitt Romney’s 47% bull?
This last one is pretty important. Slavery and Jim Crow pretty badly distorted the economic “free market” for African Americans. Democratic policies started to help ease some (but no where near all) of those distortions. But the thing that Paul’s claim that Democrats give African Americans stuff ignores is that in the years since economic policy tried to right the ship for African Americans, there has been a mass migration directly to the working and middle class — the products of which were Paul’s audience. Outside of Pell grants and student loans, these kids aren’t getting any more from the government than their white counterparts are. Which makes Paul guilty of dogwhistling with the wrong people. There are still too many poor African Americans and too many for whom poverty is generational. There are alot of poor and generationally poor white people too, except they don’t get the press that the black and brown ones do. But the common problem for all of them is that they are poor — and there isn’t one damn thing about the GOP policy that will help them. There isn’t one damn thing about GOP policy that is going to invest in freedom and opportunity for these people. Because GOP policy is about sending as much tax money to their Corporate sponsors as possible. And we already know that America’s corporations are interested in the poor as a marketing cohort — extracting what resources they have, not investing in them (the opportunity part of the equation).
Charles Blow has a great piece today discussing precisely how the GOP lost the African American vote.
Republicans lost it when Richard Nixon’s strategist Kevin Phillips, who popularized the “Southern Strategy,” told The New York Times Magazine in 1970 that “the more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.”
He’s got alot more. But the bottom line is that as long as the GOP thinks that African Americans have simply no clue about their own history, their own history with the Republican Party and can’t be trusted to assess who can best represent their political interests, they still aren’t ready for an honest conversation. No matter how hard they try, the usual Republican Bamboozlement does not equal freedom and liberty.
