CPAC Blames It On the 'Black Guy'

American Conservative Union communications
director Ian B. Walters speaking at CPAC

Well another year has come and gone for the annual gathering of conservative activists and politicians known as the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Co-founded in 1973 by the American Conservative Union, CPAC basically serves as a kind of think-tank platform for a range of conservative issues.

It offers leading conservative thinkers and politicians an opportunity to sound out their policy positions and political views in front of a crowd that embraces a decidedly right-wingy view of America.

It's a multi-day conference that helps to shape the overall message of the Republican Party and influence the legislative agenda of GOP politicians all across America.

For Republican presidential hopefuls, the road to the White House runs through CPAC.

If some of the comments heard there last week are any indication, the Republican Party really doesn't seem too concerned about the broader public perception that it's an organization which is openly unwelcoming to people of color - or even remotely interested in expanding it's membership beyond it's overwhelmingly white voter base.

As Jeffrey Mays reported on Sunday in an article in the New York Times, Ian B. Walters (pictured above), the communications director for the American Conservative Union that hosts CPAC, raised eyebrows at a CPAC dinner on Friday evening while reflecting back on the disillusionment of the Republican Party in 2008 after President Obama's election victory when he observed:

"We elected Mike Steele to be the R.N.C. chair because he's a black guy. That was the wrong thing to do."

According to Mays a number of conservatives, including R.N.C. spokesman Michael Ahrens, quickly distanced themselves from Walters' comments.

Former RNC chair Michael Steele

Comments which can be seen as a not-so-subtle endorsement of the racism and xenophobia of Trump, and his tolerance of white supremacist views evidenced by senior White House advisor Stephen Miller.

The comment also seems to crudely parrot the basis of  Trump's political views - which is to engage in "other-ism" and essentially place blame for the country's problems at the feet of immigrants and non-white Americans.

Steele, the popular ex-Republican lieutenant governor of Maryland from 2003 to 2007, was tapped to lead the R.N.C. after President Obama's 2008 election victory as Republicans tried to come to grips with a brutal election loss.

Bolstered by George W. Bush's unpopularity and anger over the Iraq War, Obama won the African-American vote 95% to Senator John McCain's 5%, the Hispanic vote 67% to 31%, the Asian vote 62% to 35% and the Jewish vote 78% to 21%.

The Republican Party was forced to face the uncomfortable political reality that it had to find a way to expand it's membership and appeal among non-white American voters.

In 2009, Michael Steele represented something of a rarity in an increasingly conservative GOP, a progressive Republican voice who was African-American - one could arguably call him a unicorn.

Pat Buchanan after winning the New Hampshire
primary in 1996

In 1993, he was one of the founding members of the Republican Leadership Council, a political action committee (PAC) that embraced a "fiscally conservative, socially inclusive" political agenda.

The other RLC co-founders included former New Jersey Republican Governor Christine Todd Whitman, former Missouri Republican Senator John Danforth and former Massachusetts Republican Governor William Weld.

The RLC PAC was formed after the backlash from right-wing writer Pat Buchanan's divisive speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention in the wake of his failed bid for the presidency in which he claimed, in part: "There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America."  

I can still recall listening to that speech on TV and getting an uncomfortable chill when he exalted the R.N.C. crowd to "take back America's cities."

The RLC was an effort to strengthen the voices of moderate Republicans in the mold of former Congressman and HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, and reject the rise of the extremist religious zealotry which has now taken root within the GOP.

Now I say all that, in part, because I think Ian B. Walter's comment that the R.N.C. selected Michael Steele as chair in 2009 "because he was a black guy" is a simplistic and incomplete summary of why he was tapped for the position.

It's also an overt attempt to pander to the overt tone of bigotry and dog-whistle racism which Trump has openly cultivated since announcing his candidacy. 

Now I might not personally agree with everything Michael Steele says in the political sense, but he's a pretty shrewd political operator who is not afraid to stand up for what he believes is right - including his criticism of Donald Trump, or his dust-ups with Rush Limbaugh back in 2009.

Michael Steele as R.N.C. chair during the 2011
Winter meeting in National Harbor, Maryland

As a conservative political commentator on MSNBC his comments and insight are always interesting and substantive.

Is it possible that his selection as R.N.C. chair in 1992 was, in part, influenced by a desire on the part of the Republican establishment to change the stiff "country club" perception of their party as an organization for old white Christian guys?

