As the Republican candidates for President slog through the final days of campaigning in a state with a large Hispanic population, two Florida Republicans with strong ties to the Hispanic community are warning their party about rhetoric that threatens to alienate the fastest growing minority voting bloc in the country:

Senior Republicans including the brother of the former president George Bush have warned the party to avoid using “harsh, intolerable and inexcusable” language about illegal immigration or risk alienating Latino voters.

The Florida senator, Marco Rubio, and the state’s former governor Jeb Bush made their appeal before Tuesday’s primary, being contested by Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

The Republican frontrunners clashed over illegal immigration in a debate earlier this week. The issue is emotive in Florida, which has the third largest Latino population in America.

Latinos make up 13% of Florida’s 11.2 million registered voters, according to data from the Florida Division of Elections, compiled by the Pew Hispanic Center.

“We must admit there are those among us that have used rhetoric that is harsh and intolerable and inexcusable,” Rubio said in a speech at the Hispanic Leadership Network in Miami on Friday.

“And we must admit, myself included, that sometimes we’ve been too slow to condemn that language for what it is.”

(…)

Bush also urged Republicans to temper their comments. “Hispanic people hear these debates and I think you turn them off. It’s not a good thing,” he said.

Bush also addressed the issue in a Washington Post Op-Ed published earlier this week in which he urges Republicans to rethink the way they think, and talk, about immigration:

Republicans should reengage on this issue and reframe it. Start by recognizing that new Americans strengthen our economy. We need more people to come to this country, ready to work and to contribute their creativity to our economy. U.S. immigration policies should reflect that principle. Just as Republicans believe in free trade of goods, we should support the freer flow of human talent.

We need to connect immigration to other pro-growth policies, so that new Americans can apply their talents here and succeed. The United States needs an economy that is vibrant and dynamic, open to the contributions of new entrants. We have to reduce regulations across our economy, whenever they impede economic dynamism and flexibility in the labor market. We need secure energy supplies, radical tax reform and a reduced footprint of power of the state.

Immigration reform requires economic reforms. We must be able to assure new Americans the opportunity to succeed and contribute their talents.

And when they come, as surely they will, we must welcome them, no matter whether they speak Spanish or Creole or Portuguese. When we hear foreign languages in the streets of America, that is a validation of the Republican vision to create a place where people want to come and make their lives. Hispanics here speak or are learning English — not French, Chinese or Hindi. There is a lesson in that, and Republicans should be the ones to champion it.

The one thing that has been striking about the two Republican debates in Florida this week is the manner in which the tone of the discussion about immigration has changed from previous debates. The lines about “border security” and immigrants taking American jobs, while not gone completely, were being counterbalanced by discussions about compassion and the value of immigrants. Both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney voiced support for a modified version of the DREAM Act that would give legal residency to illegal immigrants who serve in the military. Statehood for Puerto Rico was discussed as an option. And, both Romney and Gingrich made it clear that they were not in favor of deporting Grandmothers. It’s almost as if Rick Perry, another Governor from a state with a large Hispanic population who advocated programs like in-state tuition for the children of  illegal immigrants, were still in the race instead of having been shunned by his party’s base for advocating a policy that he called compassionate.

Of course, this is largely because the candidates are in Florida this week and eager to attract the support of the Cuban community in Miami and the large Puerto Rican community that resides around Orlando and in other areas of the state. Earlier this month, when they were in Iowa where anti-immigrant sentiment runs bizarrely high for a state that is more than 1,000 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, the rhetoric was very different. The same goes for South Carolina. Next month, the candidates will be competing in states like Nevada and Arizona and it’s quite likely that the toned down rhetoric will be replaced with the same anti-immigrant rhetoric we saw a few weeks ago in Iowa. z

Bush and Rubio are right, of course. Thanks largely to a bizarre no-compromises position on immigration reform, the GOP is in the process of alienating even further an ethnic group that is going to become a huge part of the voting electorate in states that stretch from California, across the Southwest, into Texas, and all the way to Florida. There are also large and growing Hispanic populations in swing states like Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina. For the GOP to ignore the problems it has with this voting bloc strikes me, and apparently Bush and Rubio, as a form of electoral suicide that would take a long time repair.  The Latino vote in California seems to be lost already and with it, most likely, the State of California itself for the foreseeable future. Other surveys have shown that Hispanics nationwide, while not necessarily thrilled with the Obama Administration’s increased deportations and failure to follow through on comprehensive immigration reform, are more turned off by the GOP’s stance on immigration issues than they are disappointed in the Democratic Party’s to follow through on its promise.

