The unspoken racial factor
Florida's Democratic senatorial candidate is black, and this matters
The unspoken racial factor
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Now that Florida Gov. Charlie Crist has officially decided to bolt the Republican party and run for the U.S. Senate this fall as an independent, thereby transforming that race into a fascinating three-way free-for-all, political scribes are naturally speculating this morning about his prospects for victory in November. I actually covered a lot of that ground eight days ago, when Crist was busy mulling his move, so I won't repeat myself now. Nor will I focus on conservative Republican Marco Rubio, the tea party favorite whose Senate candidacy has essentially driven the politically moderate Crist right out of the GOP.
Instead, let's talk today about Crist's likely Democratic opponent, Kendrick Meek. More specifically, let's talk about the key aspect of Meeks's candidacy that very few observers seem willing to discuss:
He's black.
There. How hard was that?
This morning, The New York Times analyzed all three candidates, listing their biggest advantages and their biggest challenges. Inexplicably, while discussing Meek's challenges, The Times mentioned only that he's barely known statewide (he's a congressman from the Miami area), and that he'll need a ton of cash to hike his name ID in the far-flung Florida media markets - but wrote not a word about his race.
Yet that happens to be Meek's biggest challenge, for this reason alone:
Since the Reconstruction era of the 1870s, the number of southern blacks elected to the U.S. Senate is exactly zero.
Below the Mason-Dixon line, black Democratic candidates typically fail to win statewide elections. In recent times, three well-qualified blacks have sought Senate seats, only to come up short: Ron Kirk in Texas (he lost in 2002 to John Cornyn), Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee (he lost in 2006 to Bob Corker), and Harvey Gantt in North Carolina (he lost in 1990 and 1996 to Jesse Helms). Indeed, only three blacks - Republican Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, and Illinois Democrats Carol Mosley Braun and Barack Obama - have been elected to the Senate since Reconstruction ended more than 130 years ago.
(It should be noted that Meek is not yet the official Democratic nominee. He first needs to win a party primary, but his sole rival is real estate billionaire Jeff Greene - best known perhaps for tapping Mike Tyson to be best man at his wedding, and for allowing hooker madame Heidi Fleiss to live at his house for a year. Greene also made big money by shorting subprime mortgages. Meek is expected to win the primary.)
Black candidates tend to fare much better in House races - roughly nine percent of all current House members are black - because those districts have large minority populations. Running statewide is very different, especially in the south, and there's no point in denying the potential racial factor even in pluralistic Florida. Indeed, Jesse Helms infamously exploited the factor when he ran against Gantt; in 1990, Helms ran a TV ad depicting a pair of white hands crumpling a job application, coupled with the on-screen assertion that Gantt supported racial quotas. And in the '06 Tennessee Senate race, Harold Ford was ambushed at the eleventh hour by a GOP ad that featured a winking white woman saying "Harold, call me!"
The Florida race won't feature such crude race-baiting, and a decent case can be made that Meek could break the southern jinx merely by mobilizing the Democratic base and prevailing in a three-way contest with 34 percent of the vote. But it wouldn't be a shock if many white swing voters and white conservative Democrats ultimately decide that they feel more comfortable with Charlie Crist.
I'm not suggesting that race is the sole factor in a voter's decision. Nor am I implying that most white voters are subconsciously racist. I'm just noting the historical record, and suggesting that what is past may well be prologue. At minimum, it's simply nuts to ignore this factor in the Florida race, and the potential challenge it poses for Kendrick Meek.
liberal: What's the difference between facts and agreed-upon facts? Are the latter more factual than facts? By the way, and educated type like yourself would know the education system you criticize is mostly run by liberals and labor unions. I think that may be an agreed upon fact.— jmc
It doesn't matter any way, Rubio is up by 7 points in a 3 way race. The tide in this election is that Independents and conservatives are going to restore some balance to our government. Amusing that Polman needs to inform everyone of Meeks race. I guess issues do not matter to the left. How soon we forget that Obama won the blue state of Florida the last time around. Southern jinx? VA and FL in 2008 blows that out of the water- Liberal- you said from the previous blog " Newspapers are in trouble not because they are too left wing; right wing publications are not doing well either. Not to be too broad-brush about this, I think they're in trouble because people are becoming too uneducated and dumb to read a paper and understand what's going on."................... public education is failing? I could have a field day with these remarks. The reason newspapers are in trouble is because of the internet. The paper is going the way of the typewriter and the buggywip. It's not the end of journalism just the downsizing of print media. Except on the internet the left doesn't have a monopoly on the news. And that drives the left nuts. It's hilarious!
