Was it wrong that John Kerry got 88 percent of the black vote?

[theboss]

There seems to be a level of concern that Barrack Obama is:

a) carrying huge percentages of the black vote and,
b) using that advantage among black voters to pressure black super delegates.

I agree that this is a problem. And I think it is a problem that Democratic presidential candidates obtained the following percentage of the black vote in recent presidential elections:

John Kerry - 88 percent
Al Gore - 90 percent
Bill Clinton '96 - 84 percent (Perot took 4 percentage points off the total)

I think Democrats should make it a goal in 2008 that at least 35 percent of black voters vote for Republicans in order to end this "voting bloc" mentality, which is clearly unhealthy in a democracy.

(Note: this post is heavily laden with sarcasm).

[JimGinPA]

1. Excellent Point

K&R

[GoreVidalIsGod]

2. They voted for Kerry because he was black!!!!!!!!!

[Window]

3. Love it!!

:thumbsup:

[BuyingThyme]

4. Apples and oranges.

[theboss]

6. Either monlothic voting blocs are good or they are bad

Can't have it both ways.

[BuyingThyme]

8. Yeah, but the Dems are always going to get that vote for the foreseeable future.

[ecstatic]

22. Ha! Don't be so sure of that

There is a such thing as staying home.

[BuyingThyme]

33. That wouldn't change the proportion at all.

Would it?

[redstate_democrat]

28. Wow.

You sure?

I think Black voters do a great disservice by voting in these large blocs. What incentive does the Democratic party have to actually address the concerns of the Black community when we will just vote for them anyway. We are the largest, monolithic voting bloc out there. This is not to our political advantage.

And then what makes things so ironic about Barack's large Black voter constituency is that Barack is actually very conservative on social issues of great concern to the Black community. He generally believes that the problems with unemployment, crime, education within the Black community are self-inflicted, that government programs don't really work, that Blacks have come 90% of the way to racial equality, that "what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts", that "white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America" as "even the most fair-minded of whites...tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country", that Blacks have been "pulled into the economic mainstream", that "conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare", and he says that encouraging black girls to finish high school and stop having babies out of wedlock is "the single biggest thing that we could do to reduce inner-city poverty." He is basically a pull yourself up by the bootstraps kind of guy and forget about years of inequality because it's not getting you very far.

He believes throwing money into schools is just status quo, but he won't go as far as calling for Vouchers. He is somewhere in the middle.

This is from his book The Audacity of Hope. Now, I gather that a lot Black people would read these words and believe a conservative had written them. He is very Cosbian.

[theboss]

30. In some ways, these stances are "Nixon to China" moments

I'm going to engage in some wild speculation here so bear with me. It could be that black voters - in general - share some of these views regasrding government programs and public schools and welfare and black on black crime. However, they are going to balk at these thoughts when presented by a white politician because they believe it to be a ploy to eliminate these programs all together. Obama can say these things because - ultimately - black voters trust him.

Nixon could open up relations with China because conservatives trusted him as a fervent anti-communist. If John Kennedy or Jimmy Carter had done it, it would have been viewed as a ploy leading ultimately to surrender on the issue.

[redstate_democrat]

31. Well

This is my point.

[theboss]

32. Then we are both geniuses

Though I am not sure why.

[BuyingThyme]

34. As long as the Pukes stick to what people like to call the Southern Strategy,

and Dems stick to the opposite side of that coin, I don't know how things are going to change any time soon.

[skipos]

5. I agree. We should get the youth vote more more even with the Repubs too

I want our elections to be as close as possible. Ideally, they would ALL be decided by the supreme court.

[Chulanowa]

26. We could go ahead and not run in Ohio or Florida too, save Diebold some money!

Heavens knows they could use the fallback

[Cha]

7. It was fucking cool.

It's too easy to retort to hilary's whiners.