Observing this problem in March, I said this:

The GOP stands on the verge of losing the fastest growing ethnic group in the country for at least a generation, all because the conservative base continues to cling to a restrictionist, anti-immigrant policy on immigration and refuses to even discuss the possibility of compromise on issues like amnesty for people already in the country illegally. To these conservatives, the answer to the immigration problem is an easy one but the truth it that it isn’t easy, and they’re leading the GOP down the road to electoral disaster.

People like Bush and Rubio clearly recognize this. Whether their fellow Republicans do, or whether they care, isn’t at all clear.

A new Pew Research survey shows all of the Republican candidates for President trailing President Obama significantly among voters from the nation’s fastest growing ethnic group:

President Obama holds a wide lead among Hispanic voters when matched against potential Republican challengers, even as widespread opposition to his administration’s stepped-up deportation policies act as a drag on his approval ratings among that group, according to a new poll.

The survey, conducted by the Pew Hispanic Center, revealed a general-election weakness for Republicans among an increasingly influential voting bloc — with former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry each winning less than one-fourth of the Hispanic vote in hypothetical matchups against Obama.

Obama leads Romney by 68 percent to 23 percent and Perry by 69 percent to 23 percent among Hispanic voters, with a margin of error of plus or minus 5.2 percentage points for the sample.

The president’s strong position with Latino voters comes even as Hispanic adults overall express disapproval with the way his administration is handling deportations of illegal immigrants, by 59 percent to 27 percent. (The margin of error among adults is plus or minus 3.6 percentage points.)

The United States has deported more than 1 million illegal immigrants under Obama, removing an average of nearly 400,000 per year — a record rate that has drawn criticism from immigrant advocates who charge that the policy is tearing apart families and punishing harmless workers. Administration officials have said they are targeting criminals for deportation.

Obama’s job approval rating has dropped among Hispanic voters by nine percentage points since last year, the survey found, dipping to 54 percent — in part because of a 15-point drop among Hispanic Democrats. His job approval among voters overall stood at 49 percent in a Washington Post-ABC News poll this month, meaning the president remains more popular among Hispanics than with the broader electorate.

“Many Latinos are aware that deportations are up, and among them the president’s approval rating is lower,” said Mark H. Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. “However, even among them, the president wins in head-to-heads against Romney and Perry.”

The findings suggest major challenges ahead for Republican strategists, many of whom believe the party cannot win the White House unless it slices into Obama’s support among Hispanics.

The results in the head-to-head matchups with Romney and Perry (no other Republican candidates were tested, apparently) are nearly identical to the breakdown of the Hispanic vote in 2008, which went for President Obama 67% to 31% for John McCain. More importantly, for the GOP, though, even when Latinos disapprove of the President’s policies, that still isn’t sending them into the arms of the Republican Party:

Even among those who disapprove of the way Obama is handling the issue of deportations, a majority support his reelection over either of these two potential Republican challengers. Obama would carry this group by 57% to 34% against Romney and 61% to 31% against Perry.

The survey also shows that identification with the Democratic Party among Hispanic registered voters remains strong. Two-thirds (67%) of Hispanic registered voters say they identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, while 20% say the same about the Republican Party.

And when asked which party has more concern for Hispanics, 45% say it’s the Democratic Party, while 12% say it’s the Republican Party. The share that identifies the Republican Party as the better party for Hispanics is up six percentage points since 2010.

