Playing with Nitroglycerin
Blacks, Hispanics, and Bush.

By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director of English First
July 3, 2001 9:20 a.m.

he results of the Los Angeles mayoral race have not received much play in conservative circles. They should.

Staunch liberals like Harold Meyerson, are complaining that James Hahn defeated Antonio Villaraigosa thanks to "80 percent support among African-Americans and 79 percent support among Republicans." Notes Meyerson: "We've seen this lineup just once before in L.A.'s political history: the 1994 vote on Proposition 187, which saw south-central districts joining the west Valley to support Pete Wilson's immigrant-bashing initiative."

As recently as December of last year, Meyerson believed that blacks and Hispanics would, "for the first time since 1968," combine as "an emerging Democratic majority." This emerging majority has run into some difficulties.

In a June 10th New York Times report, aptly titled "Los Angeles Race Bares Racial Divisions," Crenshaw resident Ruby Taylor says: "I've been watching what Spanish people [have] been doing, making black people move out of their houses. And I thought that if that cat got in, it would just go more that way."

Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute, was similarly blunt in his comments: "Some Latino leaders are feeling that the reason that [black-white] alliance was made possible was because blacks were resentful of Latino power. There's a certain rose-colored-glasses unwillingness to talk about it, but it's there, and it's real, and I don't know what we do about it for the future."

The Republican party under George W. Bush and Karl Rove seems determined to win the Hispanic vote by any means necessary. Yet, as the Los Angeles results demonstrate, outreach to Hispanics as Hispanics may put the GOP still further behind the eight ball with black voters.

For example, so long as President Bush, in the name of not offending Hispanic voters, allows Clinton Executive Order 13166 to remain on the books, he is courting trouble with black Americans.

As EO 13166 is enforced, black applicants for secure, well-paid government jobs will lose out to those who speak the languages of today's immigrants (as is already happening in Oakland .) In addition, EO 13166 places every black church that receives any federal money for anything at risk of being sued for not providing an interpreter for each and every Spanish-speaker on demand.

Even as the Bush folks push more Spanish-language outreach — weekly radio addresses in Spanish and such--it is not clear that such overtures are even reaching their intended audience.

A survey for the Gore campaign found that Spanish is the preferred language at home for just one-third of Hispanic voters. All of George Bush's campaign efforts in Spanish resulted in 62% of the Hispanic vote going to — Al Gore. Had it not been for the Cubans in Miami, disgusted with how the Clinton administration treated Elian Gonzalez, Gore, not Bush, would be sitting in the Oval Office.

It is also noteworthy that Bush carried just 5% of black voters in his state of Texas, half of what he did in nationally. Black voters might just see special treatment for Hispanics as a rejection of blacks. And it is here that the danger lies for the future of our country.

Should our politics become increasingly racially divided, with the Democrats entrenched as the party of blacks, and the GOP the party of Hispanics, each U.S. election will become a high-stakes contest in which only one tribe wins, just like elections in places like Indonesia or the Balkans.

This was not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. The genius of the Constitution was that it made it extremely difficult for any single president or session of Congress to do anything bitterly opposed by a substantial minority. Thus, no single election would matter that much and the average citizen need not get overly upset about who would run the government until the next election.

As the role of government has expanded, the importance of each election has grown accordingly. But once elections become a referendum over whose tribe triumphs, each one becomes a desperate battle in which anything goes, sort of like the 2000 presidential election in Florida, only squared and cubed.

Instead of seeking the Hispanic vote or the black vote as a bloc, Republicans would do better to earn the votes of individual blacks and Hispanics. A determined effort by President Bush to pass school vouchers, which earn the support of 60% of blacks, would do the GOP more good politically than would a hundred speeches in Spanish.

We'll celebrate the 225th birthday of America on July 4th. This nation of immigrants has long been unique as a place where an individual's achievements matter more than his ancestry. To endanger our national unity in an effort to win temporary political advantage is to play not with fire, but with nitroglycerin.