Gingrich does have a PR plan to woo black voters. An internal document entitled “GOP Minority Outreach Strategy,” obtained by Newsweek, calls for the GOP to “promote” its minority House members – all six of them – at press conferences, in action on the floor of the House and through informal TV responses to the president. It advocates finding minorities to testify at congressional hearings and creating a GOP mailing list of minority groups.
But the “outreach” strategy isn’t backed up by any policies to help ordinary black voters. “When you look at the Contract,” admits Horace Cooper, an African-American who is a top aide to Majority Leader Dick Armey, “on its face there are not a lot of things that say why black Americans should vote for the Republican Party.” Sensitive to such criticism, Gingrich recently created a group to devise a more substantive approach. A cochair of the task force, J. C. Watts, the House GOP’s lone black freshman, says he wants to “put teeth in our rhetoric.” Watts talks about the need to find some way to encourage capitalism in poor areas. But it’s too soon to say what the task force might recommend.
In the meantime, Republicans are cutting programs that have traditionally benefited minorities. Last week, as House Republicans finally got down to fulfilling their promise to scale back the federal government, almost all the $17 billion in “rescissions” approved by various House committees fell on the poor, a disproportionate number of whom are minorities. House Republicans wiped out most federal public-housing programs, lead-paint removal, rent subsidies for the poor, summer jobs for poor kids. Yet the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, which together cost $340 million and have been roundly denounced by the GOP as wasteful bastions ofliberalism, were cut only $5 million each. Democrats called the one-sided cuts “unconscionable.” HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros predicted 32,000 families would be made homeless.
Republicans responded that they are only cutting bureaucracy. They insisted that the programs for the poor will survive but that they will be administered locally, through block grants to states. Nonetheless, most of the block grants, like school lunch programs, will be smaller than the federal programs they replace, and many others, such as the HUD programs, will vanish altogether. Republicans had always planned to cut welfare programs, which they claim hurt rather than help the poor. But moderate Republicans feel that lawmakers have failed to take the second step of welfare reform – creating an alternative such as workfare. Partly to deflate charges that House Republicans are being callous, Gingrich late last week reversed himself to spare the $27 billion food-stamp program from the budget ax. Some of his followers were not satisfied. “We manage to posture in a way that makes us look worse than we are,” says Republican Congressman Jim Talent of Missouri.
That posturing could become even more pronounced in the coming presidential race. The GOP front runner, Bob Dole, plans to make ending racial preferences in hiring and education a campaign issue. Dole is regarded as a moderate on race: in the mid-’80s, he joined other senators to stop President Reagan from seeking to eliminate affirmative action. It is possible that Dole is just trying to outflank Sen. Phil Gramm on the right, with the ultimate aim of swinging back toward the middle. But Dole’s strategists say there is little hope of attracting meaningful numbers of black voters any time soon. Attacking affirmative action, they know, will please angry white male voters who abandoned the Democrats in the 1994 congressional elections.
This approach may overlook a rich opportunity. The old Democratic New Deal coalition has lost much of its political power to deliver benefits to the poor and minorities. And establishment civil-rights groups like the NAACP are fighting to stave off corruption and irrelevance. In the black community, growing numbers of “buppies” are receptive to conservative economic arguments. Black sociologist John Sibley Butler, a professor at the University of Texas, argues that blacks are comfortable with Republican values on family, crime, school prayer, entrepreneurship, regulatory reform and, historically at least, self-reliance. Many African-Americans also feel stigmatized by affirmative action. Polls show that 25 to 40 percent of blacks now consider themselves conservatives.
Last November, Republican candidates found they could win minorities in surprising numbers. The GOP garnered 16 percent of the black vote in all statewide races, up from the 11 percent George Bush won nationwide in 1992. Ohio Gov. George Voinovich got 40 percent. A year earlier Virginia conservative Gov. George Allen won 22 percent, and Gov. Christine Todd Whitman in New Jersey won 25 percent. They won blacks in part simply by campaigning in black areas long neglected by GOP candidates. Many Republican strategists think Ollie North would be a senator today if at the last minute he had not scrapped plans to campaign more heavily for black votes.
The plight of Jack Kemp reveals the Republicans’ missed chance. Kemp wants the GOP to promote homeownership and entrepreneurship in the inner city. But other party leaders don’t seem to be listening. And Kemp himself had to drop his presidential bid in large part, he told Newsweek, because his financing dried up after he opposed California’s anti-immigrants law. Kemp’s critics say his ideas don’t work. But so far, Republican leaders don’t appear to be trying very hard to come up with ideas of their own.