None of this is really surprising, of course. The Republican candidates for President have basically been stepping all over each other to prove which one of them is more anti-immigration. Even Rick Perry, who arguably has the most reasonable immigration position of any of the Republicans when it comes to issues like treatment of illegal immigrants and border control, has jumped onto the bandwagon by soliciting and touting the support of Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Outside the Presidential race, we’ve seen state legislatures in Arizona, Georgia, Alabama,  and South Carolina pass restrictive immigration laws that have caused legal immigrants and migrant farm workers to flee the state out of fear.  There has been talk on the state and national level about challenging those provisions of the 14th Amendment that bestow citizenship on anyone born within the territory of the United States, even if their parents are here illegally. Given all of that, it’s no surprise that Latino voters are running away from the GOP. In fact, earlier this year we saw a poll that suggested that Latinos aren’t so much Pro-Democrat as they are Anti-Republican. With only a few exceptions, the GOP is not acting in a way that would make Latino voters feel welcome.

When I’ve discussed this issue before with conservatives, the usual response is something along the lines of just sticking their heads in the sand. Typically, I’m told that “people don’t vote in groups,” so analysis like this doesn’t really mean anything. The problem is that there have long been real, demonstrated correlations between demography and voting behavior. We’ve seen it with race, gender, age, religion, and ethnic group. Denying that it occurs is not the answer, it seems to me. Instead, Republicans ought to be asking themselves why it is that an ethnic group that is only going to become more important in the United States in the coming decades is rejecting their party out of hand. It isn’t all about bad messaging, or media bias, or the existence of welfare. It’s because the Republican Party is perceived as anti-Hispanic because of the policy positions it has become identified with. Until that changes, the GOP is going to continue to see poll numbers like this and, as Latinos become a more important voting group in years to come, it’s only going to hurt the GOP more. You adapt, or you die.

Ta-Nehisi Coates presents a statistical comparison that makes a compelling starting point for an argument that Cam Newton is having the best rookie year any NFL quarterback has ever had. With one game remaining on the schedule, he’s already broken Peyton Manning’s record for passing yards by a rookie, tied Dan Marino’s record for touchdown passes by a rookie, and has a higher completion percentage than either. And he’s by far a bigger running threat than either ever was.

As Coates himself notes, the debate is complicated by era effects. It’s simply easier to pass the ball in the NFL of 2011 than it was in 1983, when Marino started, or even 1999, when Manning debuted, because of rules changes. Most of the league’s passing records have been set in the last few years and this season has been especially explosive, perhaps as a function of the cancellation of most of the offseason training activities because of the lockout.

Regardless, it’s an interesting debate. But not as interesting as a related one raised in the post: How much of a factor was the fact that Newton is African-American in the low expectations many scouts and prognosticators had before the season started?

Warren Moon, who had to win five straight Canadian Football League championships before being given a shot to play quarterback in the NFL and a Hall of Fame career, thinks it’s a big factor. Newton tactfully dismisses the charge, noting that the recent flameouts of high profile black quarterbacks JaMarcus Russell and Vince Young justified the fears. But Coates thinks this, too, amounts to racism.

[I]t must be said that accepting Newton’s formulation, he’s actually proving Warren Moon’s point. JaMarcus may well be the greatest bust ever (and like any greatest, that’s debatable) but the list of white quarterback busts is fairly legion ranging from Ryan Leaf to Tim Couch to Todd Marinovich to Art Schlichter. But Newton is Newton worried about walking in the shadow of  say, Joey Harrington or David Carr. He’s worried about the black guys. That is telling.

Our American struggle is not about the freedom to be exceptional–we’ve had that since the days of Frederick Douglass. It’s about the freedom to be mediocre, the freedom to fail, and have that failure, or mediocrity speak only to the  merit of an individual, not to the “group.” I assure you that Andy Dalton does not fear Matt Leinart, in the same way that Cam Newton fears Vince Young.

That’s fair enough. We’re only a quarter century or so into the era where black quarterbacks (most notably Moon, Doug Williams, Donovan McNabb, and Michael Vick) have had success in the League. Only one, Williams, has ever won a Super Bowl. Only three–Williams, Steve McNair, and McNabb–have ever started one. So it wouldn’t be shocking if a lot of analysts, who tend to be middle aged white guys, still harbor subtle doubts about the ability of blacks to quarterback on Sundays.