Sure it is, in fact selecting Steele as R.N.C. chair was a pretty savvy move on the part of Republicans in 2009.

When they knew they would run the risk of reinforcing the perception of the party as racist simply for attacking Obama politically as president.

But there's no question that Steele was more than qualified for the position based on his track record as a lawyer in the private sector, and for his extensive work both behind and in front of the scenes on behalf of the Republican Party.

This is a guy who earned his B.A. from Johns Hopkins and his law degree from Georgetown.

He was the first African-American elected to statewide office in Maryland when he became lieutenant governor in 2003 and he made an unsuccessful run for U.S. Senate in 2006, eventually loosing to current Democratic Senator Ben Cardin.

So in my view, Steele is the kind of person that Republicans should embrace, rather than try and vilify as if he was some kind of mistake as Ian B. Walters suggested at the CPAC dinner on Friday night.

But given Trump's views on race, and the Republican Party's acceptance of the de facto head of their party being a philandering bigot, maybe this current iteration of the R.N.C. does see a man like Michael Steele as a mistake - rather than an asset who reflected positively on the GOP.

After all, the CPAC crowd enthusiastically cheered Trump's rambling speech on Friday, even though it clearly contained lies and half-truths that have been fact-checked and he read a story about a snake.

And later that evening at the CPAC dinner, ACU communications director Ian B. Walter looked back nine years ago to cast blame on "the black guy." 

So much for those talked-about but never seen Republican Party "outreach efforts".

Garbled Fiction & Defending the Shire: Conservative Frenzy Heats Up

Utah Congresswoman Mia Love

With an amusing list of excuses that range from  "I can watch it on TV", to the more blunt "I don't even want to be involved", (yes those are real excuses) the list of prominent Republicans who plan on skipping the RNC convention in Cleveland next week reads like a who's who of the party elite.

The Republican Governor of Ohio John Kasich and Mitt Romney won't be anywhere near the Cleveland Convention Center when Donald Trump is presumably anointed the de facto head of the Republican party.

Nor will a host of Republican Congressman and Senators who either openly despise him, or are facing tough elections this fall and are terrified of being associated with Trump when voters head to the polls.

Yesterday I watched a CNN interview with Republican Utah Congresswoman Mia Love.

Ms. Love, who was trotted out like a unicorn at the last Republican convention, is something of an anomaly in this country; a black female Republican Mormon.

She's a GOP stalwart who normally toes the party line, but she made it quite clear during the CNN interview with Jake Tapper that she has no intention of appearing at this year's convention and in polite "poltic-speak" left no question that she has no love for Trump.

The Republican National Convention is next week, and while many prominent party leaders won't be there, a slew of protesters are sure to be.

As Kira Lerner reported in an article for ThinkProgress.org, as the news of the initial proposed amendments for the 2016 Republican party platform planks and policy positions leaked out, it's clear the GOP is trying to take a hard right and steer the party straight into La-La land.

Even as leaders, politicians, cops and families gathered in Dallas to mourn the latest victims of another mass shooting, the Republican party has proposed declaring pornography a "public health crisis that is destroying the life of millions."

Yes, Porn.Worse than guns, wealth inequality or poverty. Porn.

So much for the thousands of Americans wounded and killed by gun violence I guess; I'm sure the NRA had absolutely NOTHING to do with the idea of framing pornography as Public Enemy Number One for the Republican convention.

To the casual observer, it almost seems like prominent conservative figures are determined to use the nationwide backlash of protests against the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police last week (and the subsequent mass shooting of five police officers in Dallas by a disturbed lone African-American gunman) as an excuse to try and whip Republicans into some kind of cultural frenzy.

Danger Will Robinson, Danger ! Pat Buchanan

For example, last week conservative windbag Ann Coulter compared Donald Trump's efforts to demonize millions of immigrants to Abraham Lincoln's efforts to end slavery.

The always grim, perpetual right wing fear-monger Pat Buchanan penned an op-ed in which he warned that "White America has begun to die" due to inevitable demographic shifts in the U.S. population in the next 30 years.

After peppering the text of his op-ed with pedestrian warnings of a "rising tide of Muslim immigrants and refugees", the dependably backwards-looking Buchanan concluded by imploring "Western Man" to "defend the shire, pull up the drawbridge and man the parapets."

(Guessing he'd just watched the director's cut of LOTR: Return of the King before he wrote that?)

