Seek 20% of 1992 Vote : Republicans Under Bush Reach Out to Minorities

When Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater came here this month with the big new GOP drive to broaden its political base, more than 300 black business people and professionals crowded into the Plaza Club, 49 stories above the heart of President Bush’s hometown, to greet him.

Odysseus M. Lanier, co-owner of a management consulting firm, helped organize the reception with the zeal characteristic of a fresh political convert.

“I used to have a Republican life style and vote Democratic,” said Lanier, who, together with his wife, an accountant, earns more than $100,000 a year and has a Mercedes and a Mitsubishi in his suburban townhouse garage. “Now I vote like I live.”

Republican strategists are counting on economic achievers and strivers such as Lanier to lead a substantial defection of black voters away from the Democrats and back to the party of Abraham Lincoln--and George Bush.

“We’re going to need a lot of help because we’re trying to change the course of history,” Atwater acknowledged at a press conference in Little Rock, Ark., another stop on his “outreach” tour.

But as Republicans see it, they have no choice but to try to pull in more blacks--and other minorities as well--if they are to have any chance of extending their domination of presidential politics to the congressional, state and local levels and finally becoming the nation’s majority party.

The Republican goal for blacks, the largest and toughest of the minority groups they hope to woo, is about 20% of their vote in 1992, roughly double Bush’s share in 1988.

Whether or not that figure can be reached, political analysts believe that just in the process of trying, the Republicans will help themselves with a significant group of white voters who have been turned off by what they regard as the unduly harsh and insensitive Republican approach to blacks.

“Things like the Willie Horton issue are seen by many people as not just opposition to crime but opposition to blacks,” said UCLA political analyst and GOP consultant John Petrocik, referring to the furloughed Massachusetts convict whose crimes Republicans exploited in the 1988 presidential campaign. “That’s not acceptable to moderate whites, and there are enough people like that to make a big difference to Republicans.”

Bush Issues Orders

The marching orders to the GOP to refurbish its image on race come from Bush himself. “This isn’t just a political imperative, it’s a moral imperative,” Atwater said Bush told him. “I want the coalition I represent to include all the people in this country.”

Bush himself is considered by GOP leaders to be one of their prime assets in their effort to enlist more minority voters--if only because he isn’t Ronald Reagan.

“He (Reagan) is a very pleasant man,” said Constance Newman, a longtime Republican nominated by Bush to head the Office of Personnel Mangement. “But he didn’t seem to understand or believe that there was a problem for black people.”

By contrast, Bush’s boosters cite his support for the Negro College Fund while he was a student at Yale and his vote for the 1968 Fair Housing Act when he was a House member from Texas.

Moreover, as President, Bush started off on the right foot with a speech last January paying tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and condemning “the moral stain of segregation.”

He followed by naming blacks to prominent posts in his Administration. The outreach roster includes not only Newman but also Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan, Frederick D. McClure, the first black to head the White House congressional liaison office, and Anna Maria Perez, the first black press secretary to a First Lady.

Sees New Day Dawning

Beyond Bush’s potential personal appeal, some Republicans contend that history and demography are on their side. The 38-year-old Atwater professes to see a new political and economic day dawning, ushered in by the ripening of his own baby boom generation, “black, brown and white,” which he calls “the most educated, intelligent generation in the history of any society.”

“Every place I go across this country,” he said at the Plaza Club, “I see a revolution taking place in the black community and the brown community. It’s an entrepreneurial revolution. And our party is the party that can best deal with this entrepreneurial revolution.”

Others question whether there are enough upper-income blacks in general and businessmen in particular to give the GOP much of a boost. Margaret C. Simms, deputy research director at the Joint Center for Political Studies, a think tank devoted to policy issues affecting blacks, points out that only 9.5% of black families earn more than $50,000 a year, while another 12.5% earn more than $35,000 a year.

And not many of the more well-to-do blacks are likely to be part of the entrepreneurial revolution Atwater foresees.

In 1980, fewer than 14 out of every 1,000 black adults were self-employed, compared with 49 out of 1,000 for the overall population. And because of the severe impact of the 1982 recession on many small enterprises, Simms doubts that the percentage of blacks heading their own businesses has increased significantly since then.

Indeed, some analysts believe the GOP may have a hard time making gains among the upscale blacks whom Atwater has targeted, since many of them are either in government or in professions closely linked to government.

“The fact is that a large portion of the middle-class blacks are people whose success depends on government involvement,” contended UCLA’s Petrocik. “They include the black intelligentsia who have the money but are our most vocal opponents because they define Republicans as unsympathetic to black interests.”

Even successful black business people, the most likely targets for the GOP, have a hard time setting aside their resentment of Republicans and their loyalty to Democrats.

Skip Bennett, a Dallas financial consultant who attended the Plaza Club reception, says he favors Republican economic policies and the GOP’s stress on opportunity. But having grown up in Birmingham, Ala., in the 1950s and 1960s, he finds it particularly hard to overlook the resistance of many Republican leaders to civil rights advances.

“I’m uncertain,” Bennett said about his own political future. “My heart would say one thing, my head something else. My head is with the Republicans, but my heart is still Democratic.”

Altered Perceptions

Atwater believes Bennett and other blacks can be won over mainly by altering perceptions rather than by launching major governmental initiatives.

“I don’t think we have to make any great changes” in policy, he said in an interview. “We do have a bad image on civil rights. We have to be very aggressive on knocking that image problem down. Secondly, I think we’ve got to aggressively open up the party and show people that they are welcome and get out and communicate with people that we haven’t been communicating with.”

To that end, Atwater disclosed he was “considering” some sort of action that would help add blacks to the almost lily-white Republican National Committee, which now counts only two blacks among its 165 voting members.

The committee is made up of three people from each state and territory, regardless of their population. For years, the party leadership has resisted proposals for a rules change that would make it easier for blacks to gain membership and to become delegates to the party’s national convention. Blacks made up only 4% of the delegates to the 1988 convention.

In contrast to Atwater, other Republicans emphasize the need for the GOP to take substantive action in areas affecting the way blacks live and work.

“We need a policy change in the urban policies of the Republican Party,” said Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp, who has sought to use his position to demonstrate that the Bush Administration is concerned with the problems of minorities.

“We’ve got to be able to go into the barrios and ghettos and say, look, we want to double and triple the number of minority-owned businesses, and we want to create more jobs in the minority communities. And we want the tax code to be used for socially desirable goals, even if it causes--get ready for this--a budget consequence.”

Marty Connors, executive director of the Southern Republican Exchange, urges Republicans to make better use of local governmental resources if budgetary or other reasons make them reluctant to rely on the federal government.

“While it is proper to be against big government in Washington,” Connors wrote in a memo prepared to spur outreach efforts among blacks in Dixie, “Republicans must be willing to build a compassionate, pro-active, progressive, problem-solving theme at the state and local level. That means spending money, local money.”

On one thing, Republicans and blacks seem to agree: The party must work hard to demonstrate its good faith if its outreach drive is to pay off. One of Atwater’s listeners put the matter in concrete terms.

“The rhetoric is all well and good,” Wayne Alexander, a Houston nurseryman, said after hearing Atwater’s Plaza Club talk. “But there’s still the proof of the pudding. We’d like to see how this Administration is going to get us more access to the capital we need for our businesses.”