Thoughts for Martin Luther King’s Birthday: Kemp, the GOP, and African-Americans

“We had a great history, and we turned aside. We should have been there with Dr. King on the streets of Atlanta and Montgomery. We should have been there with John Lewis. We should have been there on the freedom marches and bus rides. We should have been there with Rosa Parks in Montgomery, Alabama, in December of 1955.”— Jack Kemp on how the “Party of Lincoln” went astray, quoted by Fredric Smoler, “We Had a Great History, and We Turned Aside: An Interview With Jack Kemp,” American Heritage, October 1993

(Earlier this month came the announcement that Jack Kemp-- former Republican Congressman, Presidential candidate, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and Vice-Presidential nominee—has been stricken with cancer. The news filled me with sadness, then with something more: the sense that a voice for the best in the GOP, past, present and future, might be stilled.

Don’t get me wrong. A pay-as-you-go guy, I have never believed, unlike Kemp, in the “Laffer Curve”—economist Arthur Laffer’s theory that a large reduction in tax rates would reduce the deficit. It didn’t happen under Ronald Reagan, its fiercest advocate among Presidents, so you can’t really say it hasn’t been tried.

The deficits that mounted sharply in the Reagan administration as a result of that theory only look good by comparison with the laughably speculative “Value at Risk” scenario for risk management that led to Wall Street’s most recent debacle. (For an intriguing account of how the latter came to be, take a look at “Risk Mismanagement,” The New York Times, January 4, 2009).

No, what I have valued in Kemp’s career is the passion for civil rights indicated by the above quote. Perhaps like his former-athlete counterpart in the Presidential sweepstakes, Bill Bradley, Kemp may have been especially sensitized to this issue by interactions with teammates in the 1960s. He glimpsed the greatest promise of Lincoln in egalitarianism, the belief that men of all races were entitled to earn the sweat of their brow.

For six decades after the Civil War, the GOP followed the path laid down by the Great Emancipator, and became the party of choice for African-Americans. Consider some of the following, much of it forgotten now:

* Ulysses S. Grant acted against the Ku Klux Klan during his term.
* After leaving the White House, Rutherford B. Hayes became involved in fostering educational opportunities for blacks, even distributing a scholarship for study abroad to the future educator-author W.E.B. DuBois.
* Theodore Roosevelt earned catcalls from the Democratic-controlled South for inviting Booker T. Washington to the White House.
* Warren G. Harding, far better known for the corruption scandals that engulfed his administration, became the first President to denounce, right in the heart of the deep South, “the stain of barbaric lynching.”

Even after FDR began to lure African-Americans to his standard with New Deal legislation, African-Americans had not totally forsaken the GOP: in each of his wins, Dwight Eisenhower took over 30% of the vote. Republicans would be lucky to receive half of that today.

The news about Kemp is doubly disheartening because two recent events reinforce the idea that the party that benefited disproportionately from a “Southern strategy” these last several decades now finds itself at the end of the road. Yet, amazingly enough, certain top officials are signaling that African-Americans are still not being accepted and might not be for the foreseeable future.

The most recent news item was Ann Coulter’s blithe dismissal of Barack Obama’s chances of being assassinated by a white racist.(In her view, most Presidential assassins tend to be left-wing or even politically unaligned).

Let’s start with the obvious, Ann: No African-American has even been in Obama’s position before as President-elect. But just about every Presidential contender with a halfway-decent shot at a party nomination gets death threats. It happened to Jesse Jackson—hardly, I’m sure, Ms. Coulter’s idea of conservative or politically unaligned—in 1984 and 1988. It happened to candidate Obama this past year when a 22-year-old Miami man was arrested for threats against him.

And we haven’t even touched on the matter of assassination of African-Americans who were not Presidential candidates. Remember the Vernon Jordan shooting, Ms. Coulter? Medgar Evers? And you haven’t forgotten about the man whose life we celebrate today, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., have you?

You could, I suppose, make the case that Coulter has been reduced to a clown, what with her idle threats not to vote for the GOP last year if McCain were nominated. You could write her off as someone likely to say or write something increasingly outrageous just to get attention, like a junkie needing a fix. The only problem is that high party officials have made their own tone-deaf mistakes regarding the African-American vote.

Consider the “Puff the Magic Negro” controversy. Chip Saltsman, a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, has defended the parody of Peter Yarrow’s old folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon” as satire.

It’s hard to think of a major party shooting itself in the foot so needlessly and foolishly. Distribution of this piece of idiocy manages a unique feat: it reeks of racist condescension even as it insults the intelligence of the American electorate, betting that voters will giggle themselves silly while forgetting the current national crisis the GOP did so much to create.

You’d think that a party that just suffered a humiliating Presidential defeat and is no longer in control of Congress might think twice about alienating anybody. But I guess the GOP is going to have to get whacked on the head by the electorate again and again and again, like Britain’s Labour Party before the election of Tony Blair or the Democrats out of power between Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.

Normally, I think it’s a good thing for an ethnic group not to become too attached to any one political party: It gives them no voice in the party it rejects and it encourages the one it patronizes to ignore it as safely in the bag.

But, on the 80th birthday of Dr. King, you can’t blame African-Americans for wondering why they should cast their votes for the GOP anytime soon. The rest of us might wonder the exact same thing.