December 18, 2000
"God bless Jesse Jackson, and God bless Al Sharpton and Charles Rangel, too." This is the prayer that right-wing Republicans must be saying on Sunday when they attend the Episcopal church or country club of their choice, that is, if there are any right-wingers left in the Republican Party. Mr. Jackson's hysterical vituperations and unveiled threats to take the 2000 election to the streets are finally making it clear to at least some members of the GOP that their experiment in diversity is a total flop.
People have been writing, calling, and e-mailing, wanting to know why I have not written a follow-up column on the elections. My simple answer (apart from laziness, boredom, and a preference for reading Roman imperial history) is that I have said what needed to be said. After wasting too many hours watching FOX News and CNN, I concluded that none of the ridiculous posturings of both parties is worth a moment of consideration by grown men and women. In fact, the serious attention paid to this cheap political theater by educated Americans of the professional class is a clear sign that, although something is happening, Mr. (and Mrs.) Jones still don't know what it is.
What it is, as the "Rev." Jackson might say, is that the Democratic Party as a party has signed on for a race war, and it is up to the Republicans to accept the challenge that has been thrown down to them by, first of all, refusing to treat the race-baiting crooks as representatives of anything nobler than a protection racket, and second, by rebuilding the Middle American Middle Class base that has elected every Republican President since Eisenhower.
All right, what actually did happen? It does not require the Machiavellian brain of Sam Francis to figure out that the Democrats held their base of blacks, Hispanics, non-Christians, tax-consumers, professional homosexuals, promiscuous women, and felons. Felons are an important Democratic constituency and not just because they were adept at voting illegally in Florida: one study circulating on the internet suggests that in Bush Country (the counties taken by the Texas Governor) the annual homicide rate is 2 per 100,000, while in Gore Country, the rate is 12. In other words, residents of Democratic America are six times more likely to off their fellow-Americans than the denizens of Republicana. This is roughly the same margin as when voting errors are counted.
But if the Democrats held onto the sluts, atheists, and murderers, they also bit off a significant chunk of the Republicans' suburban white middle class base. This is the real challenge for the GOP: to win back the hearts (they have no minds) of the suburban middle classes who did not fall for the line "Compassionate Conservatism."
Despite predictions, the Party of the Far Left had no trouble keeping the vote of Hispanic immigrants, and in the years (even the months) preceding the election, they were actually able to create hundreds of thousands of new Democratic voters. These new voters, many of whom cannot speak English, sworn into American allegiance in mass ceremonies, are American citizens to about the same extent that the thousands of couples joined in a Unification Church mass wedding ceremony count as husbands and wives.
Four years from now, the Democrats won't have to worry about the depth of a chad's dimples: Why manufacture votes, when you can manufacture voters? One Republican who has seen the light is former Congressman Bob Dornan, who lost his seat not so long ago, when non-citizens and even illegals turned out to vote for the candidate with an Hispanic surname (a lady about as "Hispanic" as the wife of George Bush). Dornan, who had supported virtually unlimited immigration before his defeat, now understands the implications for the Republican Party, and he has had the courage to speak out.
But Mr. Gore's party owes even more, in the short run, to the impressive black turn-out that voted Democrat en masse. This vote, let us recall, was not to be taken for granted. Mr. Gore, who has all the warmth and charm of a painted-upon celebrity corpse in a Beverly Hills funeral parlor, had never aroused much enthusiasm among black voters, and the rumors (leaked by an African American congresswoman) of his obvious reluctance to stay in a room with more than one black at a time raised serious questions about his ability to get out the African American vote. Then came Jesse to the rescue, telling people in the "community" that this was no normal election but an all-out war in which a Republican victory would mean the loss "of all we have gained" and "everything we worked for."
No one with half a brain, certainly not Jesse Jackson himself, believed that George Bush would lift a finger to limit affirmative action or to cut back on the massive transfer of wealth from middle class whites to lower class blacks. But it is easier to crank up this sort of demagoguery than it is to turn down the volume. During the weeks after the election, Jackson and Sharpton were everywhere, claiming to find evidence of systematic discrimination and calling for street demonstrations. At the vigil in front of the Supreme Court, some of Jackson's followers brought a mule up the steps as a symbol of the "forty acres and a mule" they had been promised during Reconstruction, and even after Mr. Gore conceded (if grudgingly bowing to necessity and threatening to continue his campaign to include the excluded counts as concession) the election to Mr. Bush, Jackson and Sharpton went on the attack, denying legitimacy to the election and calling for resistance. The leftist media are backing him up, demanding from President Bush a set of extraordinary concessions to conciliate the African American community.
What is the effect of all this? Simply this: Jesse Jackson has drawn a line in the sand, and it is now up to the Republicans either to stand and fight or to jump over the line with a grin on their faces and surrender. The tactic of surrender will only further demoralize the straight while male taxpayers who either did not vote or held their nose to vote for Bush but who now feel that he is the only thing that stands between them and total servitude.
If the Republicans continue to walk down this path, they will soon be joining Bob Dole and Bush Senior in retirement. But if they decide to fight, it will not be a race war. Bush's people are probably correct to find prominent jobs for moderate African Americans like Colin Powell. Powell reassures the flinchy suburbanites who fear a race war almost as much as they fear being called racists, but since he favors welfare and affirmative action, he has so far been impervious to attacks from Jesse and the racists of the NAACP.
What I mean by "fight" is, most importantly, that conservative Republicans will make up their mind, once and for all, that they will never be able to woo minority voters until they join the Democratic Party and take the lead in destroying the country. On a practical level, this means the Republicans will have to take steps to curtail the creation of new Hispanic members of the Democratic Party and to resist the temptation to expand welfare and affirmative action programs.
Mr. Bush, in other words, had better grow up and face the immigration issue before it buries his party. Let the Republicans keep their Lincolnian rhetoric, if it makes them feel good, so long as they know who their friends -- and their enemies -- are.
Finally, they will have to make up their minds on how to deal with people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The point is not to discredit them in their own community -- that is an impossible task and probably doesn't matter -- but to destroy their credibility with the soft-headed wives of suburban businessmen. This is hardly a Herculean task, considering the vast wealth of scandals involving most of the seven deadly sins (and a few new ones) that have swirled around the clerical robes of these accomplished race-baiters. Much of the evidence has even been published in major newspapers, and all it would take is for some low-minded Republican analogue of James Carville (why not his wife?) to put together a team to expose and permanently discredit the reverend black racists.
At the very least, the Republicans ought to be emphatic in refusing to deal with minority leaders who have sworn an oath to destroy both them and their country. Jackson tries to have his cake and eat it too: Flaunting himself as street-fighter and revolutionary, he expects to testify in Congress and to take the moral high ground in lecturing the leaders of both parties. Ask leftists in Chicago why Jesse left town, and they'll tell you they still want to know what happened to all the money, public and private, what happened to all the tax, public and private, that Jesse was supposed to spending on the poor.
Forget bipartisanship. The Republicans have to give up slow pitch softball and learn how to play hardball. Bigtime.
--Thomas Fleming