Additionally, there was much thinly veiled talk that Newton was a thug and not particularly bright, criticisms often made–mostly indirectly these days–about black athletes. But Newton gave the critics plenty of ammunition. First, there was the months-long drama over the fact that his father, Cecil Newton, hamhandedly attempted to shop him to the highest bidder as he was leaving a highly successful junior college career and moving up to Division I. Which, incidentally, he’d left after being thrown off the team at Florida under suspicion of larceny and charges of cheating in the classroom. Nor did he help himself in a truly painful interview with ESPN’s Jon Gruden in which he seemed to have no clue about how to call a simple football play.

But there is quite a bit of mitigating evidence in the case of Newton. Most importantly, he was ultimately chosen by the Carolina Panthers with the first overall pick in the draft. So, whatever doubts there were didn’t keep him from going ahead of every other player, regardless of race, in his draft class.

The doubts about Newton were mostly predicated on two facts. One, he had only started one year in college. To be sure, it was a spectacular year (undefeated season, Heisman Trophy, and BCS national championship) but scouts are leery of QBs that didn’t start at least three years. Two, he played in a high school offense. Literally. Gus Malzahn, his offensive coordinator at Auburn, has spent most of his career as a high school coach perfecting a spread offense.

Observers of the NFL hate, hate, hate quarterbacks who played something other than a pro style system in college. Because it’s damned near impossible to predict how they’ll make the transition. So many of the great college quarterbacks are pro busts because it’s the position that least resembles its NFL counterpart. In college, quarterbacks can win by running the ball constantly; so far, that hasn’t worked on a sustained basis in the NFL. In college, gadget offenses (double and triple option, spread, Wildcat) can overwhelm teams that haven’t faced that style. (Alabama, which held LSU to 6 points in regulation this year, gave up 21 points to lowly Georgia Southern, its worst performance of the year, for this reason.) That just doesn’t work over the long haul in the NFL.

Indeed, another highly controversial quarterback is a classic example of this phenomenon: Tim Tebow. He led Florida to two national titles, won a Heisman Trophy, and was a contender for two more. There’s a strong case to be made that he’s the best college quarterback ever. Yet, he was the 25th pick in the 2010 draft and most analysts thought Denver took him too high, especially with Jimmy Clausen still on the board. Why? Because he won in a spread style offense and relied extensively on his ability to run the ball. Despite considerable success in the NFL, most of us still don’t think he’ll make it over the long haul because he’s not a good passer.

For those who don’t follow the sport, Tebow’s white.

Photo: ESPN/US Presswire

John Hawkins has compiled a list of The Top 20 Most Influential Black Republicans. While I might quibble with the ordering here and there, I didn’t note any glaring omissions on first read. Instead, my reaction was how remarkably thin the list is.

Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, and Allen West are all in the top 10. Most of the remainder of the list is filled with pundits, including Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Larry Elder–but also some D listers like Jesse Lee Paterson (of whom I’d never heard), Deroy Murdock, Star Parker, and Robert George. Even J.C. Watts, whose 15 minutes were up in the 1990s, makes the list.

Now, I’m painfully aware that the Republican Party, despite its heritage as the Party of Lincoln, is unpopular with blacks. It has been since Franklin Roosevelt won them over in the 1930s. Consequentially, blacks vote something like 90 percent Democrat.

Still, that leaves 10 percent of 12 percent of a nation of 310 million people–roughly 3.7 million black Republicans. And Colin Powell–whose Republican bonafides are pretty shaky these days–is the only undeniable superstar on the list? (I’d put Rice and Sowell there, too, but they’re much more controversial.)

