Is the Democratic Party Losing the Black Vote?

[Q]

What We Must Overcome
Lani Guinier

The American Prospect
http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V12/5/guinier-l.html

"They could not get a single Democratic senator (from a body that includes not a single black representative) to join their objection."

Excerpts:

The anger over what happened in Florida has only been reinforced by the failure of the Democratic Party leadership to move quickly and seriously to engage the legitimacy issue. Right after November 7, when the perception first emerged that the election was being hijacked, the Gore campaign actively discouraged mass protest. On January 12, when Al Gore presided over the counting of the electoral college votes, it was only members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) who rose, one by one, to protest the filing of Florida's votes. They could not get a single Democratic senator (from a body that includes not a single black representative) to join their objection. The silence of the white Democrats in Congress turned the CBC demonstration into an emphatic recapitulation of the election drama. As the presiding officer, Al Gore overruled the protests. The moment was especially poignant, because the Black Caucus members, in speaking out for Floridians whose votes were not counted, were speaking out for all Americans, while even their progressive white colleagues sat in awkward silence. E.J. Dionne, a columnist for The Washington Post, watched the drama unfold on television. Turning to his eight-year-old son, seated next to him, Dionne explained, "They are speaking out for us too."

"It was the Black Caucus, and the Black Caucus alone," James Carroll wrote in The Boston Globe "that showed itself sensitive to ... what is clearly true about the recent presidential election in Florida." That truth is the gap between what the rules permit and what democracy requires. Florida made it obvious that our winner-take-all rules would unfairly award all of Florida's electoral college votes to one candidate even though the margin of victory was less than the margin of error. Yet our elected officials in Washington are committed to those rules and, even more, to maintaining civility between those adversely affected by the rules and those who benefited. As Carroll wrote, "Those who sit atop the social and economic pyramid always speak of love, while those at the bottom always speak of justice."

Unfortunately, in pursuit of bipartisan civility, the Democratic Party leadership appears to be marching to a false harmony: Charmed by compassionate conservatism and conscious of middle-of-the-road swing voters' aversion to conflict, top Democrats have ignored issues of justice and the troubling disenfranchisement of many of the party's most loyal supporters. If we learn anything from the Supreme Court's role in the 2000 election travesty, it must be that when the issue is justice, the people--not the justices of the Court or the Democratic leaders in Washington--will lead. And if anything is true about the fiasco in Florida, it is the need for new leaders who are willing to challenge rather than acquiesce to unfair rules. New leadership will not come from a single, charismatic figure orchestrating deals out of Washington, D.C.; nor will it be provided by a group devoted only to remedying the disenfranchisement of black voters. What is needed instead is a courageous assembly of stalwart individuals who are willing to ask the basic questions the Black Caucus members raised--questions that go to the very legitimacy of our democratic procedures, not just in Florida but nationwide. These are likely to be individuals organized at the local level, possibly even into a new political party that is broadly conceived and dedicated to real, participatory democracy. Such a movement could build on the energy of black voter participation, which between 1996 and last year went from 10 percent to 15 percent in Florida and from 5 percent to 12 percent in Missouri..."

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"We choose to stand up and speak out when 
others choose to sit down and remain 
silent. We are the voice for the voiceless . . . "
-- Congressman Elijah E. Cummings, Chair CBC

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