Romney's 'Zero-Percenters'
Former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas won 12 percent in 1996. That was partly because his running mate was former Rep. Jack Kemp. The innovative former football star enlisted many grassroots black and Hispanic leaders with his urban agenda of school choice, enterprise zones and tax incentives.
But today's racial-political divide goes back to the 1960s, when moderate Republicans were not nearly as rare at the national level as they are today. Leading Republicans like Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois helped pushed President Lyndon B. Johnson's landmark civil rights and voting rights bills to passage over the objection of Southern segregationist Democrats.
But as conservatives regained power -- aided by the white South's shift from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican -- black voters went the other way. As my father used to say, "We didn't leave the Republican Party, the Republicans left us."
Today, Republicans of all colors tell me how blacks should be fed up with Obama's inability to produce more jobs as he tries to clean up the economic mess that the Bush years left behind. We might expect some of that disappointment to show up in opinion polls, now that the initial thrill of having a president of African descent has worn off.
But on that score, Obama could hardly have picked a better set of opponents. The bold outreach of Republicans like Kemp or Dirksen is as hard to find as any other bipartisan gestures in today's polarized Washington.
The Romney campaign appears to be paying the price, not only with blacks but also with Hispanics, who favored the Obama ticket by 2-to-1 in the NBC/WSJ poll, among other persuadable groups.
If there is any hope for future Republican crossovers, it may come from up-and-comers like Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Romney's running mate worked for Kemp as a speechwriter and at his research organization. Ryan calls Kemp his mentor, although he has yet to show similar skills for reaching across partisan and racial divides. But he's young. There's still hope.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com.
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