Right Assails Diversity Staging at Obama Event
Over at the Weekly Standard, Michael Goldfarb takes the Obama campaign to task for deploying the "diversity police" during an appearance by Michelle Obama today at Carnegie Mellon University. But while the campaign staff's efforts to produce a multi-racial backdrop may have been ham-handed, they pale in comparison to the comic Republican attempts to create the illusion of any minority support at all.
As the university's student paper described it:
While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama's event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama...
..."I didn't know they would say, 'We need a white person here,'" said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. "I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn't know it would be so outright."
In response to the over-eager Obama campaign's attempt at politically-correct stage management, Goldfarb concluded, "The Obama campaign discriminates against people of color, and their own supporters no less, in what is presumably a misguided pander to white voters."
Of course, for the Republican Party, discriminating against people of color isn't a tactic, it's an essential strategy. And to be sure, when it comes to transparently pandering for the purposes of creating the appearance of diversity within its ranks, the GOP is unsurpassed.
Just ask the attendees of the 2000 Republican National Convention. Despite the fact that members of minority groups constituted only 6.3% of the delegates on the floor, African-American and Latino entertainers and speakers magically appeared in large numbers on stage. As CNN reported in the aftermath of the GOP convention:
"The largely white delegation and more racially diverse parade of speakers was compared in various punch lines to a Utah Jazz home game and Harlem's old Cotton Club with blacks on stage and whites in the audience."
It's no surprise George W. Bush won only 9% of the African-American vote in 2000.
Of course, by 2004, the Party of Lincoln was committed to doing better. Minority representation on the floor surged to 16.4% (compared to the Democrats' 39.1%). As J.C. Watts, an African-American and former Republican Congressman (R-OK) rightly noted, "If people see this as an election-year ploy, they will see it as having no substance." Which, of course, they did. Bush's share of the African-American vote barely moved to 11% in 2004; the gains made among black and Hispanic voters in 2004 were erased by 2006.
Then, of course, there's President Bush's own cynical approach to diversity. As part of his failed campaign to sell his Social Security privatization scheme, Bush on January 11, 2005 held a town hall meeting with a hand-picked audience to pitch the plan to African-Americans. Sadly, Bush's outreach quickly degenerated into stereotypes as he tried to sell black voters:
"Another interesting idea...is a personal savings account...which can't be used to bet on the lottery, or a dice game, or the track.
"Secondly, the interesting -- there's a -- African American males die sooner than other males do, which means the system is inherently unfair to a certain group of people."
And so it goes. The Republican Party is only too happy to display token quantities of minority voters at its own tightly scripted, stage managed venues. (John McCain, apparently, did not get the memo.) But as last year's NAACP, Univision and PBS events all revealed, Republican candidates are no-shows when confronting an agenda - and Americans - they don't control.
Back at the Weekly Standard, the likes of Michael Goldfarb will take their jabs at the Obama campaign over today's clumsy stage management. Meanwhile, the Republican National Committee is feverishly offering its candidates diversity training for the campaign against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, all in the hopes of avoiding the GOP's next Macaca moment.
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