By Selwyn Duke

Perhaps we’ve discovered the real cherished “99 percent.”
Writing that “[s]ome Philadelphia neighborhoods outdid themselves in Tuesday’s presidential
election,” Philly.com reports
that 13 of the city’s wards recorded a victory margin for Barack Obama of 99
percent or more. In other words, in some precincts, Mitt Romney was perhaps
worth only three fifths of a percent.

This places Obama in rare company, with a result hardly seen
since Adolf Hitler “won” a 1936 referendum with 99 percent of the vote. Remarking
on the anomalous outcome, St. Joseph’s University history professor Randall
Miller noted, writes Philly.com, “[P]oliticians almost never get 99 percent of
the votes anywhere except, perhaps, the towns where they were born.” Well,
scratch that. Kenyans can’t vote in American elections (at least those actually
in Kenya)…yet.

Of course, such electoral unanimity could raise suspicions
of vote fraud, especially since the number of wards in which Obama achieved his
purity is remarkably close to the number of polling places (14) that illegally
expelled court-appointed Republican vote monitors on Election Day. In
reality, though, Obama’s 99-percenter status isn’t surprising given that he
enjoys more than 95 percent support from black Americans nationwide. And while
I believe the vote fraud this election was massive, in the Philly mental wards
it would be apparent not in percentage of votes won, but in percentage of
turnout. Philly.com reports that this was 60 percent citywide but provides no
data for the wards in question.

Whatever the case, most people put a happy face on such
monolithic support. For example, Professor Miller said, “Ninety-nine percent is
extraordinary, and it shows discipline as much as anything else.” Discipline? So
that’s what they call it now. I have a different word.

Prejudice.

If 95-plus percent of whites had voted for Romney, would
anyone characterize it as a matter of “discipline”? Why, even though whites
favored the Republican by only 60 percent, their failure to split an even 50/50
is still thought cause to place the spotlight on them. For instance, this
National Journal piece on the racial
divide contrasts the actual Nov. 6 electoral map with how it would look had
only whites voted and shows that Romney would have captured eight more states and
hence the election. What isn’t shown is that if only blacks voted, Obama would
have won every state.

The reason for this is as simple as it is rarely spoken. As
black Tea Party star Lloyd Marcus put
it, blacks’ monolithic support for Obama is attributable to “racism and
loyalty to The Black Code (never side with a white against a fellow black).”

Here many will point out that blacks typically vote Democrat
approximately 95 percent of the time and that they support black Republicans
little more than white ones. Yet this argument fails. First, it’s clear that most
blacks have a prejudice against the Republican Party itself (as some whites do)
and refuse to even give its platform a fair hearing. Second, they have this
bias primarily because they see the Republicans as the “white party” and
dismiss, out of hand, the blacks within it as Uncle Toms.

If this isn’t enough to convince skeptics that racial
prejudice is the issue, I submit as Exhibit A the 2008 Democrat primaries.
During their early stages, blacks joined most other Democrats in supporting Hillary
Clinton. Yet when Obama’s star began to rise, they flocked to him, often offering
support by a 9-to-1 margin. This, despite the fact that the two candidates’
positions were virtually identical. 

This is why I just shake my head when people say that
Republicans are losing minorities because they’re not “reaching out.” This is a
nebulous term that purports to explain something while explaining nothing, much
as if you tell someone who is depressed that he needs “self-actualization.”
It’s hard for the GOP to reach out and reach people when, owing to prejudice, they
assume that the “R” after a candidate’s name stands for “Racist.”

If black people such as Lloyd Marcus, Alan Keyes, Walter
Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Jesse Lee Peterson can’t make any headway with
blacks, what kind of chance do you think white Republicans will stand?

Instead of implying that we should “reach out” — a euphemism
for “pander” — we’d be better off treating blacks the same as we do whites.

Call them out when they’re bigoted.

Even if it didn’t win any more converts, it at least might
win respect. After all, people don’t respect someone who is too stupid, too
afraid, or too dishonest to tell them the truth.

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        © 2012 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved