Black, White, Brown and Atwater : Static on the Party Lines

The new chairman of the Republican Party is a Southern white. Earlier this month, the Democrats chose a black man who grew up in Harlem to be national chairman. The racial polarization of U.S. politics appears complete.

Except for one thing: Both party chairmen have expressed a determination not to exploit racial tensions. “I promise you, my chairmanship will not be about race,” Ronald H. Brown told the Democratic National Committee after he was elected. “It will be about the races we win.”

Lee Atwater, the new GOP chairman, started a “minority outreach” program for black voters. “Affirmative action has worked, and there’s now a much larger black middle class,” Atwater said. “The time is right for us to reach out to them.”

In fact, Brown is a good example of the black voter Atwater is trying to reach. Brown rose to power in the white world. He came from the black middle class and went to elite, predominantly white schools. In Washington, Brown worked as a high-level aide for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). He became an influential Democratic Party operative and, eventually, a powerful lawyer and lobbyist.

Atwater assumes the GOP can appeal to successful blacks like Brown through economic interest. He may discover that most have a keenly developed sense of racial interest. A study by the University of Chicago reveals that successful young blacks still have difficulty finding housing in predominantly white suburbs. That is a racial problem, not an economic one.

What will Brown’s selection as chairman mean for the Democratic Party? If you believe, as many do, that Jesse Jackson represents the Democrats’ biggest problem, then Brown is in a good position to deal with it. Having served as Jackson’s convention manager in 1988, Brown has his support and confidence.

Moreover, if you assume, as many do, that the Democrats can never win the presidency if they put Jackson on the ticket, then Brown’s election allows the Jackson movement to claim a tangible success. Of course Jackson is one of the most controversial figures in U.S. politics, and some of that will rub off on Brown. Jewish voters--and contributors--have problems with Jackson, but so far they don’t seem to have any with Brown.

Brown joined the Jackson campaign late and is not known to share Jackson’s views on Israel or on black-Jewish relations. Brown is more closely identified with Kennedy and organized labor--associations that do not bother most Jews. But they do not help among white Southerners. It can be argued that U.S. politics has become dominated by race. In the last three presidential elections, black voters went 9-1 for the Democratic ticket while the Democrats failed to win more than 40% of the white vote.

At the same time, both parties have an incentive to resist “the racial temptation.” For the Democrats, it is a matter of survival. As Brown said, “America happens to be a majority white country.” Republicans risk offending a large proportion of their base--educated upper-middle-class voters who like GOP fiscal conservatism--if the party’s image becomes overtly racist.

Does racial politics work? That is the political question of 1989. Race will be the principal issue in mayoral contests in the nation’s three largest cities and an important Southern gubernatorial election. It is also the main problem facing both parties’ leadership.

The first and most dramatic test comes in Chicago, where racial politics is a tradition. The Feb. 28 Democratic primary pits a black incumbent, Acting Mayor Eugene Sawyer, against Richard M. Daley, son of the legendary “Boss” Richard J. Daley who ruled City Hall for 21 years.

Chicago’s first black mayor, the late Harold Washington, was elected in 1983 because of a split in the white vote. Now, Daley is favored to win because of a split in the black vote. Many black activists were outraged when Sawyer, an organization Democrat, was chosen mayor through the support of white aldermen. Chicago’s “movement” blacks are backing Timothy C. Evans, a black alderman who will run as the candidate of the “Harold Washington Party” in the April 4 general election.

“In Chicago elections,” a political consultant once said, “the only real issue is how a few thousand Jews plan to vote”--a cynical comment on the dominance of racial politics. The rule in Chicago is that black voters--about 40% of the electorate--vote for the black candidate. Working- and lower-middle-class whites--another 40%--vote for the white candidate. So the election is decided by the “lake-front liberals,” the upper-middle-class, heavily Jewish voters along Lake Michigan.

The rule may not hold true this year. Daley has been courting black voters, saying, “I don’t want to be mayor for half the people.” In fact, his father survived on a multiracial coalition. Machine politics was never “us against them”; it was always “something for us and something for them.” Polls show Daley winning 17%-19% of the black vote in the primary.

Moreover, the lake-front liberals are swinging heavily to Daley. Jewish voters were angered last year because Sawyer was reluctant to fire an aide who made inflammatory anti-Semitic statements.

Many Chicago blacks are distressed by the prospect of losing the mayoralty to a white--one named Daley at that. A racial Brezhnev Doctrine seems to dominate the thinking of some Chicago blacks: Once the city has fallen under black rule, it cannot be allowed to return to white control.