I’m no Rick Perry fan, but I find myself agreeing with Rod Dreher’s take on this entire controversy about the name of Perry’s former hunting lodge:

It’s more than a little mind-boggling to contemplate that this kind of penny-ante stupidity and racial insensitivity is deemed newsworthy enough by the Post to put on the front page. A couple of days ago, Perry called for the U.S. military to invade, in effect, Mexico to take on drug cartels. Hello! That’s huge. Perry could have been hunting for years at a deer camp called Rod Dreher Was Stalin’s Cabana Boy, and it would be trivial, given the magnitude of the challenges facing the country’s next president, and their proposals to address them. It is far, far more significant that a man who still has a decent chance at being the GOP nominee thinks it would be a good idea to send American troops into Mexico to conduct crimefighting operations than that this man used to hunt at a deer camp with a racially insensitive name (a middle-aged white Republican from small-town West Texas as lacking the racial sensitivities of the Washington Post newsroom — wow, who could have imagined that?).

The world teeters on the brink of a global depression. Millions of Americans are out of work, or don’t have enough work, and there are no prospects of things getting better in the short run. The American military is mired in an unwinnable Asian land war. We don’t have the luxury to worry about whether or not the men or women who aspire to lead the country were sufficiently sensitive about the name of a sporting venue in their past. As far as I’m concerned, if President Obama can fix the economy and bring the troops home, he can play golf at Honkyhead with my blessing.

Some might argue that apparent insentivity about an obvious racial slur is somehow indicitive of Perry’s views on race. As The Texas Tribune found out when they started asking, though, even Perry’s political opponents don’t think the story amounts to much of anything:

Even some of Perry’s fiercest Texas critics say they do not believe he is racist. They point to his record of appointments as evidence: He appointed the state’s first African-American state supreme court justice, Wallace Jefferson, and later made him chief justice. (Jefferson’s great grandfather was a slave, “sold like a horse,” Perry once said with disgust.) Perry’s former general counsel and former chief of staff, Brian Newby, is black; so is Albert Hawkins, the former Health and Human Services Commissioner who Perry handpicked to lead the massive agency in 2002.

“He doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” said former Democratic state Rep. Ron Wilson, who is black and served with Perry in his early years in the Legislature. “He didn’t then, and he doesn’t now.”

Added Dallas Democratic Sen. Royce West, who is also black: “I don’t agree with him on policy issues, but you can point to many things he has done that were sensitive to ethnic minorities.”

(….)

Wallace Jefferson, the first black chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, said the hunting ranch name controversy is “much ado about nothing,” and argued the implication that Rick Perry is insensitive to matters of race is flatly wrong. Jefferson, who was appointed to the post by Perry, and whose great-great-great-grandfather was a slave owned by a Waco district judge, said the reality is quite the opposite: Perry “appreciates the role diversity plays in our state and nation.”

Jefferson said he can recall his first conversation with Perry, in 2001, like it was yesterday. The two men both had fathers who were Air Force officers, and Jefferson said Perry shared his view that in all circumstances, merit mattered, not race.

“To imply that the governor condoned either the use of that word or that sentiment, I find false,” Jefferson said.

So there you have comments from people that actually know Perry, including members of the opposition. If Perry harbored some kind of a racist attitude, it strikes me that there would be some kind of evidence in support of it other than a rock on the ground outside of Paint Creek, Texas, and one would think that his political opponents would be more than willing to point to examples of it. The fact that they haven’t suggests that there’s nothing there, and that yesterday’s Washington Post story was little more than an attempt at a journalistic hit piece. If the Post wanted to do a story about Perry and Texas, then why aren’t they writing about the crony capitalism, or checking into the claims he makes about job creation in Texas? Isn’t that just a little bit more important than something that happened when a good portion of the people who will be voting in 2012 were still in school? Instead of obsessing over these kinds of trivialities, let’s see the Washington Post concentrate on something that matters for once. They used to know how to do that.

Herman Cain, who had initially criticized Perry when asked about it on two Sunday morning talk shows, basically said today that he considers the matter closed:

Herman Cain pushed back Monday against criticism that he had unfairly called opponent Rick Perry “insensitive” when asked about a rock displaying a racial epithet at a ranch leased by the Texas governor.

“All I said was the mere fact that that word was there was ‘insensitive,’ ” Cain said outside Trump Tower in Manhattan, N.Y., according to the National Review. “That’s not playing the race card. I am not attacking Gov. Perry. Some people in the media want to attack him. I’m done with that issue!”

