Perhaps we’ve discovered the real cherished “99 percent.” Writing that “[s]ome Philadelphia neighborhoods outdid themselves in Tuesday’s presidential election,” Philly.com
reports that 13 of the city’s wards recorded a victory margin for Barack Obama of 99 percent or more. In other words, in some precincts, Mitt Romney was perhaps worth only three fifths of a percent.
This places Obama in rare company, with a result hardly seen since Adolf Hitler “won” a 1936 referendum with 99 percent of the vote. Remarking on the anomalous outcome, St. Joseph’s University history professor Randall Miller noted, writes Philly.com, “[P]oliticians almost never get 99 percent of the votes anywhere except, perhaps, the towns where they were born.” Well, scratch that. Kenyans can’t vote in American elections (at least those actually in Kenya)…yet.
Of course, such electoral unanimity could raise suspicions of vote fraud, especially since the number of wards in which Obama achieved his purity is remarkably close to the number of polling places (14) that
illegally expelled court-appointed Republican vote monitors on Election Day. In reality, though, Obama’s 99-percenter status isn’t surprising given that he enjoys more than 95 percent support from black Americans nationwide. And while I believe the vote fraud this election was massive, in the Philly mental wards it would be apparent not in percentage of votes won, but in percentage of turnout. Philly.com reports that this was 60 percent citywide but provides no data for the wards in question.
Whatever the case, most people put a happy face on such monolithic support. For example, Professor Miller said, “Ninety-nine percent is extraordinary, and it shows discipline as much as anything else.” Discipline? So that’s what they call it now. I have a different word.
Prejudice.
If 95-plus percent of whites had voted for Romney, would anyone characterize it as a matter of “discipline”? Why, even though whites favored the Republican by only 60 percent, their failure to split an even 50/50 is still thought cause to place the spotlight on them. For instance,
this National Journal piece on the racial divide contrasts the actual Nov. 6 electoral map with how it would look had only whites voted and shows that Romney would have captured eight more states and hence the election. What isn’t shown is that if only blacks voted, Obama would have won every state.
The reason for this is as simple as it is rarely spoken. As black Tea Party star Lloyd Marcus
put it, blacks’ monolithic support for Obama is attributable to “racism and loyalty to The Black Code (never side with a white against a fellow black).”
Here many will point out that blacks typically vote Democrat approximately 95 percent of the time and that they support black Republicans little more than white ones. Yet this argument fails. First, it’s clear that most blacks have a prejudice against the Republican Party itself (as some whites do) and refuse to even give its platform a fair hearing. Second, they have this bias primarily because they see the Republicans as the “white party” and dismiss, out of hand, the blacks within it as Uncle Toms.
If this isn’t enough to convince skeptics that racial prejudice is the issue, I submit as Exhibit A the 2008 Democrat primaries. During their early stages, blacks joined most other Democrats in supporting Hillary Clinton. Yet when Obama’s star began to rise, they flocked to him, often offering support by a 9-to-1 margin. This, despite the fact that the two candidates’ positions were
virtually identical.
This is why I just shake my head when people say that Republicans are losing minorities because they’re not “reaching out.” This is a nebulous term that purports to explain something while explaining nothing, much as if you tell someone who is depressed that he needs “self-actualization.” It’s hard for the GOP to reach out and reach people when, owing to prejudice, they assume that the “R” after a candidate’s name stands for “Racist.”
If black people such as Lloyd Marcus, Alan Keyes, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Jesse Lee Peterson can’t make any headway with blacks, what kind of chance do you think white Republicans will stand?
Instead of implying that we should “reach out” — a euphemism for “pander” — we’d be better off treating blacks the same as we do whites.
Call them out when they’re bigoted.
Even if it didn’t win any more converts, it at least might win respect. After all, people don’t respect someone who is too stupid, too afraid, or too dishonest to tell them the truth.
