The Black Vote

Captain's Quarters has a great piece on the black vote. He says:

In pressuring their community to focus solely on the Democratic party, they have thrown away their options to play on both sides of the aisle. While Republicans would love to have an opportunity to attract more support especially from middle-class blacks who might appreciate the laissez-faire economic policies of the GOP, they traditionally receive little response for outreach efforts. Take the assertion towards the end of the article that Jesse Jackson makes of being "shut out" of the government:

More than ever, Jackson said, black Americans are primed to vote against a sitting president. "Bush has a closed-door policy on civil rights and labor," he said. "He has not met with the NAACP, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the Congressional Black Caucus, except for once, or organized labor. We don't have access to our government."

Jackson lied. George Bush met with the NAACP -- he spoke at their meeting in 2000 during his first campaign for president. In return, they produced a series of ads tying him to the dragging-death lynching of James Byrd, a particularly egregious campaign commercial that even some NAACP members questioned, especially since Texas enthusiastically prosecuted the murderers responsible and sentenced them to death. Now that the NAACP burned its bridges with Bush, Jackson complains that Bush doesn't want to walk across the smoking wreckage.

We need to stop being sheep.

Voting Themselves into Irrelevancy