Maryland U.S. Senate Race

I've written before about it: this election year the Republicans are putting forth prominent black candidates in a long-term bid to begin to end Democrat dominance of the black vote. To paraphrase Winston Churchill loosely, this may not be the end of the Democrat lock on the black vote; but it may be the beginning of the end. In both Ohio and Pennsylvania, the Republican candidates for governor are black. This is not tokenism. These are two important and prized electoral states in the national presidential races. Just as in the post of Secretary of State in D.C., which is, of course, held by another African-American, the Republicans are demonstrating that they are serious about serious and important black officeholders.

According to this Robert Novak column at realclearpolitics.com, the race to watch is the Maryland U.S. Senate race in which African-American Lieutenant Governor Steele is the Republican candidate (here is the link). And for Catholics, the good news is that Steele is pro-life. So is Blackwell in Ohio. The history of black party loyalty began with a decades long attachment to the Republican Party of Lincoln in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Democratic Party of that era was the party of slavery, the Confederacy, and Southern racism. With FDR's New Deal, blacks transferred their political loyalty to the Democratic Party for the first time because of the social programs that meant so much to the poorest of the poor. Today, the Party of Lincoln is making a new bid for black voters to come back home. It's a bid based on supporting school vouchers that will have a revolutionary and favorable impact on black inner city students, on demonstrating the reality of black empowerment and the end of racist attitudes by nominating black candidates to prominent appointed and elected positions, and by appealing to the social conservatism of many religious African-Americans whether on the issue of abortion or "gay marriage." It's a formula that's working because it matches the reality and aspirations of many African-Americans.

In this regard, the reelection of Mayor Ray Nagin in New Orleans has been a tremendous (but little noticed) setback to the political plans of Howard Dean. The plan was to make Katrina the Democrat version of 9/11, even with New Orleans as a potential site for the 2008 Democrat National Convention, just as New York was the site of the 2004 Republican National Convention. But Mayor Nagin, although a Democrat, spoke loud and clear after his reelection by thanking President Bush for keeping his promises to aid the New Orleans recovery. Howard Dean's man will not be the host for any Democrat National Convention in New Orleans. Howard Dean's man (liberal Louisiana Lieutenant Governor Mitch Landrieu) lost the race even with a gigantic fundraising advantage over Nagin and the backing of the liberal Democrat establishment in Louisiana and beyond. The Democrat Katrina card with black voters lost a lot of its power with Nagin back in office emphatically praising Bush's commitment to recovery.

Like Hispanics, African-Americans voters must be in play for both major parties in order to have any real influence in American politics. More Republican black voters will do that. More Republican black voters will also be a major roadblock to the Culture of Death of abortion and to the analogous Death-of-Opportunity Culture found in dead end inner city public school systems which Democrats irrationally seek to preserve by resisting school vouchers.