Racial Democracy: The GOP and "Urban Areas"

Paul Ryan and the GOP: Insane when it comes to understanding 'urban areas'

P90X. It’s a great workout. Defeated candidate for Vice President of United States, Paul Ryan, is apparently a big fan of weight training regime. So am I.

Changing up your workouts - engaging in muscle confusion - is a smart way to kick-start the metabolism and ensures muscle growth/fat loss.

Engaging in the same routine day will only result in muscle growth stagnation.

Someone once said the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

This could refer to doing the same routine in the gym day in and day out and expecting to build a new body, or, perhaps they it refers to the GOP’s strategy of minority outreach.

Maybe Mr. Ryan was mentally and physically exacerbated from a P90X workout when he [Ryan Surprised by Voters in ‘Urban Areas’, New York Times, by Michael Shear, 11-13-12]:

…blamed Democratic turnout in “urban areas” for the loss by the Republican presidential ticket last week, saying he was surprised that he and Mitt Romney did not do better in the nation’s big cities. “The surprise was some of the turnout, some of the turnout especially in urban areas, which gave President Obama the big margin to win this race,” Mr. Ryan said in an interview with WISC-TV. “When we watched Virginia and Ohio coming in, and those ones coming in as tight as they were, and looking like we were going to lose them, that’s when it became clear we weren’t going to win.” The remarks prompted scorn from some liberals who viewed Mr. Ryan as blaming inner-city minorities for the Republican defeat. “Paul Ryan emerged from dustbin of nothingness 2 blame his & Romney’s defeat on “urban” vote,” one person tweeted. “These 2 losers continue 2 demean minorities.”

Surprised? Do these GOP nitwits (and their high-priced campaign consultants) never, you know, consult the history of mayoral elections in cities where a black candidate ran against a white candidate?

Ample data exists about mayoral elections in ‘urban’ settings from Coleman Young’s race for mayor in Detroit; Maynard Jackson’s bid for Atlanta’s mayor; Carl Stokes in Cleveland; and Harold Washington in Chicago that would have provided empirical evidence of what to expect in the race for the White House between the black Barack Obama and the white Mitt Romney.

In a racial democracy, black people will unanimously side with the black candidate, knowing that he will fight for their interests; whites will side with a white candidate, despite that candidate fighting any and all accusations of racism (which, strangely, are accusations black candidates never face).

An important essay from the Contemporary Patterns of Politics, Praxis, and Culture: National Political would have provided sufficient evidence to the GOP of the folly of “minority” outreach:

As Chicago’s African American and Hispanic populations grew, combined reaching roughly 54 percent of the population by 1980, the glaring discrepancy between the size of the minority vote in the Democratic coalition and what minorities received in exchanged became more and more difficult to defend. The breakthrough came in the 1983 Democratic primary when Mayor Jane Byrne and Richard M. Daley, the son of the late mayor, split the white vote and Harold Washington squeaked to victory with 36 percent of the vote. With little history of true biracial coalitions and with Washington threatening to reform city government and the machine, white ethnics lined up behind his Republican opponent, Bernard Epton. In one of the most racially divisive campaigns in urban history Washington won a narrow victory, receiving  99.7 percent of the black vote, about 75 percent of the Hispanic vote, but only 12.3 percent of the white vote. The suffocating effect of dominant political machines were true even of Gary, Indiana, on of the first two major U.S. cities to elect a black mayor. Gary had a strong political machine that kept blacks subordinated until the late 1960s when African Americans were approaching an electoral majority. Richard Hatcher was able to win the Democratic primary in Gary in 1967 only because of a split in the white machine fueled by a corruption scandal. In a threeway primary, Hatcher narrowly won a plurality of the total vote (40 percent), received 75 percent of the African American vote but only 5 percent of the white vote. He then went on to win in the general election against a white Republican candidate by less than a 3 percent margin. The election had a very high turnout, and was highly polarized as Hatcher received 96 percent of the African American vote but only 10 percent of the white vote.
Since Democrats outnumbered Republicans nine to one, party labels turned out to be meaningless. In a city that was almost evenly divided by race at the time, Hatcher won because of the massive mobilization of African American voters, which was necessary because of the decades long subordination of African Americans by the city’s Democratic machine.  [Contemporary Patterns of Politics, Praxis, and Culture: National Political Science Review, by Georgia Anne Persons, p. 60]

Gary, Indiana died when ‘urban’ voters elected a black mayor; this ‘democratic’ action convinced white people it was time to flee the city. The civic, economic, and overall quality of life found in Gary now reflects the majority population (88 percent black) that is tasked with creating/sustaining a community.

 Chicago was on its way to death when ‘urban’ voters elected Washington, but he had the indecency to die in office, allowing the city (already with a terminal level of diversity) to stay on life-support for another couple of decades.

But it was only a momentary ‘stay of execution’ for the Second City.

The GOP will only engage in effective national minority outreach when white people become the demographic minority of the United States. As we have seen from mayoral elections in Philadelphia, Gary, and Chicago… this is what we can expect in a racial democracy.

Perhaps Paul Ryan and the consultants he has hired to advise him and the GOP on ‘minority outreach’ should ditch P90X for the Insanity workout.

The term aptly describes the current state of Conservatism Inc.