But by no means does Mr. Buchanan have a monopoly on high-minded conservative lunacy.    

Count Giuliani

In a scorching Op-Ed on Tuesday, the Editorial Board of the New York Times ripped into former Mayor Rudy Giuliani for the divisive, reactionary, overtly racist schpeel he launched into during an appearance on CBS' 'Face The Nation' on Sunday.

Rather than backing off after public backlash, he took his act to Fox on Monday and doubled down.

Taking a cue from the worn pages of the Republican playbook, Giuliani followed an all-too-common tactic employed by conservatives in the wake of unjustified killings of people of color by police; he changed the subject and tried to blame black people for it.

This pandering peddler of loony Birther theories, who once stated that President Obama "doesn't love America the way we do", even tried to pivot the topic from out of control cops to black-on-black crime by offering up some helpful advice for a young black son:

"Be very careful of those kids in the neighborhood and don't get involved with them, son, because there's a 99% chance they're going to kill you, not the police."

The Editorial Board of the NY Times called that hokum "Mr. Giuliani's garbled, fictional statistic".

Garbled fiction pretty much sums of the Republican message as they head into what is sure to be one of the most interesting conventions in years.

Seriously I wouldn't miss this one for the world.

Trump's South Carolina Primary Win Taken With Salt

Trump addresses supporters in South Carolina 

Anyone troubled by Donald Trump's decisive victory in last night's South Carolina Republican presidential primary should keep a few things in mind.

First, like the residents of most states where presidential primaries or caucuses are held, residents of the Palmetto State have been fond of bragging about their state's penchant for accurately predicting the eventual Republican nominee in the past.

Take that with a big grain of salt.

The last time around in 2012, South Carolina picked the divisive former House Speaker and pillar of Republican obstructionism Newt Gingrich - who had about as much chance of winning a general election as Sarah Palin.

So while Trump's victory does add to his momentum, with all due respect to the good citizens of South Carolina, winning a presidential primary there doesn't tell us a whole lot about how he'd fare in the larger general election.

Especially in the current political environment in which conservative primary voter's tendency to lean towards anti-establishment figures with zero political experience (Trump, Carson) could be seen as a reflection of frustration with a dysfunctional Washington political environment, anger at President Obama, or anxiety about the one-sided "economic recovery" that has left the vast majority of the voters who support Trump (disenfranchised white male and female citizens with some or no college education) left out in the same cold where most supporters of Bernie Sanders are.

2012 electoral college map results for Obama's 2nd win

Second, consider the numbers.

By that I mean the all-important 538 electoral college votes up for grabs in the 2016 presidential election.

270 are needed to win it.

In the last 2012 election, President Obama won 322 electoral votes to Mitt Romney's 206.



Thus far Trump has won victories in New Hampshire, which has 4 electoral votes, and South Carolina, which has 9 electoral votes - Iowa, which Senator Ted Cruz won, has 6 electoral votes.

So if you look at a breakdown of the electoral college votes by state, in effect, if we use the primary / caucus votes so far as a gauge of the 2016 presidential elections, Trump has "won" a total of thirteen electoral votes of the 270 he would need to win.

As far as winning the Republican nomination to be the 2016 presidential candidate, those votes are significant, but as far as him going head-to-head against Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders in a general election, it really doesn't tell us all that much.

2010 U.S. Census demographics by race

Based on the most recent available U.S. Census data, the state of Iowa is about 91.3% white, New Hampshire is 93.9% white and South Carolina is about 68.3% white, 27.9% black and 1.5% Asian.

Let's not forget that South Carolina was the state where voters were swayed, in part, to vote for George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential election after members of the Bush campaign printed up thousands of fliers that falsely accused Senator John McCain of having fathered a black child and placed them under the windshields of South Carolinians vehicles in order to tap into the racist undercurrent that is such a part of the state's history.

The current crop of Republican candidates have engaged in such shenanigans as well.

As reporter Schuyler Kropf reported in The Post and Courier on Friday February 19th, the day before the primary, pro-Ted Cruz robo-calls went out criticizing Trump and Republican Governor Nikki Haley for having weighed in on removing the Confederate flag from atop the South Carolina statehouse last year.

Specifically the robo-call chided Trump for "talking about our flag like it's a social disease."  

Using language like that to describe the Confederate flag is simply a more high-tech version of slipping racist fliers on the windshields of cars - but the fliers were used in 2015 too.

