Black vs Brown in '08

Bob Novak looks at Clinton's risky strategy:

LOS ANGELES -- Sen. Hillary Clinton is relying on the big Latino vote as her firewall to prevent losing the California Democratic primary Feb. 5, the most important of 22 states contested on Mega Tuesday. But that reliance, say both pro-Clinton and anti-Clinton Democrats, is fraught with peril for the Democratic Party's coalition by threatening to alienate its essential African-American component.

Clinton's double-digit lead in California polls over Sen. Barack Obama is misleading. Subtract a Latino voting bloc whose dependability to show up Election Day always has been shaky, and Clinton is no better than even in the state, with Obama gaining. To encourage this brown firewall, the Clinton campaign may be drifting into encouragement of brown vs. black racial conflict by condoning Latino racial hostility to the first African-American with a chance to become president.

[. . .]

Experienced California Democratic politicians doubt the validity of Clinton's double-digit polling lead in the state. At the heart of Obama's support are upper-income Democrats (in exceptional supply here) and young voters whose intentions are difficult to predict. Will the state's huge, currently passive college campuses erupt in an outpouring of Obama voters?

Another problem for pollsters is a California peculiarity. A registered independent who shows up at a polling place Feb. 5 and asks for a Republican ballot will be told, sorry, but the Republican primary is for registered Republicans only. But the voter then may take a ballot of the more permissive Democratic Party. How many will do this and then vote for Obama? The polls cannot predict.

Clinton's 39 percent against Obama's 27 percent in California's Field Poll released last week provides much less certainty than a 12-percentage margin normally would. With Clinton falling and Obama rising, it compares with her 40-point lead six months ago.

The demographics are most important. Clinton has dramatically lost support among blacks, trailing Obama 58 percent to 24 percent. It is a virtual dead heat among white non-Hispanics, 32 percent to 30 percent. Therefore, the 12-point overall lead derives from a 59 percent to 19 percent Clinton edge among Latinos.

In California, the Latino vote is notoriously undependable in actually voting, especially when compared with African-Americans. How the Clinton campaign deals with Hispanic voters is a sensitive matter, but sensitivity never has been a hallmark of the Clinton style.

Insensitivity was reflected in a recent issue of the New Yorker, when Clinton's veteran Latino political operative Sergio Bendixen was quoted as saying, "The Hispanic voter -- and I want to say this very carefully -- has not shown a lot of willingness to support black candidates."

That brief quote from an obscure politician has generated shock and awe in Democratic circles. It comes close to validating the concern that the Clinton campaign is not only relying on a brown firewall built on an anti-black base, but is reinforcing it. A prominent Democrat who has not picked a candidate this year told me, "In any campaign I have been involved in, Bendixen would have been gone."

But not in Hillary Clinton's. During the Jan. 15 debate prior to the Nevada caucuses, where the Latino vote was important, NBC's Tim Russert read the Bendixen quote and asked Clinton, "Does that represent the view of your campaign?" Her response was chilling: "No, he was making a historical statement."

Consider the above in the context of this article by Steven Malanga which is up on Front Page Magazine:

Terry Anderson is angry. From his KRLA-AM radio perch in Los Angeles, the black talk-show host thunders, “I have gone on the streets and talked to people at random here in the black community, and they all ask me the same question: ‘Why are our politicians and leaders letting this happen?’ ” What’s got Anderson—motto: “If You Ain’t Mad, You Ain’t Payin’ Attention”—so worked up isn’t the Jena Six or nooses on Columbia University doorknobs; it’s the illegal immigrants who allegedly murdered three Newark college students last August. And when he excoriates politicians for “letting this happen,” he’s directing his fire at Congressional Black Caucus members who support open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens. “Massive illegal immigration has been devastating to my community,” Anderson, a former auto mechanic and longtime South Central Los Angeles resident, tells listeners. “Black Americans are hit the hardest.”

Though blacks have long worried that the country’s growing foreign-born population, especially its swelling rolls of illegal immigrants, harmed their economic prospects, they have also followed their political leadership in backing liberal immigration policies. Now, however, as new waves of immigration inundate historically African-American neighborhoods, black opinion is hardening against the influx. “We will not lay down and take this any longer,” says Anderson. If he’s right, it could upend the political calculus on immigration.

Democrats in general and the Clintons in particular are banking on black stupidity to win them the upcoming election. There has only been one brief period in the entire history of the Democrat Party when it had the genuine best interests of black Americans in its heart. That was when the original civil rights legislation which ended Jim Crow was passed (and then Democrats weren't united on the issue). At all other times whether it was before the Civil War when Democrats supported slavery or after the Civil War when Democrats were supporting segregation to the latter phase of the Civil Rights Movement when Democrats were supporting the welfare laws which destroyed the black family and turned the inner city black neighborhoods into hell-holes of crime, drugs and violence the Democrat Party has preyed upon the black community like a malignant parasite.

It may be that now, as last, blacks are beginning to wake up to the fact that their so-called "leaders" are for the most part whores bought and paid for by the white left-wing power structure. Men and women who sell out their people for a place at the Democrat table of power.

Don't expect a great deal of movement in black voting patters at first. Blacks in America have been raised from birth to believe that America is a structurally racist country and that the Republican Party is the equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan. They have been taught everywhere from the politician's soap box to the minister's pulpit that black's only hope for survival in the US is to elect Democrats.

It is hard to break that kind of conditioning, but it is possible. If just 20% of the blacks who currently turn out to vote for Democrats in presidential elections were just to stay home on election day it would be impossible for a Democrat to be elected president. That is unless the left gets an amnesty bill passed and floods the electorate with tens of millions of new Democrat voters.