(…)

Cain seemed eager to put the issue behind himself Monday, asking reporters to instead ask about “what’s important to the American people” rather than “beat this distraction to death about a word that appeared on a rock.”

“I really don’t care about that word,” Cain said. “They painted over it. End of story! I accept Gov. Perry’s response on that.”

Cain’s response on Sunday had been the main reason that this turned into a two-day story. Will this put an end to it? It should, but I doubt it will. We’ll probably even get a question about it at the next Republican debate. Because, you know, there’s really nothing important to be talking about right now.

The Washington Post is out this morning with a story from Rick Perry’s past that has already caused one of his rivals to issue a condemnation:

Paint Creek, Tex. — In the early years of his political career, Rick Perry began hosting fellow lawmakers, friends and supporters at his family’s secluded West Texas hunting camp, a place known by the name painted in block letters across a large, flat rock standing upright at its gated entrance.

“Niggerhead,” it read.

Ranchers who once grazed cattle on the 1,070-acre parcel on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River called it by that name well before Perry and his father, Ray, began hunting there in the early 1980s. There is no definitive account of when the rock first appeared on the property. In an earlier time, the name on the rock was often given to mountains and creeks and rock outcroppings across the country. Over the years, civil rights groups and government agencies have had some success changing those and other racially offensive names that dotted the nation’s maps.

But the name of this particular parcel did not change for years after it became associated with Rick Perry, first as a private citizen, then as a state official and finally as Texas governor. Some locals still call it that. As recently as this summer, the slablike rock — lying flat, the name still faintly visible beneath a coat of white paint — remained by the gated entrance to the camp.

When asked last week, Perry said the word on the rock is an “offensive name that has no place in the modern world.”

But how, when or whether he dealt with it when he was using the property is less clear and adds a dimension to the emerging biography of Perry, who quickly moved into the top tier of Republican presidential candidates when he entered the race in August.

He grew up in a segregated era whose history has defined and complicated the careers of many Southern politicians. Perry has spoken often about how his upbringing in this sparsely populated farming community influenced his conservatism. He has rarely, if ever, discussed what it was like growing up amid segregation in an area where blacks were a tiny fraction of the population.

That’s largely true of anyone of Perry’s age (61) who grew up in the southern United States, though, so I’m not sure that it says anything about Perry per se, and if it does then it would seem to disqualify any white southern make over the age of about 35 or so. Racism is an ugly thing, and southern segregation displayed it in one of it’s ugliest forms, but is that really Rick Perry’s fault? I’m not so sure, especially when you realize that place names that are racially insensitive is an issue Texas has been dealing with for decades:

 The name “Niggerhead” has a long and wide history. It was once applied to products such as soap and chewing tobacco, but most often to geographic features such as hills and rocks.

In 1962, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names changed more than a hundred such names, substituting “Negro.”

“Typically these were in areas where African Americans were not all that common,” said Mark Monmonier, a geography professor at Syracuse University who wrote a book on the subject of racially offensive place names.

The federal action still left many local names unchanged. In Texas, Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady, lobbied to change the name of a mountain in Burnet, Tex., that had the same name as Perry’s hunting spot. In 1968, it became “Colored Mountain.” In 1989, the Texas NAACP began lobbying the state legislature to change many more names, such as “Nigger Creek” and “Niggerhead Hill,” although there has been resistance from private landowners, according to news accounts.

In his responses, Perry said the managers of the Hendrick ranch appealed in recent years to federal officials to rename Niggerhead, although the name does not appear on U.S. topographic maps. Monmonier could not find it in a database maintained by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. That suggests renaming the property would be a simple matter for its owners or possibly state officials, Monmonier said.

Chuck Wilson, the manager of the Hendrick ranch, said that particular parcel is now called “North Camp Pasture.”

The operative question at this point seems to be at what point the rock containing this name was painted over. Perry told the Post that he remembers it occurring in the early 1980s when his father became one of the leaseholders of the hunting lodge, but the Post seems to dispute that:

Perry’s version of events differs in many respects from the recollections of seven people, interviewed by The Washington Post, who spoke in detail of their memories of seeing the rock with the name at various points during the years that Perry was associated with the property through his father, partners or his signature on a lease.

