RNC Schedule: Tokenism Extraordinaire
from Ben Adler at the Nation: http://www.thenation.com/blog/169595/rnc-schedule-tokenism-extraordinaire
Tampa, FL—Most Republicans oppose affirmative action, but their national convention is the apotheosis of the practice at its most tokenistic and least substantive. Whereas Democrats and liberals support policies that are meant to actually assist disadvantaged groups as a whole and to protect them from discrimination, Republicans have no interest in women or minorities except as window dressing for their discriminatory policies. It would be insulting for them to think it will actually work. In fairness, Republicans probably know they will not actually move many African-American or Latino votes by putting a handful of non-white speakers on the dais in Tampa. Rather, it is part of Mitt Romney’s general election strategy of the ricochet pander. Like his speech at the NAACP, the purpose is not to appeal to minorities, but to socially moderate white suburban swing voters who want to be reassured that pulling the lever for the GOP does not make them bigots.
Republicans’ poll numbers among Latinos, African-Americans and women are daunting. In the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Mitt Romney actually got 0 percent of the black vote. In a recent poll of Latino voters, Romney trailed President Obama 65 to 26. And according to several recent polls, Romney performs about eight points worse among women than among men . . .
And so the Republican National Convention schedule, just released Monday night since it had to be updated to reflect their premature cancellation of Monday’s events, will cram as many women and minorities as they can find into the primetime line up. Look at who will be speaking on Tuesday in the network TV hour (from 10 to 11pm): Texas Senatorial nominee Ted Cruz, former Representative Artur Davis, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, Mrs. Lucé Fortuño, First Lady of Puerto Rico, Ann Romney, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and a benediction from Reverebd Sammy Rodriguez, President of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. Of the seven speakers, only one is a non-Latino white man. That, of course, is Christie, the convention’s keynote speaker. It is emblematic of how the GOP itself works: the real power is held by white men, but women and minorities are trotted out to speak in public. How else can you explain the wife of the governor of Puerto Rico getting a primetime speaking slot at the convention? She may be a dynamic individual and charismatic speaker, but can anyone claim with a straight face that if she were a white Protestant she would be given this platform?
It is impossible to know whether Republicans actually believe this will help them among non-white voters. On the one hand, the condescending assumption that women and minorities care only about seeing one of their own on stage, not actual policies that affect them, fits with the out of touch elitism of the GOP and the Romney campaign. It was Romney, after all, who tried to argue that he will be a good president for women merely because he is married to one. That ended up devolving into a food fight over one Democratic strategist’s correct, but irrelevant, observation that Ann Romney has never held a job outside the home. The correct rejoinder, on the merits as well as the politics, is not that Ann Romney is a rich housewife. It is that even a woman candidate—Sarah Palin, for instance—could be a terrible president for women. Just as Palin and Rick Santorum have grossly claimed to be advocates for the disabled because they have children with disabilities, while opposing the actual policies that the disability community needs, the RNC is pretending that women, Latinos and African-Americans are . . .
read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/169595/rnc-schedule-tokenism-extraordinaire
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