The Republican's Black Hole 1

The only thing our leftist media likes better than giving "advice" to Republicans after they win is giving "advice" to Republicans after they are resoundingly humiliated at the polls.  In virtually every case, this advice consists of telling Republicans to behave more like Democrats, to sign up to the politically-correct doctrinaire leftism so beloved of our elites, and to reject the Neanderthals who traditionally make up the Republican base.  So it's no surprise that today's punditocracy is outdoing itself with helpful hints to Republicans on, well, how to turn into liberal Democrats by supporting everything liberal Democrats want to do to America.

Every now and again, though, a journalist actually comes up with sensible advice for Republicans, perhaps by mistake.  CNN's Roland Martin achieved this notable feat in a recent article entitled "Want black votes, GOP? Listen to black voters."

When we saw this title, we prepared ourselves for yet another screed on how Republicans need to take from those undeserving rich and give more handouts to the needy, to endorse gun control, and to dump even more billions of dollars into worthless public schools.

Wrong, and most spectacularly so!  Mr. Martin's article, to our surprise, explored quite literally the plain meaning of his title.

For more than a year I've tried to get Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to make an appearance on my Sunday morning news show on TV One, the nation's second-largest black cable network... 

You would think they'd welcome a chance to share their policies with a constituency that routinely doesn't vote for them. But Republicans routinely pass it up, and then wonder why they don't get the votes of blacks and other minorities.

Your first reaction might be, "Of course no Republican wants to appear in a forum where they're just going to be called a racist bigot.  Where's the sense in doing that?"  Yet not only did Mr. Martin promise to do no such thing, and provided examples of fair treatment he'd given to Republican guests in the past, he raises a fundamental point:  How can Republicans expect a group of people to vote for them when Republicans make no attempt to reach them with the Republican message?

Mr. Martin gives an illustration of this problem which, if true, is damning:

For instance, a prominent black Republican in Illinois told me about a presentation a few years ago with party elders about how they could attract black voters. When it was all done, this Republican said, the first comment from the floor was, "We are not going to support welfare."

The group of black Republicans was puzzled: "We didn't even bring up welfare. What are you talking about?"

No, of course Republicans are not going to support expansion of welfare benefits; doing so would effectively mean they weren't Republicans anymore.  Why does that have to be the top-line issue?

Were those Republicans saying that they thought welfare was the only thing that blacks care about - that it's hopeless for black Americans to dream of finding an actual job?  If so, isn't that... racist?

More likely, they were falling into the trap that the Stupid Party does every day of letting the leftist media frame the debate.  The media says that welfare and other programs of government largesse are the only thing that minorities care about, and Republicans stupidly believe it to be true and thus write off and entire sector of their fellow American citizens as worthless, hopeless, useless "takers."  Now that statistics show that we have a majority of takers in this country, Republicans from Mitt Romney on down seem to have given up on the place or any hope of improvement.

As Mr. Martin goes on to argue, this is worse than a crime, it's a mistake:

What I'm describing points up a much larger problem with the GOP and its inability to speak to issues that all voters care about. [emphasis added]

Think about it for a moment: Black Americans are black (duh) but they are also human beings, with all the hopes, dreams, and frailties of anyone else, are they not?  Yes, there are some number of hopeless delinquent thugs and layabouts content to collect a welfare check and watch Oprah in between doing dope and drivebys, but every last one of them?  Ridiculous!

There are black entrepreneurs just as there are white, Asian, and Hispanic ones.  People of every color pay taxes and react with disgust to news of government waste.

What's more, on some issues black Americans are closer to the Republican position than white Americans are!  California's Proposition 8 that attempted to ban homosexual marriage was carried to victory on the basis of overwhelming black support.  Republican pundits like to claim, without a shred of evidence, that Hispanics are natural "values voters"; when it comes to the definition of marriage, blacks provably are.

Yet it's a fact that Republicans make virtually no attempt to reach out to black voters, and this is a crying shame.  Once again, Republicans have drunk the media Kool-Aid that blacks are represented by the Racist Reverends, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and to get "the black vote" you have to go through them.

It'll be a frosty day in the Hell they're bound for before those two charlatans ever support a Republican position, given that their personal meal tickets depend entirely on the use of big government and media liberalism to blackmail businesses and political opponents with false charges of racism.  But who says they control each and every black voter?

It is true that blacks vote overwhelmingly for Democrats.  It's probably true that a fair portion of these votes are fraudulent; the last election saw entire precincts of Philadelphia with not one single vote for Mitt Romney.  It is not humanly possible for twenty thousand people to all vote identically, if for no other reason than someone is bound to vote the wrong way by mistake as Palm Beach, Florida memorably demonstrated a few years back.

But equally, not all black votes are the result of fraud, lies, and ignorance.  There are black voters who make up their own minds from what they are told.  We know what they're told every day in the liberal media, in the socialist public schools, in the churches preaching a racist "liberation theology."  If that's all they ever hear, it's no wonder they vote as they do!

And if Republicans and conservatives are too fatalistic to attempt to reach out to them, this will never change and we really are doomed.

The beauty of conservatism is that it rests on an accurate understanding of human nature - not white nature, not Western-people nature, not even American nature, but the nature of all human beings as they really are.  Our message is dying, not because it's wrong, but because it isn't being presented plainly and loudly in terms people can understand.

As Mr. Martin amply documents, our leaders are afraid to take conservative arguments to what they view as inherently enemy territory.  Well, if we won't take the fight to the enemy side, how can we expect ever to conquer any ground?  Is it any wonder that we don't?

Following Mr. Martin's suggestion, this series will explore various specific conservative policies which would directly benefit the lives of black Americans.  They would also help out white, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, as it happens - but none of them will ever know it if nobody tells them.