The Red 14%

14% - Congressional Job Approval Rating

(http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/congressional_job_approval-903.html)

Tuesday Romney won Pennsylvania, and four other states, locking up the Republican nomination.

Money can’t buy you love.

He didn’t get 60% of the vote in Pennsylvania which is a weak showing for presumptive nominee running unopposed. More than 40% of voters still favored someone other than Romney two weeks after having the Republican primary field to himself.

The Tea Party and other extremists that control the party will blame Romney, if President Obama wins re-election. They won’t look at their ideology that is shared by a very small slice of voters.

They don’t see how their zealotry turned off the independents, and conservative Democrats they needed to win. Instead the Tea Party will blame Romney and in 2016, nominate an even more extreme candidate rather than pulling back to the center where the voters are.

If the Republicans do that, they can look at what happened to the Democrats in the last century to see what they have to look forward to.

In 1968 the Democrats narrowly lost the Presidency. Their response to that loss was to nominate increasingly ideologically pure liberal candidates. Between 1972 and 1992 Democrats won the Presidency one time, in 1976 as result of Watergate.

Only when Bill Clinton and the DLC stood up to the left wing of the party and pushed the Democrats back to the center did they start winning the White House again.

Between 1992-2008, the Republicans won the White House by a statistically significant margin one time - 2004. They lost in 1992, were crushed in 1996, lost the popular vote and took the Presidency by chicanery on 2000, and lost in 2008.

Each loss pulled the Republicans further to the right. “compassionate conservatism” in 2000 gave way to the “swift-boat” campaign of 2004. The danger for the Republicans is a loss in 2012 will pull them to the fringe. If anyone other than a Rush Limbaugh conservative runs next time it will be very hard for them to win.

Even now the Tea Party crowd is openly talking about waiting out the 2012 Presidential race and focussing on the Senate and House races. They want to build their bench for future Presidential runs in 2016 and 2020 with an ideologically pure candidate from the ranks.

These candidates appeal only to small activist base. The Congressional Job approval rating of 14% is an indication of what Americans think of the Tea Party agenda. After all it is the Tea Party agenda, not a liberal left wing agenda that is debated in the House and used to block progress in the Senate.

With their hard support of “papers please” anti-immigration laws and their solid opposition to any form of the “Dream Act” the Republicans have alienated Hispanics, who are the fastest growing voter population in the country. With their recent moves against fair pay acts, contraception, and medical privacy, Republicans have also alienated women who make up over half of the electorate.

If this alienation locks in broader voting patterns, Republicans could be starting a long period of being the minority party. Over time, demographics will reduce their power in the House and Senate and create a long term Democratic majority. The Republicans nationally could look like the Republicans in California.

Will that be a good thing?

Between 1955 and 1988 the Republicans carried California in every Presidential race but one. (http://articles.boston.com/2012-04-22/news/31383123_1_swing-state-unemployment-auto-industry) Since 1992 the Democrats have carried it in every Presidential election. It is not even competitive for the Romney in 2012. Today, there is a 15% gap in voter registration with the Democrats firmly in the majority. Republicans are all but locked out of Statewide office.

So what happened?

In 1992, then Governor Pete Wilson (R-CA) supported Prop 182 which at the time was the strongest anti-immigrant statute in the country, denying a range of social services to “illegal aliens.” The growing Hispanic vote which had been reliably Republican because of the Party’s stance on social issues moved firmly to the Democrats. Southern California Congressional Districts once represented by the likes of arch conservative Bob Dornan elected the Sanchez sisters.

Locked in as a political minority, the Republicans became more partisan, and unwilling to work with Democrats to resolve California’s tough issues. The Democrats, released from the responsibility of working across the aisle also moved to more extreme positions. The result was the State simply ceased to work effectively. Budgets haven’t passed on time, the higher education system has been dramatically cut back (the CSU system is not taking in new students this semester - it can’t afford to), roads crumble while Sacramento bickers.

California is often seen as a bell-weather of future trends nationally. If this is true the trend is for the country could be political gridlock and decline. What we have seen so far in Washington is just taste of what's to come. We are faced significant economic problems, a civil conflict in Syria that could spread, a restive and North Korea and nuclear Iran. Let’s hope we can break the trend.

57 Years Apart

“Thar he.”

The black sharecropper Mose Wright identifying the white killer of Emmett Till in open court in Mississippi in 1956.