KKK flyers found on South Carolina cars in July, 2015

A month after racist killer Dylann Roof walked into a prayer service at the Emanuele African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and shot nine innocent African-Americans on June 17, 2015, the same tactics were used again.

As WBTW reported, a month later on the night of July 14, 2015, groups of white men in pickup trucks waving Confederate flags were seen driving through the predominantly black Dorchester Waylyn neighborhood of North Charleston, South Carolina the night before flyers from the Traditionalist American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan were found placed under the windshields of resident's cars.

It's certainly not fair, or my intention, to dismiss all whites who live in South Carolina as being racist against blacks, or harboring bias against Hispanic or other racial groups or ethnicities.

However, it is fair to say that Donald Trump's divisive language and rhetoric played well to conservative white primary voters on Saturday night, and it was a factor in his winning the primary with 32.5% of the vote - a 10% margin of victory over Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz who basically split 2nd place with 22.5% and 22.3% of the vote respectively.

The "big" electoral vote states like California (55 electoral votes), Texas (38 electoral votes), Florida and New York (29 electoral votes), Illinois and Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) and Ohio (18 electoral votes) are all far more racially diverse.

Major power brokers in the Republican party are rightfully concerned over how Trump's huge unfavorable poll ratings amongst non-whites and women will affect Republican chances in the 2016 general election when the votes of citizens of African descent, Hispanics and Asians will have a much larger impact.

Which is why Republicans have spent so much time and effort enacting "voter ID laws" around the country to put up barriers to make it harder for people of color, other ethnicities and legal immigrants to cast votes.

Many political observers, myself included, are waiting to see how Trump's open embrace of bigotry (he's been endorsed by white supremacist groups), anti-immigrant hysteria and total lack of foreign policy experience would play out in a national election.

Conservative thinker Pat Buchanan

As the paleoconservative thinker and author Pat Buchanan (a presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996) observed in an interesting Washington Post interview with Chris Cillizza back in January, Senator John McCain lost the African-American vote 24-1 in the 2008 presidential race, and Mitt Romney lost the Hispanic vote in 2012 by 70%.

Should Trump lose California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio by those kinds of margins, Republicans are going to have to wait until 2020 to mount another attempt to retake the White House - and by that time the shifting demographic make-up to a far more diverse American populace are going to render the current Republican party even more irrelevant.

Thus far Trump's only coherent policy position seems to be the construction of a wall hundreds of miles long along the southern border of the United States and a totally unrealistic pledge to deport up to 11 million illegal immigrants.

Despite repugnant conservative smear tactics, the vast majority of those people work AND pay taxes.

In 2015, a nationwide study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy reported that the approximately 11-plus million illegal immigrants in the U.S. paid about $11.84 billion in local and state taxes in 2012 - so Trump's signature presidential position would not only cost U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and add to the deficit, it would also strip nearly $12 billion in annual tax revenue from local and state coffers.

Thus far Trump has offered absolutely no realistic plan on how he'd get the current divided do-little Republican-majority Congress to authorize, or pay for, the billions of dollars needed to pass either of those two fantasy initiatives.

In his zeal to win favor amongst the small Tea Party / extremist faction of the Republican party to win the GOP nomination, Trump may very well have rendered himself unelectable in a general election because he's alienated such a huge portion of the U.S. populace.

In the wake of the recent passing of author Harper Lee, maybe Trump should take some time to read Lee's "To Kill A Mockingbird", a classic American novel that explores the impact of racism through the lens of a small southern town that 'A Prairie Home Companion'  host Garrison Keillor called a book about "decency".

It's doubtful such literary insight would reverse the damage he's done to his brand with his divisive ranting, but it might help him to understand why most Americans find the idea of him as a president to be unpalatable.

Except in South Carolina.

My guess is current Republican Congressman Joe "You Lie!" Wilson would approve of Saturday night's results - which, like many South Carolina voters, might have more to do with personal racial perspectives than actual political policy.

The Car That Can't Turn Left

As I watched race car driver Juan Pablo Montoya win this year's Indy 500 the other day, it occurred to me that today's Republican party runs in the opposite direction of American auto racing.

When Indy and NASCAR drivers race on the oval track, they travel counter clockwise and always turn left; whereas today's GOP seems to run around a circular track and only turns right.   