Some who had watched Perry’s political ascent recalled their reaction to the name on the rock and their worry that it could become a political liability for Perry.

“I remember the first time I went through that pasture and saw that,” said Ronnie Brooks, a retired game warden who began working in the region in 1981 and who said he guided three or four turkey shoots for Rick Perry when Perry was a state legislator between 1985 and 1990. “. . . It kind of offended me, truthfully.”

Brooks, who said he holds Perry “in the highest esteem,” said that at some point after Perry began bringing lawmakers to the camp, the rock was turned over. Brooks could not recall exactly when. He said he did not know who turned the rock over.

Another local who visited the property with Perry and the legislators in those years recalled seeing the rock with the name clearly visible.

“I thought, ‘This is going to embarrass Rick some day,’ ” said this person, who did not want to be named, fearing negative consequences from speaking on the subject.

Since the Post story came out, the Perry campaign has issued another statement:

“A number of claims made in the story are incorrect, inconsistent, and anonymous, including the implication that Rick Perry brought groups to the lease when the word on the rock was still visible. The one consistent fact in the story is that the word on a rock was painted over and obscured many years ago.

“Governor Perry and his family never owned, controlled or managed the property referenced in the Washington Post story. The 42,000-acre ranch is owned by the Hendricks Home for Children, a West Texas charity.

“Perry’s father painted over offensive language on a rock soon after leasing the 1,000-acre parcel in the early 1980s. When Governor Perry was party to the hunting lease from 1997 to 2007, the property was described as northern pasture. He has not been to the property since 2006.

“In 1991 the Texas Legislature passed a bill to rename old, offensive place names.”

Herman Cain was asked about the controversy during two morning show appearances today, and stated that he thought the name was offensive:

Businessman Herman Cain on Sunday called it “insulting” that the family of Rick Perry owned a hunting camp with a racially charged name well into the 1980s and possibly even later.

According to a Washington Post article that appeared Sunday, the hunting camp owned by the Texas governor was branded with the name “N—–head.” The word — reportedly on a rock at the entrance of the 1,70-acre parcel — has been painted over and the camp renamed.

Perry has said it was changed in 1983 or 1984, but others suggest it may not have been covered until later — with one person estimating for the Post that it was as late as 2008.There “isn’t a more vile, negative word than the N-word, and for him to leave it there as long as he did, until before, I hear, they finally painted over it, is just plain insensitive to a lot of black people in this country,” said Cain, who is running against Perry and a group of others for the Republican presidential nomination.

I think we can all agree with Cain that the name was offensive, and it was the right thing for it  to have been obscured, and later changed by the appropriate Texas authorities. The question, though, is does it really matter whether the rock was pained over in 1983, 1985, or later?

I’m no Rick Perry fan for several reasons, but this story strikes me as much ado about nothing. Reaching back into the past and finding something like this was probably relatively easy for the Post reporter who wrote the story, but I don’t see how it tells us anything about Rick Perry the 61 year old man, or what kind of President he would be. Rick Perry hunted at this camp, and his father owned a lease interest in it starting in the early 80s. They didn’t own the property, they didn’t control the property, and they didn’t name the property. How are they responsible for any of this?

They’re not, of course, but this is nonetheless embarrassing, as the unnamed Paint Creek resident quoted in the article predicted it would be when he first saw it. Something tells me that, if he could, Perry would just as soon go back in time and make sure that rock was painted over from Day One. The fact that it wasn’t, though, doesn’t really strike me as all that big of a deal, and hardly worth the bottom-of-the-fold front page treatment it gets in today’s Washington Post.

Marcia Anderson has become the first African American woman to be promoted to a two star general in the US Army.

AP (“US Army selects 1st black female 2-star general“):

For Marcia Anderson, the promotion from brigadier general to major general validates the work of everyone who came before her.

Anderson on Thursday became the first African-American woman given a second star as a general in the U.S. Army during a ceremony at Fort Knox. It’s a day, Anderson said, that black soldiers who fought during the Civil War or the Tuskegee Airmen could never have imagined.

