Black Republican speakers sticking it to the Democrats

BY: GHK LALL

The Democrats are in for a topsy-turvy ride at the upcoming November elections, now less than a hundred days away. It will be a case of so near, and yet so far away from the seat of ascendancy. I think that the party’s leaders and strategists have only themselves to blame.

The Democrats have the numbers, but they lack the will. They lack the will, from Nancy Pelosi to Chuck Schumer to Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to speak out and call things, as they are, as they should see them. Instead, they look the other way and pretend not to see what there is to be seen; the evidence of their malingering and paralysis is there, the maledictions mount. They coddle (as seen by their political opponents) arson and anarchy and looting and violence and rapid deterioration of safety, never comforting to begin with, in the vulnerable, crime-plagued, heavily minority populated inner cities. Those inner cities have been reduced to one war zone after another, with criminals ruling the streets and neighbourhoods, and leaders all but abandoning their obligations.

I used to live in some of those inner cities when things were very bad; and as I was readying to move uptown, they started to turn around. Today, most of them are back to the bad old days and most regrettably under the banner of the BLM protests, which started out as angry and justified in the heart, but peaceful in objectives. Shed the spotlight. Keep up the pressure. Bring about reform. But now the bottom has fallen out in New York City, Chicago, and Portland, among others. Most of the masses having an unfettered field day rampaging and wreaking mayhem are not going to come out and vote come November. And all the while, the self-destructive actions of those mobs are what play out before eyes and in the heads and the hard, unpardoning conclusions of White voters. Even the liberals, as noted by the New York Times, are cringing, as their neighbourhoods are invaded and settled by the homeless and riotous.

It is those same White voters that still constitute a significant majority of voting America. They will vote in their numbers and they are getting all the fuel and fodder (not irrationally so or unjustifiably so) from the Republican National Convention currently in full swing. In what I consider a masterstroke, a commonsense one, the Republican Party hit the right notes with the right people at the right time before the right audiences. It is a fail proof strategy, when Black speakers are recruited to blast away at what is going on in minority America with out of control lawlessness, and the great harms inflicted upon those communities, while Democrats at the helm stand by idly. They do so because they fear incensing Black voters and impinging on their prospects in November. Though I hear that Mr. Biden is way ahead in the polls, I believe that it is misleading, as it did with Hilary Clinton in 2016; and Thomas E. Dewey in 1948.

Meanwhile, as criminals pretending at protesters wreak havoc in the streets, the Republicans reap political hay with former NFL superstar, Hershel Walker; Senator Tim Scott (r-SC); Kim Klacik, a contender for the available Congressional seat of the late great Elijah Cummings; and Vernon Jones, an Assemblyman from Georgia. They have several things in common: they are young, they are Black, they are Republican, they are intelligent and articulate, and they are compelling. I think Joe Biden and the Democrats are in trouble.
They are because I hear sharp shades of when Nixon postured about ‘law and order” and some other Republican leader preaching about ‘war on drugs.’ I hear of bedrock American values, and about those elements that touch to the core the bulk of the majority that votes.

Many Americans recoil from the mere thought of another four years in the White House with a suspected unhinged leader there. As an immigrant and a minority, I shudder at the prospect. But I must face this unalterable reality: Democrats do themselves no favour when they shrink from fulfilling leadership responsibilities, when they pander and yield to what is besieging city after city in America, and when they have all but thrown up their hands in surrendering to mobs. Those poll numbers favouring Mr. Biden will not hold, but collapse, as much damage has been done. I wish it were not so, but I was never enamoured by him in the first place. Hence, four more years look unbeatable right now.