I’m a hustler baby, I’m a hustler
I just want you to know, wanna let you know
It ain’t where I been, it ain’t where I been
But where I’m ’bout to go, top of the world!
—Jay Z
The race hustlers can almost taste it now—Obama at the top of the world. And now Spike Lee, Maxine Waters, Jeremiah Wright, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, et al. are joined by a new hustler-wannabe—Howard Dean. Yes, the Dean of scream. Yaaaaaaaaaaah! Whether he made a Freudian slip or not last week, Dean reminded me of the pathetic, race-confused “Raji” as played by Vince Vaughn in the movie “Be Cool.” In an NPR interview, Dean was asked about the shifting demographics in the U.S. and responded: “And if you look at folks of color, even women, they’re more successful in the Democratic Party than they are in the white, excuse me, than in the Republican Party….”
However you see it, Dean said what he thinks of the Republican Party—and joined the ranks of the “race hustler” elite while sporting his signature smirk. The lesson for Republicans is not that the race hustlers are still at it; or that the mainstream media smoothed it over for Dean (yet again); or that Wolf Blitzer will not rend his shirt in outrage; or that Keith Olberman will not round up a latte liberal posse to tar and feather Hustler Howard. The lesson is that Dean’s words are true. No matter how you slice the demographics, the Republican Party is distinctly “white” and that stings the conscience of the conservative to know that a solid block of the American electorate rejects the conservative worldview out of hand.
For the last 50 years Republicans have consistently garnered only 10 percent of the black presidential vote with no better prospects this time around. Every political consultant, pollster, economist, sociologist, historian, hack and blogger, not to mention past and present politician, seems to have a well-reasoned explanation for the phenomenon. So far, I’ve only stumbled across one honest commentator (Paul Gottfried, a professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania) who says he “is still searching for an explanation as to why this hostility [blacks toward Republicans] is as deep and abiding as it seems to be.”
Who better to give some insight on this Republican failure than two former black Republican legislators—former U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts and former Congressman from Oklahoma, J.C .Watts?