Reaching Out

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 30, 2001 | by Hans S. Nichols

Looking ahead to the 2004 presidential election, Republicans know they must convince Americans of all backgrounds that they are precious in the GOP's sight.

With the June round of polling showing President George W. Bush's approval ratings falling to as low as 50 percent, many Washington pundits began drafting eulogies for the Bush administration. Never mind that at this stage in his presidency Bill Clinton was at a shaky 46 percent. According to columnist Bob Novak, Bush was in any case unfazed, joking with an aide, "What's all this NBC/Wall Street Journal poll B.S.?"

So why isn't Bush panicking into warp-speed fund raising as Clinton did? For starters, Bush's approval rating among Hispanics (59 percent) is higher than his numbers from non-Hispanic whites (58 percent), according to one poll. To sources at the Republican National Committee (RNC), this is evidence that Dubya's plan to expand his base and appeal to minority groups is working just fine.

"We see the most potential in blacks, Asians, Hispanics and Catholics because when you break it down on issues, all those groups should be natural constituencies of the Republican Party," says Ana Gamonal, spokeswoman for the RNC. Other concerted efforts will be made to convey Bush's message of compassionate conservatism to Americans of Asian and Arab backgrounds, as well as to the high-tech community.

"As Republicans, we make millions of impressions a day. We need to think intuitively about how our words are received by that poor, single African-American mom," says Elroy Sailler, a senior aide to House Republican Conference Chairman J.C: Watts of Oklahoma. Watts has launched a "Full Impact Strategy," to help colleagues deliver the GOP message directly to voters.

Sailler (whose wife works in the White House Office of Public Liaison) tells Insight that Watts' Capitol Hill effort is being coordinated with the White House at the "highest levels." And new positions are being created in various House and Senate nodes to ensure that congressional policy complements the urgencies of electoral politics. "For far too long the perception has been that Republicans don't care about the little man," Sailler says. The Full Impact Strategy will attempt to manage perceptions better, he says, because "this simply isn't the case."

Sailler clarifies, "We're not talking about changing our positions or creating new policies to benefit a black person, a red person or a brown person. We don't think like that." Look instead, for example, for the GOP to talk about how its agricultural and tax policy can help some 20,000 black farmers.

In a related effort, Watts also has created a working group with 15 presidents of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU). In the budget Bush sent to Congress, he requested $1.4 billion over five years for HBCUs. And when Bush spoke to the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Detroit on June 25 to revitalize his faith-based initiative, he told his mostly Democratic audience: "I'm extremely proud to announce that Rosa Parks, a monumental figure in the civil-rights movement, has endorsed the initiative."

But for all his efforts to woo black voters, there still is "deep-seeded opposition to this president's agenda," White House spokesman Tucker Eskew tells Insight. "We didn't do very well in the last election," Eskew euphemizes of the president's attraction of only 9 percent of the African-American vote in 2000. Larry Sabato, professor of political science at the University of Virginia, calls Bush's efforts at black outreach "purely hopeless," largely due to "Florida fallout." Sabato tells Insight: "I've never seen such a large group of voters so determined not to give a new president a chance."

Even so, with his experience as prologue, Bush has reason to expect improvement. In his first gubernatorial election in Texas, he won just 15 percent of the black vote. Four years later, his support nearly doubled to 27 percent. GOP operatives say it was Bush's potential for appeal to black voters that explains the viciousness of the attack ads against him in the last round. A senior House Republican aide tells Insight, "The NAACP's advertisements that essentially blamed Bush for the death of James Byrd," an African-American victim of racial malice in Texas, were not only false but "below the belt." They show "how scared Democrats are about Bush's potential."

Bush's approval ratings among African-Americans now are in the high 30s, which is a striking turnaround from the postelection numbers. As House Republican Conference spokesman Kevin Schweers points out, "At least that's better than 9 percent."

Is the Bush White House really making progress with black voters? In a special June election to replace the late congressman Norman Sisisky, Republicans made a concerted effort to reach African-American voters, who constitute nearly 40 percent of Virginia's 4th District. The GOP candidate, Randy Forbes, won the traditionally Democratic seat with 52 percent of the vote against an able black Democrat.