Open Letter to Future RNC Chairman: Re: Talk is Cheap

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Originally published in 2005

By Sherman T. Parker

Chairman Mehlman
Republican National Committee
310 First Street, SE
Washington, DC 20003

Re: Talk is Cheap

Dear Chairman Mehlman:

You and President Bush are spending a considerable amount of time talking to African-Americans, coining phrases such as the "party of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass." What does that mean if your only goal is to marginally break off the African-American vote? It is embarrassing and you are doing the African-American community a disservice. You are not creating a political infrastructure that competes with the Democratic party. Packing the podium with minority faces at Republican events is meaningless from a black perspective. The African-American voter is more sophisticated than that. The Republicans’ only budgeted one to two million dollars to reach black voters, (less than the cost to produce one Super Bowl ad). The fact that there are no major black elected policy makers serving in any state capitol, the United States Senate or the House of Representatives, leaves African-Americans no alternatives to the Democratics.

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that African-Americans began their defection from the GOP for economic reasons during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s social-welfare programs of the New Deal, thus becoming a reliable component of the big-city Democrat machines. The African-American embrace of the Democratic Party became even more prevalent during the 1960's; blacks voted overwhelmingly for Presidents' John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The black vote led to the sweeping civil rights programs, which transformed a nation.

While it is true in part, that Democrats were successful in the battle over African-American voters by presenting them a convincing message, that message may have never been received had it not been used in conjunction with the Democrat Party’s considerable effort to legitimize that message by electing African-Americans to office. Any electorate is naturally skeptical and distrusting of politicians and their promises. Given this, the objective of any candidate is to get the electorate to relate to the candidate on a personal level in order to gain their trust, and therefore trust their message. In electing African-Americans, Democrats gained messengers capable of relating to the communities that they were asked to persuade. Democrats drew majority African-American districts, raised money for African-American candidates, provided grassroots mechanisms, and advanced the stature of their African-American officials. Through the gain of African-American officials, these communities were also privy to the same political graft that was so prevalent in Democrat machine politics, which in turn, solidified support among their community leaders.

During the Great Depression, we saw the rise of African-American Democrats such as Adam Clayton Powell of New York and William Levi Dawson of Chicago in city halls and in Congress. Does anyone think Mayor Daley cared about African-Americans in Chicago? NO! Does anyone really think FDR cared about the problems African-Americans were facing in the South? If so, why didn’t President Roosevelt make one public statement or one speech pertaining to the disgraceful lynching of African Americans during his nearly four terms? The Democrats' focus was to keep a safe majority for the Democratic Party and to stay in power. During this period, the Republican Party took the African-American community for granted, because they were the party of the great African-American emancipator, Abraham Lincoln.

Part two: The Solution

Representative Sherman Parker represented part of St. Charles County (District 12) in the Missouri House of Representatives. He was the first African American elected to the Legislature from St. Charles County. He was elected to the House in November 2002 and was re-elected in 2004 with 73% of the vote. Sadly, on September 18th, 2008 at the age of 37, Mr. Parker died unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm.

Sarah Palin discusses media bias

This is an interesting video interview from Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood.

Did Prop. 8 pass by a landslide or did Obama barely squeak by?

The following commentary is from my good friend and fellow Red County Blogger, Mike Spence. He does a really good job of putting the Prop. 8 victory in persepctive.

Proposition 8 Did Better Than You Think.

The losers in the Prosotion 8 race have tried to portray their loss as a narrow one, caused by various boogeymen. (LDS Church, Black voters, etc...)

Ron Prentice of the California Family Council and ProtectMarriage.com compiled some statistics to put the win in context. Here are some of them:

The official Statement of the Vote has been released by the Secretary of State. Proposition 8 passed by a margin of 52.3% to 47.7%. Proposition 8 won by a margin of 600,000 votes: 7,001,084 to 6,401,483.

Prop. 8 received 2,150,000 MORE votes than did Arnold Schwarzenegger when he was reelected in 2006.

Prop. 8 received nearly 2 million MORE votes than Dianne Feinstein did when she was reelected to the US Senate in 2006.

Prop. 8 received 250,000 MORE votes than did John Kerry when he carried California in 2004.

Prop. 8 received 45,000 MORE votes than did Barbara Boxer in her landslide reelection to the U.S. Senate in 2004.

Prop. 8 passed with approximately the same percentage of the vote that Barack Obama received nationally.

So did Prop. 8 pass by a landslide or did Obama barely squeak by?

How Obama got elected (Video)

This video comes from a website called OneAngryMan.com .

I find it funny how little these Obama voters know about the candidates or their campaigns.

Normally I would dismiss stuff like this as juvenille propoganda. But the responses in this video are totally consistant with just about every encounter I had with Obama supporters.


The video's creator writes:

On the evening of November 4th, 2008 I along with millions of Americans were shocked that a man of Barack Obama’s extreme liberal positions and radical political alliances and policies could be elected President of the United States.

This is further proof that the news media, completely engrosed with Obama’s persona, simply refused to do their job.

Twelve Obama voters were interviewed extensively right after they voted to learn how the news media impacted their knowledge of what occurred during the campaign. These voters were chosen for their verbal abilities and willingness to express their opinions to a large audience. The video below seeks to provide some insight into which information broke through the news media clutter and which did not.

