Can playing 'slavery card' win Iowa for Cain?
OPINION - While Mr. Cain plays up his blackness to the glee of many large GOP primary crowds, the faces in those crowds are overwhelmingly white...
I totally get it now. It can’t be mentioned enough that Republican presidential “candidate” Herman Cain had a lucrative gig as a motivational speaker for many years
In that context, everything he says about himself can be viewed as a positive affirmation, the kind that people say to themselves in the mirror every morning hoping to turn them into a reality. This morning Mr. Cain said, “You will win the black vote!”
Sorry to break it to Mr. Cain but no you can’t.
That isn’t stopping Cain from making the big pitch in Iowa over the weekend, sending out mailers asserting he has the black vote on lock and therefore can beat President Obama next fall.
Cain playing the “more authentically black than President Obama” card again said, ”[As] a descendant of slaves I can lead the Republican party to victory by garnering a large share of the black vote, something that has not been done since Dwight Eisenhower garnered 41 percent of the black vote in 1956.”
Well, I guess that depends on what Mr. Cain means by “a large share of the black vote,” because recent polls just flat out prove him wrong. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll has Obama getting 93 percent of the black vote with Cain getting only 6 percent. To compare, even President George W. Bush got 11 percent of the black vote which aided him in his re-election victory in 2004.
While Mr. Cain plays up his blackness to the glee of many large GOP primary crowds, the faces in those crowds are overwhelmingly white. Cain’s shtick and Negro spiritual singing may be a hit with late night comics but it is not resonating with many black voters. Why? Because Cain’s policy positions don’t resonate with many black voters. And that’s the more important point.
Some political commentators like to make the claim that President Obama won in 2008 because of black voters. Furthermore, the claim is also made that black voters supported Obama because he’s also black.
And while the black vote certainly helped solidify Obama’s support within his Democratic base voters, it is both false that black voters won the election in 2008 and that black voters voted for the black guy because he’s black.
President Obama’s support was strong but so was President Bill Clinton’s who won 84 percent of the black vote in 1996 and 83 percent in 1992.
Mr. Cain’s idea of what is or is not authentically black and thus will resonate in that voting black is completely off base. Black voters traditionally are loyal to party over skin color. Policy over pigmentation.
It’s also unclear what purpose this Cain “campaign” mailer has in the less than colorful neighborhoods of Des Moines, Iowa especially given the makeup of GOP primary voters but it’s also possible that Cain simply wants to use up his fundraising dollars and pivot the conversation away from sexual harassment and Libya.
