The Idiocy of the Short Thinking Political Operative

Two weeks ago the cable news whores were all a twitter at a poll showing African Americans voting at the feeble but better rate of not quite 1 in 5. Today Jesse at Pandagon made a similar comment and Steve Gilliard does so in his inimitable fashion as well. Many others, from Atrios to Attaturk have posted on this subject.(wait, that doesn't sound like much of a range does it)

But let's look at yet another example of the GOP going out of its way to alienate African Americans. If you've read other blogs, and I think that pretty much means 100% of this blogs readers you know that in Detroit, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Milwaukee to cite a few, there have been ham-handed efforts to hold down the vote of African American laden districts. The stupidity of the effort is that they are done by bigots, who naturally assume that the flimsiest scheme will work in these communities, among voters that are frankly more sophisticated than at least 90% of the Republican base.

The GOP is going to be stuck at 10% or less of the African American vote for years because of crap like this. In fact, I would bet that for each of these operations in these communities, Bush lost a third of his small base and sent them out for Kerry, and got another few percentage points of non-voters to go to the polls and vote Democratic.

Someday, the GOP will learn that this bullshit is both racist and stupid -- fortunately for Democrats that day seems to be a long way off.