SELLING THE IDEOLOGY, NOT PANDERING:

Restoration Weekend: How the GOP Will Attract Black Voters The Republican Party's ideas are good for America, and great for African-Americans. (Lindsey Graham, 11/08/03, FrontPage)

I stand up before you as a new Senator from South Carolina, and I consider myself a failure having connected with only 31 percent of my state. I believe that my ideas are better than that, and I've got a problem. And if we don't turn this problem around, not just in the South but in the nation, somebody will be writing a book, The Republican Party: A National Party No More.

Now, how do you do that? You don't reinvent yourself about what you believe.  Nobody likes that. You come up with a way to better convey what you believe. What I've found so astonishing is that when you list down what we believe, in African-American communities, there's a lot of checks by "yeah," until you get to the part that it was a Republican-brought idea. That's the problem.  School choice -- who are we talking about when you give a choice to get out of failing school?  We're talking about minority kids in rural and poor parts of this country.  So the biggest beneficiary of school choice is people who are trapped in poor schools who are disproportionately minorities. Social security reform -- how many people here, if you could, would invest your social security on your own, parts of it?  Everybody.  You know why? You're not stupid.  The reason you would do that is you're getting less than 2-percent return rate.  How many people have the federal government managing your estate?  Nobody. 

Why would you give to the federal government more power than they already have to get you less than 2 percent? If you're an African-American working in South Carolina, the biggest tax you pay is social security tax. If you're an African-American male born after 1980, do you know what your rate of return on social security is? Negative 0.9. So if we can reform Social Security, the beneficiaries of it are not you; it's working people. It's hourly-wage earners. It's people out there who are working in the middle class, in the lower middle class. It's African-American families that are the biggest beneficiary of social security reform. Just look at the numbers.  

Why? Because African-American males don't live as long as white women. The biggest transfer of wealth in the nation is from Social Security taxes paid into the system by African-American males because they never live long enough as a group to get the benefit of their investment. And their money doesn't stay in their family.  It goes into the pot, and the pot rewards white women, because they live longer than everybody else. If you sold that policy in the private sector, they would put you in jail.  It's discriminatory.  If you went down through the communities of America offering this policy in the private sector, somebody would sue you because it's discriminatorily designed. And nobody would buy it. "I'm here to take 6 percent of your wages for the rest of your working life, and I can promise you negative 0.9-percent return."  Would you buy it?  

Interesting to think that it's the very conservative Southern senators who have the greatest stake in attracting black voters to the GOP.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 8, 2003 8:27 AM