[Adelante]

9. Very good, boss

:thumbsup:

[George_Bonanza]

10. Black blocs become problematic when it starts to directly benefit Blacks

[theboss]

11. If you study old-style machine politics, black voters were the key to everything

They were the key to the machines' victories and, simultaneously, the biggest threat to the machines. The minute they demanded something that scared white voters, the machines were at risk.

[stellanoir]

12. and Obama got 0 votes in Harlem and there has been no investigation. Ughhh

That's plausible

/sarcasm

[theboss]

13. I've missed this...what?

'Splain please.

[JVS]

15. There were some precincts that registered no votes for Obama

[theboss]

16. It looks like some of those disctrics have been corrected now

At least according to the Times.

Still, that's messed up.

I alos notice that some of Clinton's huge victories on Super Tuesday don't seem so huge now. California was 9 points. For whatever reason, I thought it was more than 15 points.

[JVS]

14. Yeah, that's kind of fucked up. But Hillary had to win NY, it's a state that matters, don't ya know

[NashVegas]

17. We're In the Primaries, Not the General Election

How did Kerry do there?

[theboss]

19. Exceptionally well in a broad field

He generally got between 55 to 60 percent of the vote, which was the key to his win in the early primaries.

Bill Clinton got something like 70 percent of the black vote in '92 primaries. That's how he became the nominee.

[orangefire]

18. Before the media-manufactured "race war", many blacks supporterd Hillary

that number dropped to near single digits immediately: the block mentality.

[theboss]

20. So, tell them to break the bloc mentality and start voting for Republicans

It's the only fair thing to do.

[redstate_democrat]

29. You know what

The Democratic party is steadily moving more and more to the Right anyway. A lot of Black, especially older Blacks, are conservative on certain social issues just as evangelicals on the Right are. The more the party strays away from its more progressive agenda on bread and butter issues, this bloc may find itself trying to decipher between the two major parties and will determine things on individual issues instead of just voting based on party affiliation.

[DemBones DemBones]

21. No. But when Tavis Smiley gets death threats

and Rep. John Lewis gets robo calls plus live calls saying very derogatory things about him until he finally gives in and says he'll support Obama, it is very, very bad.

If Obama got 100% of the black vote, that would be the choice of black voters.

But pressuring prominent blacks to support Obama when they think Clinton would do a better job is wrong.

Saying blacks must support Obama because he's black is wrong. John Lewis was getting beaten up at civil rights marches when Obama was still in diapers so it's ludicrous to say that Lewis's support for Clinton showed he's "not black enough." Lewis marched with MLK, rode with the Freedom Riders, worked with SNCC, and people have the audacity to say he's "not black enough"? I think the man earned the right to be a superdelegate and cast his vote according to his own conscience. I've thought he was a good man for a long time and it pisses me off that he was treated that way. Obama was a civil rights lawyer and should appreciate that Lewis laid the foundation for younger blacks like him.

Imagine if women in Congress were being pressured to vote for Hillary Clinton because she's a woman. Would you approve of that? I certainly would not.

[theboss]

23. Those robocalls? Placed by a republican operative

http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0108/Those_Lewis_Robocalls.html

[DemBones DemBones]

24. What about the live calls and the death threats?

If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the GOP has done all the bad stuff, that's just more proof that they want Obama to be the nominee because he's weaker than Clinton and McCain can beat him.

Do we want to run the guy they want us to run?

[theboss]

25. Republicans should want Hillary...but they hate her with a blinding passion

Hillary would unite the Republicans in ways that McCain can't. But the Clinton hate-machine has been running for 16 years and apparently it simply can't be turned off.

And - between you, me, and the man in the moon - I don't believe Tavis Smiley about the death threats.

[Califooyah Operative]

27. That was before it became cool to dismiss the black vote. nt

[anonymous171]

35. Apparently black voters aren't "true" democrats.

Since only HRC gets those.

[BooScout]

36. Those figures are for the GE,.....

You're comparing apples to oranges.