I voted for Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, in 2010. Should he decide to run for reelection in 2014, I will reaffirm my support. I also think estate taxes should be abolished and the individual mandate included in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 was a conservative approach to healthcare policy that can be appreciated.
Overall, had I been born in the 1920s I would have been a Republican. However, now it is more than the fact that it is 2012, and the Grand Old Party has drifted towards extremism that has prevented my enlistment.
The days of Sen. Edward Brooke, R-Mass., the first black American to be popularly elected to the Senate, are over. I, as a black American, could never identify with the Republican Party.
Upon the election of Barack Obama to the White House, Republicans made no more than token attempts to appeal to a constituency they had utterly lost. The nation elected its first black American as president, and so the Republican Party chose Michael Steele to be the first black chairman of the Republican National Convention in 2009.
“Let’s elect somebody who looks like them and they will return,” perhaps the Republicans thought of the black electorate. It didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because there wasn’t a mea culpa, the party didn’t truly try to reach out to the black electorate. It instead wasted its time with racist attacks on the president.
He was born in Kenya they said without rebuke, and that Islam is his true faith. All of this in the maelstrom of irony that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., Obama’s opponent in 2008, was born in the Panama Canal Zone. George Romney, Mitt Romney’s father, ran for the presidency in 1968 – and he was actually born outside of the country – in Mexico.
It didn’t stop there, and as the chance to unseat the incumbent president drew near, the attacks intensified. The racial dog whistles became more sonorous, so much so that now all humans could hear them.
For what else could Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House, have meant when he called Obama the “food stamp president” (never mind claims for public assistance always rise during times of recession)? Or what did John Sununu, the former Republican governor of New Hampshire, mean when he called Obama lazy, despite the fact that that lazy black man has taken fewer vacation days than his predecessor did in his first term?
The insincerity of the Republican Party’s attempt to win over a portion of the black electorate was fairly transparent. After two years with Steele, despite the fact he helped conservatives win control of the House of Representatives, he was not reelected to head the RNC.
In the aftermath of the victories in 2010, more restrictions on voting eligibility were added which are anticipated to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of urban minorities. If they won’t vote for us, they won’t vote at all, appears to be the new strategy.
The Democratic Party has been able to count the black electorate solidly for the past 40 to 50 years, but this has not always been the case. In earlier times, the black electorate had loyalties to the Republican Party, to the party of Abraham Lincoln; the party that enacted the most progressive civil rights laws in this nation’s history.
Hiram Rhodes Revels, P.B.S. Pinchback and Edward Brooke are few of many first blacks elected to public office, and they were not Democrats, but Republicans.
Today the Republican Party must point to its black leaders frenetically, to showcase them, instead of seeing it as common place, as it should be, and as it could be.