On Sunday night, August 28 1955, two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, came to the home of Mose Wright, a black sharecropper and local preacher, to kidnap Emmett Till because Till had allegedly flirted with Bryant’s wife. Bryant and Milam, took Till, a 14 year old black youth visiting from Chicago, beat him beyond recognition, shot him and threw him into the Tallahatchie River strapped by barbed-wire to the blade of an industrial fan.

When Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, recovered his body for burial, she insisted on an open casket funeral. She wanted the world to see what she couldn’t describe. The photos in the Chicago Defender of the pulp that had been Till’s face electrified the world.

On Sunday night, February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin a 17 year old black youth, was walking back to the home where he was staying in central Florida. He was accosted by George Zimmerman, a member of the neighborhood watch, and within 5 minutes Martin was dead with a gunshot wound to his chest.

Two young black men, barely adults, visiting family members, were killed on Sunday nights 57 years apart. Till was kidnapped and killed because Bryant thought Till had whistled at his wife. Martin was killed because he was wearing a hoodie and may have been reaching for a pack of Skittles.

We have come a long way in 57 years.

It isn’t socially acceptable anymore to take a black man, and turn his lynching into a town festival complete with picnics and souvenir postcards. Between 1882 and 1968, 539 blacks were lynched in Mississippi, and 257 blacks were lynched in Florida. (http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html). Many of the victims “crimes” were “insulting” a white women.

Now, in the South, interracial marriage between whites and blacks is above the national average. Black and white interracial marriage rates in Mississippi are in line with the national average. (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/02/16/the-rise-of-intermarriage/7/#appendix-2-state-and-regional-rates).

But, it is still socially acceptable to be suspicious of a young black man simply because he is a young black man.

In the New York Times, Michael Powell points out the New York Police Department, stopped and frisked over 685,724 New Yorkers in 2011. That is more than the population of the City of El Paso, Texas. Of those, 603,437 (more than the population of Washington, D.C.) were innocent and weren’t charged or cited for any reason. Powell, who is white, asked his two sons, 19 and 24 years old, how many times they had been stopped and frisked.

Neither had.

Powell then asked 8 black male students in his class at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, who were the same age as his sons, the same question. Together they had been stopped a cumulative 92 times. One had even been asked to remove his shoes on the subway. Their only crime had been to be black in the wrong place. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/nyregion/reducing-crime-squandering-good-will.html).

Like Powell’s students, Martin was judged not by the content of his character but by the clothes he was wearing combined with the color of his skin. Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father, warned his son he would be stereotyped and could be the target of violence. “I told him that society is cruel.” (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-04-14/african-american-parents-talk-to-sons-about-race/54258448/1).

The same fear behind “stop and frisk” is the fear behind “stand your ground” in Florida.

In 2005, Florida changed State law to say if you felt threatened in a public area, you didn’t have a “duty to retreat” and you could respond with deadly force. The police would determine if the person stood their ground and the homicide was justifiable. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law). In the five years before “stand your ground” there were an average of 12 justifiable homicides a year. In the five years since the average is 36. (http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/mar/26/christopher-l-smith/sen-chris-smith-claimed-deaths-due-self-defense-fl/).

The way the police handled Zimmerman fits the way the law is written. They investigated the shooting, they heard from the only surviving witness, and they determined it was a “stand your ground” case and let the suspect go. The law is so broadly written it will be very hard to convict Zimmerman of anything.

When “stop and frisk” meets “stand your ground” a case like Trayvon Martin’s is inevitable.

In 1956, Mississippi’s judicial racism was open for all to see. Few doubted Bryant and Milam would be acquitted. The defense argued that Till was alive, and the body that had been buried in Till’s casket was a corpse stolen and used by the NAACP to create a story. Jury deliberation took 67 minutes. As one juror said: "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long." After Bryant and Milam were acquitted, and protected from further prosecution, they admitted their guilt in an interview in Look magazine.

At the trial of Till’s killers, the Defense argued Mose Wright couldn’t have seen who took Till, because the only light to see by was a flashlight. They asked Wright to identify who took Till from his home that night. Against centuries of fear, and the risk of violent death, Wright stood in the witness stand, pointed at J.W. Milam and said “Thar he.” There he is.

With a thin outstretched hand Wright touched the glacier of fear, and it began to break. Who will touch the glacier this time?