I made the post below when I was annoyed and on my way out the door. Not that I don't completely stand by the sentiment expressed therein, but it could use a bit of explanation.
The ideas expressed by Tapped and Hesiod to me represent the worst kind of paternalistic liberalism that Democrats are often accused of. They presume to tell an interest group when it should pursue its agenda and what that agenda should be. While good advice can be just that - good advice - in this case it sounds like the kind of advice some of our right-leaning friends regularly give democrats generally. You know, "if only the democrats would pursue *these* policies, in *this* way, then maybe I would like them."
In addition, I wonder if those dispensing the advice really have a clue what, say, the NAACP's agenda is. One of the big myths in politics - widely disseminated and believed by those on the left and right - is that all organizations such as the NAACP are concerned with are affirmative action type programs. This is the story our media peddles. In fact, if one looks at the NAACP legislative scorecard, the one referred to in the Washington Post article, to see why Senators such as Lott and First receive an 'F,' one realizes that the NAACP agenda is pretty much the agenda of most in the Democratic party. Votes the NAACP used to make the scorecard included the Ashcroft confirmation, Title I funding for poor schools, reducing class sizes by providing federal money to hire teachers, school construction money, forcing full Pell grant and Head Start funding, the Senate Patients Bill of Rights, the confirmation of Robert Gregory, the extension of unemployment benefits, various election reform proposals, and increases in global AIDS funding.
These issues aren't exactly on the fringes, and nor are most of them explicitly about race - and definitely not explicitly about race-based affirmative action or quotas or anything like that. But, how they are about race is that many of the issues are ones in which there are current racial imbalances in public policy and spending. If the moment when the Senate Majority Leader steps down due to his embrace of the racist segregationist Thurmond campaign isn't the time for black politicians and the NAACP to point out that minorities are getting shafted disproportionately by imbalances in education funding, by election shenanigans, by inequities in the health care system, and by recent increases in unemployment (up from about 7.6% to 11% among African-Americans compared to 6% average) - when exactly is that time?
Both due to actual racism and simply the diminished political power of the less economically advantaged generally, the interest group the NAACP represents is getting shafted. Part of the reason they're getting shafted is that certain politicians link support of those policies with support of giving handouts to African-Americans, while pushing the apocryphal notion that the federal government is taxing the hell out of Mississippians to pay for Head Start programs for black kids in Chicago. Ditto unemployment benefits. Ditto medicaid. These politicians are the ones who make these issues about race, not the NAACP or the CBC .
And, rather than hiding in the back waiting to be called up to the podium, they should stand up and fight without expecting to be tut-tutted by the liberal punditocracy.
