Look Who's Race-Baiting Now

...And in Tennessee, the increase was from 13 percent to 18 percent, though the state still supported Bush over its native son, Gore...

...The black political infrastructure came together," says the University of Maryland's Ron Walters, who served as a top aide in Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign...

...In just four months, it spent approximately $10 million to build an organization spanning 13 states...

...Control of Congress hinges on it, and the White House may, too...

...But this is somewhat misleading, because in some states the increase was considerable and impacted Senate races...

...The call was to thank Joyner for his help in getting voters registered and motivating them to go to the polls...

...Clinton, though out of the spotlight, also did what he could to boost black enthusiasm for Gore...

...In one, the narrator said, "We know we have a long way to go to gain your trust," and in another a voice said, "Look, we know what you think Republicans are like...

...Its officials worked in conjunction with representatives of Black Entertainment Television, who visited 37 historically black colleges over nine weeks to energize voters, and with rap impresario Russell Simmons, who launched a mobilization effort called Rap the Vote...

...And a flier headlined "Stopped Again...

...But we're working hard to show you who we really are...

...Had George W. Bush won even 12 percent of the black vote—the rough average for GOP presidential candidates in recent elections—he would have walked away with Florida, and perhaps some other states as well...

...pictured a black motorist handing his driver's license to a policeman, accompanied by the claim that "George W. Bush says the U.S...

...And on Election Day, the National Voter Fund's field staff knocked on doors and offered voters rides to the polls...

...It's much more powerful than ever before...

...According to David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black-oriented think tank, there's never been as big an effort to mobilize black voters as there was this year...

...In Missouri, the increase was from 5 percent to 12 percent, contributing another Democratic victory, that of the late Mel Carnahan, defeating John Ashcroft...

...Complementing these ads were a series of telephone calls to one million black households...

...Two years ago, Democrats scored upset victories in gubernatorial races in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama thanks to a major mobilization effort overseen by a little-known Democratic operative named Donna Brazile...

...Bush won the state's white voters 51 percent to 45 percent, but thanks to heavy black turnout lost the total vote by 17 percentage points...

...While touching on a number of issue-oriented themes, like school choice, the ads also candidly acknowledged the party's low standing among blacks...

...BY MATTHEW REES ON THE EVENING of November 15, Al Gore took a break from wrangling over the election outcome to telephone the country's highest-rated black radio host, Tom Joyner...

...Gore's gratitude is understandable...

...And this was no last-minute appeal to a group he'd ignored...

...He appeared on the Tom Joyner show a few days before the election and touted Gore as "the next best thing" to himself (the comment undoubtedly helped Gore with blacks, though privately Gore's aides winced...

...Mobs, guns, and Jim Crow...

...It was their first interview since the election...

...So grateful was Gore that when Joyner asked if he'd come on his radio show the next morning, Gore not only agreed, but put Tipper on the air as well...

...And Bush finished with just 9 percent of the black vote, prompting Democratic pollster Ron Lester to say, "He lost ground as black voters got to know him...

...number of key states, including Florida, but 90 percent of blacks voted for Gore, the highest black support for a presidential candidate since Lyndon Johnson received 94 percent in 1964 (even Bill Clinton received only 84 percent four years ago...

...Given Brazile's prominence, and Gore's need to generate a high black turnout, it was unsurprising that he visited three black churches the weekend before the election...

...Similar activities were undertaken by groups like the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, which toiled in 83 cities, in 29 states, to register 100,000 voters and encourage turnout...

...But some other National Voter Fund materials were equally mendacious...

...But Jackson, who's always been more interested in TV time than the nuts and bolts work of politics, did little to boost turnout...

...The outcome was nonetheless exasperating for Republican officials...

...Without the efforts of Joyner and a number of other black advocates, he would certainly have lost the election...

...Members of the Congressional Black Caucus, a group not known for successful voter mobilization efforts, sponsored a two-week bus tour to a number of contested congressional districts...

...As for the Republican National Committee, it spent over $1 million on black radio ads, but it's not clear they had much impact...

...Four of them were from telemarketers urging people to vote, while two were taped messages, from Joyner and Clinton...

...In Florida, the black percentage of the total electorate rose from 10 percent four years ago to 15 percent this year, which all but guaranteed the victory of Democrat Bill Nelson over Republican Bill McCollum...

...Nationally, blacks were 10 percent of the electorate, about the same as four years ago...

...During the campaign, Gore appeared before blacks far more often than any other racial or ethnic group or special-interest lobby...

...Maryland is an extreme example of the race problem facing Republicans...

...And the Republicans...

...Ropes, dogs, lies, and hoses...

...His favorability rating among blacks was 43 percent last year, according to a Joint Center poll, but fell to 29 percent this year...

...It included many of the usual suspects, like Jesse Jackson, who boasted after the election, "It's the most I've ever really campaigned...

...It did this through a variety of radio and television ads, direct-mail pieces, and literature drops...

...all but blamed Bush for her father's death at the hands of white racists, received considerable criticism...

...Not only was black turnout up in a Matthew Rees is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...This is the second election in a row in which Republicans have fared considerably worse than expected, and on both occasions one reason has been higher-than-expected black turnout...

...Bush appeared before a number of black audiences, though that may have been as much to soothe the conscience of GOP moderates as it was to win over blacks...

...government shouldn't do anything about racial profiling...

...In these capacities, she helped neutralize Bill Bradley's effort to win over black voters, who loom large in the Democratic presidential primaries, and in the general election she directed a campaign to boost black registration and voting...

...And he did not seem to get any credit for having Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as top advisers...

...Clinton also had 150 black political leaders to the White House on October 27 to sing Gore's praises (and his own), and visited a number of black churches in the final weeks of the campaign...

...Instead, most of the credit goes to a recently created arm of the NAACP called the National Voter Fund...

...Precisely what Republicans can do to offset the advantage Democrats enjoy from massive black turnout is unclear, but they better figure it out soon...

...It was before a black audience that he said Bush had pledged to appoint "strict constructionists" to the courts, and that strict constructionists had once considered each black three-fifths of a person...

...One radio ad said, "There are many ways intimidation was, and still is, used to keep African Americans from voting...

...For her efforts, she was named Gore's political director last year, and was later promoted to campaign manager...

...Ostensibly nonpartisan, the effort was in fact an adjunct of the Gore campaign, concentrating its activity and advertising in swing states—something the IRS may want to investigate in a Bush administration, hints New York Post columnist Michael Meyers...

...Another radio ad ripped into Texas for supposedly spending more money on prisons than schools, and urged listeners to contact Bush about it...

...It began by registering voters—207,000 in all—and then turned its attention to demonizing Bush, who as late as mid-July was the choice of 17 percent of blacks in a national NBC/Wall Street Journal poll...

...There's this huge monolithic voting bloc that will absolutely not consider any kind of Republican position on issues," Richard Bennett, Maryland's GOP chairman, told the Baltimore Sun after the election...

...He also pandered in the worst way...

...One of the television ads, in which the daughter of James Byrd Jr...