Republicans are 0-2 in the past two presidential elections and not by thin margins either; despite widespread efforts on the local, state and national level to illegally disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of African-Americans, Hispanics, legal immigrants and college students from their right to vote.

It's highly doubtful that former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's recent announcement that he's jumping into the crowded 2016 GOP presidential clown car for another run will do much to erase the Republican o-fer.

Not only is the field of 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls already top-heavy with candidates seeking the coveted blessing of the Religious Right and it's fundamentalist Christian following, it's just not likely that a member of Opus-Dei who home schools his children is going to appeal to mainstream American voters.

The Republican National Committee, conservative media spin doctors and the party's power brokers and rainmakers have allowed the GOP to drift so far to the political right that they've effectively decoupled themselves from the American center - and, some might argue, reality.

For example, last week House Speaker John Boehner pushed through the Republican-majority Congress' umpteenth anti-abortion bill; one that would effectively ban all abortions past 20 weeks.

Given the GOP's current slavish devotion to the far right wing, one might imagine that members of the crowded field of 2016 Republican presidential hopefuls might take a page from Bill Clinton's successful campaign strategy and stake out the moderate middle of the electorate by moving the party closer to the center of the American political spectrum to broaden their party's narrow appeal.

But if recent headlines are any indication, the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision has effectively empowered wealthy ideologues with hyper-conservative agendas to dictate the Republican party's platform; so appealing to far right extremists is like a job requirement for any conservative seeking the party's nomination.    

As a press release from the People For the American Way (PFAW) reported recently, last Wednesday May 20th the Gun Owners of America (GOA), a pro-gun rights group that considers the NRA a bunch of pansies, sent an e-mail to it's membership informing them that they would be conducting "tele-town hall meetings" with 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls this week to vet them on their positions on gun laws.

GOA executive director Larry Pratt

To understand GOA, you need to know a little about their rather outspoken executive director Larry Pratt (pictured left), who was forced to quit his position as co-chairman of Pat Buchanan's unremarkable 1996 presidential campaign after the Center for Public Integrity released a report in February of 1996 showing that Pratt had attended numerous meetings and spoken at events attended by neo-Nazis and white supremacists aligned with the American militia movement.

Not surprisingly, Pratt was not only an important figure in the formation of the militia movement in the 1990's, he's also active in the anti-immigrant movement having founded groups such as English First (an "English-Only" group) and U.S. Border Control.

Pratt has shrewdly updated his bizarre anti-immigrant hysteria as a means to smear President Obama too, according to the PFAW, Pratt accused the President of seeking to "enlist undocumented immigrants into a private 'Praetorian guard'" (Cue cuckoo clock sounds) 

According to the PFAW, Pratt is also the guy who said members of the US Congress were right to have "a healthy fear" of assassination because it motivates them to "behave."

Now I'm not at all suggesting that Larry Pratt doesn't have the right to exercise his 1st Amendment rights and enjoy freedom of expression.

But if any 2016 Republican candidate wants to be taken seriously as a candidate for the highest office in the land, participating in a "tele-town hall meeting" with a racist, anti-Semite nut-bag like Pratt is probably not the way to do it.

Any GOP candidate worth his or her weight in salt who wants to win the White House in 2016 is going to have the guts to grab the wheel of the Republican clown car and turn it to the left; away from divisive purveyors of hate like Larry Pratt and back towards a semblance of sanity.

Insane! Trump & Buchanan Move from Proof of Birth to Obama's GPA

Republicans just keep getting crazier.

With President Obama's surprise morning news conference to release his long-form birth certificate to confirm what he and other legal experts have been saying since 2007 (that he was born in America) still reverberating in political circles, the right wing extremists who currently dictate the GOP's agenda and policy direction struck back.

Apparently undaunted by factual proof that the entire basis for the "Birther" movement is in fact, not true, members of the right immediately moved on to questioning the President's qualifications for getting into Columbia and Harvard.

In one of the most overt displays of racism I've ever seen, quasi-Presidential hopeful/media whore Donald Trump along with former-Presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan launched into a bizarre attempt to discredit the President's academic qualifications for getting into college and law school.

Meanwhile Media Matters reports that since March 2nd, Fox News has stoked the irrational flames of the Birther movement by promoting the Birther story an astounding 52 times - 84% of those reports went unchallenged or uncorrected.

At least it's evident to Americans that the 2012 GOP presidential campaign will be about one thing - the President is black.