But to everyone’s surprise, racial politics has as yet failed to dominate the primary campaign. The real test will come in the April general election, however. Brown has said he will support Daley if he wins the Democratic primary. Jackson has not. Evans claims to be the legitimate heir to Washington. And Washington, who claimed victory in 1983 by declaring “Now it’s our turn,” was a successful practitioner of racial politics.

Brown seemed to have much more trouble pledging his support for New York Mayor Edward I. Koch if he wins the Democratic nomination for a fourth term this September. When asked about Koch, Brown said his support would “probably include all legitimate Democrats” who win Democratic primaries.

Koch clashed with Jackson during the New York presidential primary last year. More than a few people speculated that Koch attacked Jackson to provoke the black community into running a black candidate against him.

The theory was that Koch could beat a black in a citywide primary, whereas a white liberal with black support might give him trouble. That theory will be tested in this year’s Democratic primary. Koch will have a black opponent, Manhattan Borough President David N. Dinkins. Dinkins is a low-key politician with a record as a compromiser and conciliator.

Dinkins says he will appeal to black voters as an ethnic rather than a racial politician. What’s the difference? Dinkins explains: “Of course some people will vote for one of their own. An Italian will vote for an Italian, Jews will vote for a Jew, blacks will vote for a black. I see that as racial pride, natural pride. The difference is the bigotry in the refusal to vote for someone on the basis of race.” In other words, ethnic voting is voting for someone of your own group. Racial voting is voting against someone from a different group.

In previous elections, Koch established a pattern. He lost the black vote in the primary and then carried blacks as the Democratic candidate in the general election. Apparently, blacks do not dislike him so much that they will desert the Democratic Party. That may change. Right now, polls show Dinkins well ahead of Koch. Dinkins is trying to do a Daley--win the support of his race without resorting to racial politics. But Dinkins doesn’t have Daley’s name. And New York City is less black. Even if Koch wins the primary, he may face a strong GOP challenge from former federal prosecutor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who went after corruption on Wall Street and in city government.

In Chicago, the white candidate is running against racial politics. In New York, a black candidate is doing the same. In both, the big test will be whether racial tension is strong enough to undermine loyalty to the Democratic Party.

Black candidates for mayor of Los Angeles and governor of Virginia face a somewhat different test. Both races involve officeholders who have avoided racial politics. They had no choice. Los Angeles and the Commonwealth of Virginia are less than 20% black.

Tom Bradley, the four-term mayor of Los Angeles, has been called “the prototype of the electable black”--low-key, non-threatening, former police officer. He is, in the words of a California Democratic politician, “a good liberal Republican.” In fact, Bradley has been criticized because of his alliance with the business Establishment.

Lt. Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, the only black statewide elected official in Virginia history, has the same non-controversial image. Wilder asked Jackson to stay out of his 1985 campaign. He ended up winning with 44% of the white vote. This year, Wilder is unopposed for the Democratic nomination for governor and may become the first elected black governor in U.S. history--in a strongly GOP Southern state, no less.

The Virginia race will be Atwater’s Spanish Civil War. How will the GOP run against a black Democrat in a Southern state? Atwater critics accused him of running a racially charged presidential campaign for George Bush last year.

Whether he did or not, it worked. Will Atwater be able to resist the temptation to run a racially charged campaign in Virginia?

Brown can do a good deal to unify the Democratic Party. The issue is whether he can help reach beyond the liberal base. It used to be that Democrats could win national elections just by holding together. The new version of the theory claims that Democrats can win if they run a left-wing campaign that inspires sharply increased turnout among blacks, Latinos and poor people.

Not true. In the current issue of Public Opinion magazine, political analyst Ruy Teixeira examines the evidence and concludes: “If both blacks and Hispanics had voted at rates 10 points higher than whites, the overall net gain for the Democrats, 4,340,000 votes, would have still fallen short of the number Dukakis needed for victory.” Dukakis lost by 6.9 million.

What Brown has to do is extend the Democrats’ reach beyond a base of liberals, poor people and minorities. Since he has the confidence of the party’s leading left-wing figure, Brown may be well-positioned to lead the Democrats toward the center. The problem is that Brown’s political experience has been entirely within the Democratic Party. Atwater, by contrast, has spent most of his career running against Democrats.

Atwater took the heat last year for the racial overtones of the Bush campaign. In his Feb. 9 speech to Congress, however, Bush promised to “work to knock down the barriers left by past discrimination and to build a more tolerant society that will stop such barriers from ever being built again.”

Do blacks believe him? When Ronald Reagan took office in January, 1981, he won the approval of only 24% of blacks. Last month, according to the Gallup Poll, Bush was approved by 51% of blacks--almost the same figure as among whites. That is the best news in a long time about the future of racial politics in America.