Not a normal task for a GOP Presidential candidate, nor an easy task – but a task well worth doing, and long overdue:
John McCain plans to spend next week reaching out to African-Americans, displaced factory workers and people living in poverty – voters not usually associated with the Republican Party.
Starting Monday, the presumptive GOP nominee for president will stop in Alabama’s “Black Belt,” then move on to the struggling steel town of Youngstown, Ohio, and the Appalachian region of Kentucky. The Arizona senator is also trying to make it to New Orleans, which is still recovering from 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
“I want to tell people living there that there must not be any forgotten parts of America, any forgotten Americans,” McCain told newspaper editors this week.
“A lot of moderate white voters want a president who can reach out to the disadvantaged,” said John Pitney, a former House GOP aide and government professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. “So McCain has to show he’s making the effort.”
McCain “is sending the signal that he’s a different kind of Republican,” which he must do to attract independent voters unaligned with either party, Republican pollster Whit Ayres said.
“Independents voted overwhelmingly for Democrats in 2006,” Ayres said, when Republicans lost control of Congress. McCain can win, Ayres said, only if independents vote for him in 2008.
For far too long, the GOP has written off these areas of the country – and the worst part about this neglect isn’t in electoral politics, but in the fact that the cure for what ails them is to be found in conservative policy. These places are locked in poverty not because of some failure inherent to America, but because they are hamstrung by a corrupt Democratic machine which wants the poor kept down, and on the liberal plantation. The best way to utterly crush liberalism is to, step by step, take these poor voters away from them by providing them with real help – and real hope for genuine change.
Naturally, Democrats are mostly denigrating the effort – if we GOPers have been writing them off, Democrats have been taking them for granted, and they expect to be able to do so again in November…but even if McCain only switches one in a thousand of these voters, it is still a thing worth doing, because it will start a process rolling which can eventually lead to the end of liberalism in America. But I think he’ll do better than that: No, he won’t win 25% of the black vote, nor will he carry any of the Congressional districts Kerry won by 10 percentage points or more back in 2004 – but he’ll win some, and any poaching in Democratic territory makes the Democrats’ task harder – but more important than that is the political shift of a GOP aggresively courting America’s poor.
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