Is the Religious Right wrong for the GOP?

I knew it was only a matter of time before my fellow Republicans started taking pot shots at us religious conservatives; blaming us for the outcome of this most recent election. (See Kathleen Parker: Religious right threatens Republican Party's future)

Is it just me or wasn’t the man at the top of our ticket a guy who took great pride in the fact that he was not a member of the Christian right? And wasn’t his campaign run by folks like Steve Schmitt, who did everything possible to run their candidate as anything but a conservative Republican? Face it, this was the year of the “Moderate Republican” and they lost.

The only reason it was as close as it was, was because of the addition of Sarah Palin to the ticket. We all watched as crowds cheered, donors gave and volunteers flooded the campaign. Why were they doing this? It was because this young energetic PRO-LIFE, PRO-GUN, PRO-MARRIAGE, CONSERVATIVE woman was now on the ticket. Like her or not, Sarah Palin brought energy and excitement to this presidential election at levels her more moderate running mate could not. And had it not been for the conservative haters in the campaign undermining her at every turn, the ticket might have done even better.


But let’s be honest, considering the level of Obamania that swept the country and the media, an almost $1 billion war chest and a meltdown of the financial markets; Ronald Regan- heck, even Abraham Lincoln couldn’t have won. So, I don’t blame John McCain. But to blame religious conservatives for the state of our party is just plain wrong.

I believe that there are two primary culprits to this meltdown.

The first is Republicans not walking the talk. We claimed to be about smaller government, but the greatest expansion of government spending happened under our watch. We claim to be about family values, but we had leaders propositioning congressional pages and playing footsies in the men’s room. We claimed to be the party of “Ethics and Moral Values”, meanwhile members of our party are being run out of office (some to jail) under corruption charges. We claim to be a party who supports equality for all, but we can’t seem to find our way to some communities until we need their vote. To make a long story short, we lost because we governed like democrats.

The second culprit is the GOP infighting. Moderates blame conservatives, stating that the only way to win is to abandon our socially conservative principles and change the party platform. Then conservatives fire back, questioning the “Republicanism” of anyone who disagrees with them on anything. We become the proverbial circular firing squad shooting at each other instead of the Democrats. If we are to turn this around two things are going to have to happen. First, moderates need to stop attacking our conservative values. Conservatives make up the core to of the GOP's base. We are the meat and potatoes, moderates are the side dish. So, stop trying to change the platform. Likewise, conservatives must realize that not everyone is going to score 100% on the conservative values test. The party platform is the measuring stick we should use when judging our candidates. But we must also keep in mind that in some cases the perfect Republican candidate will not be the perfect Republican. Believe it or not, one can be a fiscal conservative and social moderate and still be convicted of being a Republican. In the infamous words of Mr. King (Rodney that is) “Can’t we all just get along?”


However, there is a silver lining to this rather dark cloud. The best solution for the syndrome that now ails the Republican party past has always been a Democratic administration. Nothing brings combatants together like a common enemy.

Let us not forget that Jimmy Carter helped us usher in the Regan Revolution. Then there was Bill Clinton’s liberal leadership, which led to the Contract With America. The election of Barack Obama could turn out to be best thing that could have happened to the GOP. That is, if we can learn to get along, govern according to our values and take a serious look at how we plan to attract new Republican voters.

So, what will Republican need to do to attract these new voters? We need to go to where they are; to get to understand their issues; and then, effectively communicate how our common conservative values can produce societal and public policy solutions to the challenges they face.

We have a lot of heavy lifting to do to rebuild our party. And if we are to be successful, it will not be as some sort of "Democrat-Lite" Party. "All the liberal values without the annoying tax increases." It will be because we have committed the resources necessary to build relationships with voters and have focused our message on shared values of family, opportunity and freedom as it applies to all Americans.

Speaker Bass decries racist comments by LGTB community

During an interview with the Sacramento Bee editorial staff, California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass commented on the “hostility” that the LGTB community has shown towards blacks after the passage of Prop 8, which defined marriage as being between a man and a woman.

During a videotaped interview, Bass told of how blacks who actually voted against the measure were confronted with “racial epithets” when they showed up to protest the vote. She went on to point out that some were so fearful they even left because “…they were threatened.”

The Speaker went on to say, “I was appalled at how quickly some members of the LGTB leadership went there…”

Well Madam Speaker, they did. But I understand your confusion. I too thought they were No on H8?

(I stand corrected!!!! The video is quoted correctly in the article. My apologies to the Sacramento Bee!.)

This Brotha has escaped the plantation!

Thank God! Someone else gets it!

Racist Cartoon has liberal roots

Well this is an iteresting twist!

It turns out that the "Obama Bucks" cartoon was actually created by a liberal blogger in an attempt to "to poke fun at the unrealistic fears and agenda of racism that a fringe element of Republicans strongly embrace."

Do you really buy this? Here are some other pictures on his site.

So what exactly is the social value of these pictures? Even in the context in which he places them in his blog, they do nothing more than promote racism.

I want to be clear.... The "Obama Bucks" cartoon is flat out racist. And the head of the Republican women's group that included it in her organizations newsletter was wrong as the day is long. There is not excuse to propigate such hatefilled material.

But this liberal blogger is just as wrong for creating and posting it as she was for reproducing and distributing it.

Racism is racim. From the right or the left, it is still wrong!