That's Rich

Frank Rich offers up his usual drivel:

Though Mr. Bush ran for president on “compassionate conservatism,” he diversified only his party’s window dressing: a 2000 Republican National Convention that had more African-Americans onstage than on the floor and the incessant photo-ops with black schoolchildren to sell No Child Left Behind. There are no black Republicans in the House or the Senate to stand with the party’s 2008 nominee. Exit polls tell us that African-Americans voting in this year’s G.O.P. primaries account for at most 2 to 4 percent of its electorate even in states with large black populations.

First, note the eternal Democratic penchant for seeing everything in terms of demographic groups. Don't like Mr. Obama because he's a socialist? Racist! Wait, you're a Republican even though all Republicans are old white guys? If this is change...

Rich is right that the Republican Party doesn't have a lot of blacks or Hispanics, but he suggests that the reason is that the Republican Party is mildly racist. Hilariously, he does so by talking about the struggles of a Republican governor of Virginia who supported busing (which, unlike eliminating mandatory segregation, was a terrible idea anyway), ignoring the fact that Southern Democrats were the major opponents of the civil rights movement (think current Democratic Senator from West Virginia, former Klan leader Robert Byrd) and that Republicans played a major role in most important civil rights legislation from the Sixties.

Honestly, though, the real reason why the Democratic Party is so overwhelmingly supported by the African-American population is that they discovered long ago that they could keep entire demographic groups dependent on them through grievance mongering and race baiting. Frank Rich's column only illustrates this fact. Not only do the Democrats focus on race and sex rather than issues, they actually perpetuate racial divisions and seek to codify them through affirmative action. The Republicans, on the other hand, actually support policies that would help African-Americans and that African-Americans support by wide margins: school choice, restricting abortion, and ending homosexual marriage.

The fact that African-Americans are overwhelmingly Democratic speaks more to the Democrats' manipulative and base tactics than to Republicans' admittedly poor job of reaching out to them.