Ethnics Want to Be More Than Just Another Ingredient in America’s Political Stew

There was a time in American presidential politics when courting the ethnic vote was simple. Gangling senators from Midwestern farm states would don yarmulkes and wolf down blintzes on New York’s Lower East Side, or would put on outsized sombreros and address crowds at fiestas in Southern California. More substantively, the campaign for what the GOP referred to as the “nationalities vote” might be a speech praising the freedom-loving qualities of some Baltic homeland or calling for most-favored-nation status for Poland.

But with the nomination phase of the 1988 presidential campaign less than half completed, it is clear that the gastronomic and symbolic phase of ethnic politics is over: The ethnics want one of their own.

Jesse Jackson’s showing in Illinois on Tuesday is the most obvious example. That he was able to capture 91% of the black vote shows a major element of the Democratic electorate cohering around a single candidate. Jackson, however, was able to capture only one in 15 white voters in Illinois. What we see in Jackson’s effort is not so much a conventional presidential campaign as it is an explosion of racial pride.

And while Michael S. Dukakis’ appeal in the electorate is far broader, it was estimated recently that almost one-quarter of his campaign contributions came from Greek-Americans.

The origin of ethnic candidacies can be found in the election of 1928, in which the Democrats nominated New York Gov. Alfred E. Smith, an Irish Catholic whose emphatic New York style often was as much of a liability as his religion. In losing to Herbert Hoover, Smith laid the groundwork of the great Roosevelt victory in 1932 by reactivating the Democratic loyalties of Irish-American voters. These voters had been politically passive since 1896, when the party’s choice had been William Jennings Bryan--an agrarian fundamentalist for whom ethnic urbanites had little taste.

It is sometimes forgotten what an incredible thrill of group pride went through Irish-Americans when John F. Kennedy became President. Kennedy’s candidacy stemmed temporarily the drift of Irish-Americans to the Republican Party, and even brought back conservative Irish Catholic voters who had, largely for ethnic reasons, supported Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy.

Because of the concentration of Catholics in states having large numbers of electoral votes, the Kennedy reconversions to the party more than offset the defections of Southern Protestants. But what those defections also illustrated was the downside of candidacies that were so heavily based on ethnic passions: They often called for countervailing hostilities, often from other minorities.

Jesse Jackson’s negatives are shockingly high. A third of Democratic voters find him unacceptable to be the party’s nominee, and almost half of them feel negatively about him. The nomination of Jackson, moreover, would achieve what no other political event has been able to accomplish--the defection of a majority of Jewish voters to the Republicans. Despite Jackson’s efforts to make amends for the lamentable statement attributed to him in 1984, he is the most polarizing figure in American politics since George C. Wallace.

But it would be a mistake to assume that the same people who find Jackson unsupportable would feel the same way about a Rep. William Gray (D-Pa.) or a Mayor Tom Bradley of Los Angeles, who share neither Jackson’s history of insensitivity nor his distinctive revivalist style.

We’re going to see a great deal more of this new ethnic politics at the national level as more minority or immigrant groups use the presidential selection process to acquire badges of political sovereignty. Before the end of the century we will see the emergence of more Latino contenders for statewide or national offices. The first Mexican-American elected governor of California will automatically be mentioned as a presidential possibility--not only because of the importance of Latino votes but also because of what those votes represent in the three states that must be won to capture the presidency: Florida, Texas and California. Asian-Americans as a group will also be feeling their political muscle by the end of the century, and they, too, are located strategically.

Paying off ethnic groups for their political support with bits of cherished policy or a Supreme Court appointment may no longer be sufficient after 1988. Being on the ticket may be the homage that needs to be paid to a group’s political arrival.

If they can avoid jarring an American electorate that does not reject novelty so much as it treats it with caution, these future candidates will be received at least as well as Smith, Kennedy or Dukakis. It will be a mark of our political maturity when the first Latino candidate for President is suffered to endure successive meals of souvlakia, knishes and hoppin’ john.