“But, they still signed up and served,” said Anderson, who lives in Verona, Wis., when not on active duty.

Anderson, who will leave her post as deputy commanding general of the Human Resources Command at Fort Knox on Friday, received the promotion after a three-decade long military career. She is moving to the office of the chief of the U.S. Army Reserve in Washington, D.C.

Anderson’s father, Rudy Mahan of Beloit, Wis., served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War II, but never got to fulfill his dream of flying bombers. He drove trucks instead. It’s something Anderson attributes to the narrow options available to blacks at the time.

“There were just limited opportunities,” Anderson said in an interview after her promotion.

Her military career started almost by accident. When she was a student at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., Anderson signed up for ROTC after being told the “military science” course would fill her science requirement.

“I pretty quickly found out it was much more than a substitute for gym class,” Anderson said.

Ahe stayed with the military, fulfilling her eight year commitment before deciding to re-enlist in the reserves. Anderson, an East St. Louis, Ill., native, said she was a captain, working on training soldiers “just off the street,” when it occurred to her it was a job she enjoyed and wanted to keep doing.

“Before there is a war fighter, there is a trainer,” Anderson said. “I get really excited about training soldiers. I think it’s the best job in the Army.”

What’s most interesting about this story is that we’ve come to the point where milestones like this are hardly newsworthy. (Indeed, only a handful of outlets have plucked this story off the AP wire as newsworthy as of this writing.)  We’ve had plenty of black generals; Colin Powell achieved the highest possible position in the United States armed forces, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, way back in 1989. We’ve also had plenty of women generals since Anna Mae Hays, chief of the Army Nurse Corps, broke the ceiling in 1970. Ann Dunwoody became the American military’s first female four-star in 2008. So, we’re now at the point of crossover milestones.

None of this diminishes Anderson’s personal achievement or diminishes the power of her family’s story. It’s just been a while since a black woman had reason to think that her gender or race were barriers to success in the American military.

The Army’s press release has more on her background:

Those who attended today’s proceedings were each “a witness to history,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin Freakley, commanding general of the U.S. Army Accessions Command and Fort Knox, who co-hosted the ceremony with HRC commander Maj. Gen. Gina Farrisee.  ”We honor a leader, an officer, a lawyer, a wife, a mother and a grandmother — summed up, a great American,” Freakley said.

[...]

Anderson’s journey to becoming the Army’s first female African-American major general was made up of things that were largely unplanned. ”I firmly believe that we are never in control of very much,” she said. “The most we can do is have a set of values and beliefs, and adhere to them as closely as possible.” Anderson said she valued curiosity, tolerance and striving for excellence. ”Be a lifelong learner. Accept people for who they are. Accept change because it is inevitable,” she said. “Do not expect to be rewarded just because you show up on time, do what is expected of you and leave at the same time every day, because that is merely C-grade work.”

Anderson said she learned from peers and senior officers what it means to be a good leader, and she incorporated their advice into her personal leadership style: ”Good leadership is not about telling people what to do or how to do it — it is knowing how to listen, when to delegate, how to provide space and resources to your staff, making sure they get the praise for a job well done,” she said, “and that YOU take the responsibility when a plan fails.”

[...]
Anderson’s background sculpted her into the personable, successful woman she is today.

Anderson attended an all-girl Catholic school in East St. Louis, Ill. It fostered excellence in young women that might be otherwise masked in a co-ed educational environment. ”Going to an all-girl high school definitely formed part of who I am today. You weren’t trying to impress any boys. Excellence was valued. You were just doing what everybody else was doing. You were trying to excel,” she said. “The faculty every day encouraged you to excel, and you just did. There were a lot of great role models among the faculty — all very accomplished. They spent a lot of personal time with you.” Anderson said that experiencing that type of support leads to fulfilling your role models’ expectations. ”You want to validate their faith and confidence in you, and it makes you excel,” she said.

Family life, too, enhanced her search for knowledge. ”You were encouraged to be more aware of the world around you and curious. I never grew out of asking, ