I started this as a comment to Chris’s
Getting Low Income Voters to the Polls but then it got way toooo long…
There are some good points that Chris has made particulary that when “low Income” people vote they usually vote Democratic. However, if you look on closer inspection you would find a greater percentage of lower income Black vote Democratically and a higher percentage of lower income whites vote Republican.
That is where our agreement ends.
Short history of Democratic Presidential elections:
It amazes me that everyone is soooo perplexed. It is easy to see if you open your eyes…The moral of this story is:
- 2000: First time, voting for a Democrat that won’t protect my vote, …shame on them
- 2004: Second time, voting for a Democrat that won’t protect my vote, …shame on me
- 2008: Third time, I will not vote for a Democrat that won’t protect my vote, …and keep my butt at home
Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc:
the income gap between the electorate and the nation as a whole shot way up before “third way” or centrists organizations within the Democratic Party ever came into being, and in no way seems to have been exacerbated by Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 campaigns.
That is because you are looking at the wrong data…
To get to the bottom of this debacle which will only get worse in 2008 the blame must be placed squarly on the shoulders of the DLC and the anti-low income ie Black folk and anti-job policies instituted by Bill Clinton.
“post-1976 increase also took place because”
Because Jesse Jackson had an incredible GOTV campaign in 84 and 88 which swelled the ranks of the “low income” people on the Demcoratic rolls which inturn sacred the poop out of the Zell Millers and the leftover Klansmen in the Democratic Party.
The DLC, formed in the mid-1980s to suppress the voices of Blacks and labor in the party – and
as a direct reaction to the hugely successful Black voter registration drives that accompanied Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns – is determined to keep organized Black America at arms length, and broke. Should Kerry win, traditional Black leadership will be declared irrelevant.
…
“The Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Leadership Council will crow that their dubious strategies were in fact brilliant. Their claims should not go unchallenged.”
a
“rump faction” of white Democrats founded the DLC in the mid-Eighties as a reaction to “the 1984 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson, in which the black candidate received a percentage of the vote considerably higher than the proportion of black votes in several states, and sparked a
significant expansion of the party’s base constituencies among minorities, labor, and even some white rural voters. The Democratic Party was actually growing – but in the wrong direction to suit the `rump faction’ centered in the white South.” The corporate-bankrolled DLC gained national power with the election of Bill Clinton,
Here is where the start of the real split of the Democratic party took place and the real decline of the Democratic majority… funny now ever mentions how the rise of the DLC is parallel to the demise of the Democratic party… funny that…
“Low Income” I guess is the politically correct way of saying “Black folks”… as the entire world saw all those Low income people in NOLA.
Contrary to popular CW…
Winning the South = Winning the Black Vote and Low Income Vote…who make up the majority of the south: Blacks, Poor Black and Poor Whites.
Black and Bruised:
Some Democratic strategists say that the party might be smart to write off not just South Carolina but the whole South (except Florida) and concentrate on states more demonstrably in play. It is less commonly noted that writing off the South, home to 55 percent of the country’s black population, symbolically means writing off African-Americans as well.
… Cobb-Hunter, like every African-American I spoke with, has not forgotten that in 2000 the party pulled virtually everything out of the South to concentrate on Florida, then refused to see beyond hanging chads and go to the mat over the tens of thousands of voters, the majority black and Hispanic, said to have been improperly labeled felons and stripped from the rolls. ”Any message that the Democratic Party wanted to send, they sent in 2000, and ’04 is just a continuation of that message,” she said. ”It’s up to the Democratic Party whether they want to change the story. Because if they don’t, we will not carry one Southern state. Let me just add that if the Democratic Party is not serious about dealing with the issues of race and class that are so prevalent in this country but particularly in the South, then they may as well write it off, because there’s no point in coming in here with cosmetics.”
The DLC/CLINTON policies forgot about real people WHO WORK!!!
‘‘The Democrats lost the White House because they forgot the street, the corner, the people who put them in office,” George R. Dean, who owns a clothing business in town, offered soon after Aiken said he’d have an opinion or two for me. A member of the Chamber of Commerce, he made a straight-up Keynesian argument for investment in infrastructure, education, the environment, small-business relief, ”the needs of the people”: ‘‘The divide in America ain’t black and white; it’s the haves and the have-nots, and that’s the truth, darling. Until we start disbursing this stuff, as we say in the Deep South, us’en in a heap of trouble.”
The “By standard Mentality”…?
Cobb-Hunter winced when I recounted this and remembered the day
a maid led a group of girls into her Statehouse office. ”They’re in training,” the maid told her. ”And I just got so depressed, because they were young, 19, 20, early 20’s, and they were training to become janitors. That to me just suggests that we — meaning those of us in leadership positions — we have really failed our community. We are raising a generation who believes there is no hope, and we can’t put the total blame on white folk. Because we aren’t any different from white officials once we get in there. <cough>
Obama: How to sell out with
not looking like you are selling out </cough> We are selfish — and there are exceptions to every rule — but in general people of color tend to act just like white folk when they get into power. They’re very selective about who they share it with; they’re selective about who they bring into the inner circle; and they’re interested in taking care of themselves and their own and not much beyond that.”
It ain’t just in NOLA… there are poor people across this nation.
I’d heard this kind of thing throughout Orangeburg: the Democratic Party is reactive, ”spinally challenged,” populist only intermittently while the people sink. More than 27 percent of the county’s households survive on $15,000 a year or less, a condition of persistent poverty that ensnares so much of the South, especially the rural Black Belt. For some, the drug business is a way out, and Cheeseboro can spot the ”movin’ on up” homes that drugs bought. But more are caught than lucky, particularly if they’re black. African-Americans make up 30 percent of South Carolina’s population but 70 percent of its prisoners. Officially, one out of 13 black men in South Carolina is barred from voting because he is in prison, on probation or on parole; nationwide the rate is one in 8. And everyone says it: the poor have been written off. The poor, the state, the South. Who’s next?
Is this the Demcratic party that speaks for Blacks and poor. People are just waking up to the fact that the DLC has been kicking people out of the boat for a long time. No one said anything when Clinton pushed out the Blacks, working class and the poor… now that the DLC is hitting too close to home with women, gays and anti-war crowd… finally the Dem base if getting a clue.
Separately, each woman noted that the former state party chairman, Dick Harpootlian, who is white, had once quipped, ”I don’t want to buy the black vote; I just want to rent it for a day.” That was in 1986, he told me, an offhand joke that no one takes seriously, adding that as a state and a country, ”we’ve got to get beyond racial division, and we can’t seem to do that.” Memories are long; the three women were not the first to mention his quotation to me. Nor were they the first to assert that white Democrats would jump party (and have) before accepting black leadership. Or to say they’d felt used by the former Democratic governor, Jim Hodges, who was elected in 1998 with the help of black party activists and who then, some say, ignored black, poor and working-class voters.
Bill Clinton the first Black President: NOT
Bill Clinton was supposed to have made up for all that. ”He had the moves,” Cobb-Hunter said. Her voice had a weariness. ”He’d been around black folk, and he had that cadence; he knew how to speak the language.” People do like ”Bill.” In Elloree they have warm hearts for ”Hillary” too. Yet assessing the Clinton program — with its signature triangulation, mollifying the base while co-opting Republican themes — Cobb-Hunter said, ”I’m a realist, honey; I’m not snowed by much.’‘ Still, Aiken insisted, ”it was a happier time”; nearly 74,000 jobs have been lost statewide since 2000. ”You can’t lay that all on George Bush,” Cheeseboro argued. ”You can’t blame Bush for Nafta” or, as others attested, for ”ending welfare as we know it” while cutting other social spending. ”There wasn’t a war,” Aiken said. And to that I heard amens all around. It seems the war, and the death of three young Orangeburg men in Iraq, has concentrated attention on issues that Clinton’s personality once papered over.
Fire Next Time:
Some 260,000 eligible black voters in South Carolina aren’t registered. Added to registered no-shows, that means half a million or so African-Americans are ”missing voters,” a group sizable enough to turn any statewide election for the Democrats — if they saw a reason to. But everyone I met who’s doing voter registration in town, on campus or in the countryside said they’re up against it. Cheeseboro recalled that two years ago, ”folks actually ran me out their yard. They’d say: ‘Get out! I’m not voting. I don’t want anything to do with it. Ain’t nothin’ gonna change.’ I have heard that over and over again.”
I imagine the Democratic party being lead by the OH SO RELEVANT DLC will continue to stick it’s head in the sand and lose in 2008… if they can’t mount a defense for Roberts at the lowest moment in time of this admistration then I can not see what they will challenge the GOP with in 2008 …what the motto will be “We are a little bit better than they are”
