Jon Stewart Mocks Rand Paul's Howard Univ. Speech: 'You Can't Yadda Yadda Yadda The Last 60 Years'
Huffpo's summary of the opening segment: Jon Stewart began Thursday's "Daily Show" with a look at Rand Paul's visit to Howard University. After announcing that people told him he was either "brave or crazy" to go speak at the traditionally black school, Paul attempted to convince the students that the Republican party has always been on the right side of civil rights history... if you disregard the last 60 years, of course. Stewart was quick to point out that "you can't just yadda yadda yadda the last 60 Republican years," noting that it was the racist response to the civil rights movement that led many Democrats to leave their party and join the Republicans, changing the face of the GOP forever.
Link to video.
[More behind the cut]
This is part of the new strategy in the effort to capture more minority voters in an effort to turn the tide of worsening demographics as more Latino voters potentially will make Arizona, Texas and Georgia the next set of states become more purple in the next two presidential election cycles. As Jon Stewart pointed out the history of African Americans and the GOP recently has been a rather strained one; and that's reflected in both voting and delegates at the RNC. In 2012, there were only 28 African American delegates on the convention floor.
But the question of whether the GOP can increase its diversity is serious business to GOP political strategists, who understand that an overwhelmingly white party faces electoral doom in an increasingly diverse country.
On Tuesday, theGrio spoke to three black RNC delegates from California, two from Texas, and one apiece from Michigan, Florida, South Carolina, Georgia and New York, who among them identified 28 African-American delegates, including themselves. The reticence may have something to do with a history of declining diversity at the GOP nominating conventions in recent years.
After peaking at 167 in 2004, when George W. Bush accepted his party’s nomination for a second term as president, the number of black delegates dropped to just 36 in 2008 - 1.5 percent of the delegates who nominated John McCain. That was a 78.4 percent decline from 2004, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which has tabulated the number of black delegates to both party’s nominating conventions every presidential election cycle since 1974.
According to the Joint Center’s senior political analyst, David Bositis, the year with the most African-American delegates to the GOP convention was 1912, when William Howard Taft became the Republican nominee with the help of black Republicans in the then-solidly Democratic southern states (“basically back then, the only Republicans in the south were black,” Bositis said). And the lowest ebb was in 1964, when just 1 percent of the delegates to the convention that nominated conservative firebrand Barry Goldwater for president were black.1
Of course, there are some on the right who are opposed to any sort of "compromise" on those elements that would sweeten the pot for more minority inclusion. Rush Limbaugh rails against efforts to reach an amnesty agreement. Rick Santorum (Mr. "Blaaa people") has categorically stated Republicans changing their opposition to gay marriage would be suicide. I'm pretty skeptical that much will anything will change, despite the best efforts of conservative pundits who seem to believe Mario Rubio and Ted Cruz will save the GOP (the talking point on the right that Latinos are naturally conservative and would vote Republican if it weren't for the bellicose talk on immigration reform. Except Latinos aren't socially conservative.
Two days after Latino voters broadly rejected the Republican Party, Charles Krauthammer saw reason for optimism. Latinos, he said, “should be a natural Republican constituency: striving immigrant community, religious, Catholic, family-oriented and socially conservative (on abortion, for example.)” George W. Bush and Karl Rove found a way to approach 40 percent of the Latino vote; Romney barely netted half that. So Republicans, facing a demographic time bomb as their base of white men ages, have comforted themselves by thinking all they really need to do is perform as well as Bush did among Latinos to get near the White House again.
Whether or not Republicans have any chance of capturing more than a tiny fraction of the Latino vote, Krauthammer (and the straw-grasping Republicans who echoed him) shouldn’t take Latinos’ conservatism, including their views on abortion, for granted.
First of all, being religious doesn’t mean you vote according to the dictates of your church, and Latino voters have consistently told pollsters that they don’t. Last December, a Latino Decisions poll found that 53 percent of Latinos said religion would have no impact at all on their vote. And only 14 percent agreed that “politics is more about moral issues such as abortion, family values, and same-sex marriage.” In fact, exit polling from the election this month showed that Latinos were more likely than other voters to support same-sex marriage recognition.2
It's going to be a definitely a fun ride over the next two years to see if the conservative elements of the Republican party will try to run a national candidate that will will the election, and have nominees that will finally push the Senate into the Republican column. Nate Silver is already writing about that.
Summing up the possibilities across all 35 Senate races yields a net gain of four to five seats for Republicans, just short of the six they would need to win back the majority. However, the margin of error on the calculation is very high at this early stage.3
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1. Despite diversity brag, few black delegates at the 2012 Republican convention, by Joy-Ann Reid, The Grio. Published. August 29, 2012.
2. Rove’s plan won’t work: Don’t count on Latino social conservatism. By Irin Carmon. Salon. Published November 23, 2013.
3. Can Republicans Win the Senate in 2014? Nate Silver, New York Times. Published February 20, 2013