- How is this article playing the race card? And what does that even mean - that he's mentioning race? Get over it. Race is an important political issue. Of course a political commentator is going to discuss it. And if you're tired of these articles, tough sh*t. The issue isn't going away because you're tired of it.— p-diddy
- FormerGOPer- On December 23, 2008, WTI crude oil spot price fell to US$30.28 a barrel. Today the price of barrel of oil is $86.15. You better drill baby drill because it is reflected in everything you purchase. Won't be too long and we'll be seeing the sad stories of people who have to choose between filling up their car or buying food.
- Smike. First - we need to get a drilling program in place ( this oil rig problem was a disaster but we'll have to see if it was preventable) But, drilling isn't going to keep us in cheap oil. We are swimming in it now. It's being driven by dollar value. Even Lundberg ( more a spokesman for Big Oil) doesn't make the claim the supply/demand is working here. If we find huge deposits within our control, it will go to the world market. The only way we'll control it is in a time of war.— JimR
- I agree with what most of what you said P-diddy but why does race have to be an important issue? I could only see it being important if you believe one race is better suited to govern than others. Since I don't believe that a person's color makes any difference, I don't see how it matters. Frankly, I'd rather not know (what I consider to be) trival things about a candidate, including his race.— James TL
- JimR- You know the left will use this to push their anti drilling agenda. And that affects world prices. Alternative energy?? Does it even exist? We talk a lot about it but I keep seeing the cars and trucks filling up on gas and diesel. My point is stop acting as if there is any viable alternative. Smart Cars? There is nothing " Smart " about a " Smart " car- one accident and you're dead and I'm pretty sure they use fossil fuel as well. With a booming population we will never conserve our way towards energy independence or less fuel consumption. Not happening and it aint gonna happen. Drill baby drill!
- Of course I realize that many people find a candidate's race to be important so of course a reporter would bring up the fact. I just hope that someday all of this racial nonsense would just go away. We have far more important things to worry about in this world.— James TL
- JamesTL- We wish the left would drop the race issue.
- No additional drilling will be authorized until its determined what happened aboard the rig, owned by Transocean Ltd., White House senior Advisor David Axelrod said today on ABC’s “Good Morning America........... Brilliant! Saudi Arabai, Venezuela, Iran and the rest of the oil producing world that hates us thanks you Mr. President. Can you say Oil back over $ 100 per barrel?
- Listen Mr Polman, in today's post-racial society we do not speak of a person's race. You have just set race relations back 40 years.— pic man
- Liberals will drop the race issue when racists drop the race issue. I'd like to give you righties the benefit of the doubt about your belief that we have a color-blind society, but things keep happening in the real world. And please note, I am not saying that a right-winger who believes we have a color-blind society is a racist. No, he is a well-intentioned naive person. And i'm fed up with the false indignation by republicans who complain that bringing up the race issue is an accusation that all republicans are racists. As they well know, we are simply saying that the far right tolerates racists and lacks zeal in running them out of their various organizations. We may be wrong about this, but we expect you to respond to the actual accusation, not the false one that you assert is our point.— liberal
- swede--you are probably right about our energy future, but it's not a pretty picture.— liberal
- To say that liberals run the schools is nonsense. How many liberals are on local school boards around the country? Take Texas, for example. Or Central PA, where i was educated. The big problem with our schools is bad educational policy that keeps perpetuating itself, decade after decade. Unfortunately, the privatization, charter-school and voucher movements, whatever administrative improvements they make, seem to accept this bad policy without challenge. (In general, the bad policy I refer to is educating for "performance"--which means nothing-- instead of knowledge). As long as a privatized school keeps the same kind of curriculum, it is unlikely to do a better job.— liberal
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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