Former Reagan Navy Secretary Jim Webb won the Democratic primary in Virginia for the right to challenge incumbent Sen. George Allen next fall.
I think Webb will give Allen a tougher fight than Harris Miller would have. Leading Democratic worthies such as Chuck Schumer, John Kerry, and Harry Reid think so, too; that’s why they supported him.
Dick Wadhams, the campaign manager for Mr. Allen, said, “We hope that Senator Schumer and John Kerry and Tom Daschle and Harry Reid campaign all day every day in Virginia for Jim Webb.”
I think the fact that Webb found it necessary to abandon his earlier criticism of racial preferences, much as Joe Lieberman found it necessary to do when he ran for vice president, reveals once again that support for colorblind racial equality has become the third rail of Democratic politics.
One can be a Democrat in good standing, and receive important party support and backing, whether one supports or opposes the war in Iraq, whether one supports getting tough on the border or providing an easy “path to citizenship,” whether one supports or opposes abortion. But one can’t run as a Democrat and support the principle that the state should treat all its citizens without regard to their race, creed, or color.
UPDATE [14 June]
In his acceptance speech last night, Webb said:
It’s time to welcome home those Democrats who left for a time, the Reagan Democrats, the conservative Democrats, whatever labels we give them…. It’s time to welcome them home.
If he really wants to attract conservatives back to the Democratic party he will forthrightly denounce racial preferences and reaffirm the principle of colorblind equality. It will be interesting to see if he does that, or continues to support the racial favoritism that drove many of those conservatives away in the first place.
It will also be interesting to see whether Sen. Allen has the good sense, and the fortitude, to make Webb’s about face on racial preferences (he opposed them when he was a Republican; he supports them now) an issue in the campaign.
Its pure politics. In order to keep the African-American vote solidly in the 95% + range for Dems, the Dems must, MUST, bring home the political bacon on affirmative action. Otherwise, horror of horrors, African-Americans might actually start thinking about which party’s candidates to vote for instead of reflexively pulling the Dem lever. And without the monolithic Af-American vote the Dems go the way of the Whigs and they well know it.
Veritas writes:
>>>”Its pure politics. In order to keep the African-American vote solidly in the 95% + range for Dems, the Dems must, MUST, bring home the political bacon on affirmative action. Otherwise, horror of horrors, African-Americans might actually start thinking about which party’s candidates to vote for instead of reflexively pulling the Dem lever. And without the monolithic Af-American vote the Dems go the way of the Whigs and they well know it.”
Given the population demographics trends of the United States, and the onset of “Brown America” within the next few decades, you might want to look at the flip-side of that dilemna for Republicans, which is over-reliance on white voters.
>>>”The plans Texas Republicans have concocted so far envision redrawing districts that now return liberal white Democrats so that the racial minorities that elect them—mainly black—will be diluted in new districts dominated by white voters. The Democrats, of course, are wise to this game and have been quick to scream “racism,” but whether it is or not is not quite my point.
The point is that the GOP’s redistricting plans prove that the party and its leaders understand full well the political significance of race in American politics—that whites will tend to vote Republican (54 percent did so for Bush in 2000, and that’s less than most victorious Republican candidates have won in the past), and non-whites (blacks and Hispanics) will vote Democrat (90 percent and 67 percent, respectively, in 2000). For all the Republican gabble about “reaching out” to blacks and Hispanics, the reality is that the party depends on winning the white vote at least as much as the Democrats depend on the non-white. And the Texas plans prove that the party leaders know it.
Thus, in Texas’ 9th District, around Galveston, about 40 percent of the voters who elected Democrat Rep. Nick Lampson in 1996 were non-white. The Republican plan would carve up the district and dump some 85,000 blacks and Hispanics into the “overwhelmingly Republican” district that elects House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. Another 100,000 would be shipped into a heavily Republican bastion in the Houston suburbs.
There is no talk in Texas of “reaching out” to the non-white voters who will find themselves redistributed into Republican fortresses. If they vote Republican, swell—but the purpose is not to win them over so much as to jackhammer the bloc votes that keep the Democrats in office.”
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Francis/NewsSF100303.html
This great piece by Samuel Francis has a kicker that dove-tails right into this thread:
>>>”What it tells us is that the Stupid Party may not be quite as stupid as it looks and acts after all. For all their pandering to blacks and Hispanics, all their jabbering in Spanish during campaigns, and all their refusal to resist affirmative action and immigration, they know very well on which side of the racial bread the political butter lies.
And it also tells us something else as well: Even though they know that their party depends on the white votes they are trying to cluster into new districts, the Republicans continue to moo about “reaching out” to non-whites and pander to them just as much as ever. In other words, they take the white vote for granted, because they also know that white voters now have nowhere else to go.”
Strong stuff.
–Cobra
John Rosenberg writes:
“One can be a Democrat in good standing, and receive important party support and backing, whether one supports or opposes the war in Iraq, whether one supports getting tough on the border or providing an easy “path to citizenship,” whether one supports or opposes abortion. But one can’t run as a Democrat and support the principle that the state should treat all its citizens without regard to their race, creed, or color.”
Beautifully put, alas!
Curtis Crawford