by Clarence Page

President Barack Obama's election has inspired a record number of African-American candidates to run for Congress this year. What's surprising is that they're running as Republicans.

Say what? Have President Obama's approval ratings been that shaky? Not quite. At this point we're talking about African Americans who merely have thrown their bonnets in the ring for the Republican nomination in their districts. Political oddsmakers don't give many of them much of a chance to win.

That's not something I celebrate, since I believe, as many of these candidates do, that black voters would benefit from having both parties competing for black support, along with that of other Americans. But since the Grand Old Party's conservative turns in the 1960s and 1980s, many African Americans don't feel they left the party of Abraham Lincoln as much as the party left them.

Many still hope Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele can help close that gap, if he can settle some embarrassing questions about his office's spending priorities. They include a famous tab that Steele says he didn't know about for nearly $2,000 at a leather-themed topless nightclub in California. I wonder if the club's dancers receive health care benefits.

Ironically, exasperated Republican insiders tell me, Steele probably would have been gone by now if the party didn't have such a severe shortage of Republicans-of-color in key positions.

Republican leaders these days find themselves in the awkward position of trying to reach out to nonwhites without calling attention to race. They favor a color-blind society as a policy position and oppose affirmative action "quotas." Yet they are not comfortable with looking increasingly like a white party, especially when they have to go up against the country's first black president on issues.

At latest count, 33 African Americans are running for Republican nominations to Congress, according to the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a two-year old organization founded by chairman Timothy F. Johnson, vice chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party. That's the highest number of black Republican congressional candidates since Reconstruction, the foundation's leaders believe.

The bad news in this story is that none of the 33 is considered at this point to be a favorite to win. Nevertheless, they point out, Obama was a long shot, too. "I think we're going to see some surprises this year," said Johnson, who expects at least five to be contenders. "It depends on how many of the 33 get nominated."

Indeed, nominations count, and black Republican congressional nominations actually have been falling off in recent years, according to David Bositis, senior research associate at the black-oriented Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

In the twenty years that he has been tallying those numbers, Bositis has seen black Republican congressional nominees rise from 11 in 1990 to 23 in the 1994 and 2000 races, then fall off to 10 in 2002, 15 in 2004, and only 9 in 2006 and 2008.

Republicans usually don't usually have much competition for their party's nomination in black districts, where Democratic primaries usually decide who serves more than the general election does. The only two black Republican congressmen since the 1930s, J.C. Watts from Oklahoma from 1995 to 2003, and Gary Franks of Connecticut, who served 1991 to 1997, came from racially and politically mixed districts.

One who is receiving serious attention after raising serious money is Florida's Allen West, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and highly decorated Iraq war veteran. Sarah Palin has endorsed him, and the National Republican Congressional Committee has included him in their Young Guns program for candidates who have shown superior fundraising ability.

West resigned with full benefits after an investigation for allegedly harsh interrogation of an Iraqi police officer that included firing a pistol near the suspected insurgent's head. He's an underdog against Democratic incumbent Ron Klein, but he's hoping for an Obama-backlash-year upset.

As a tea party-supporting conservative, West illustrates how far right the GOP has swung since the 1970s when Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke was the party's only black member of Congress. Today's GOP looks like the party of tea parties and Sarah Palin, appealing to its right-wing base in a way that makes many moderates uncomfortable. West already is drawing lots of support from the tea party wing. But he needs to reach out to the middle, too. So does his party.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

 

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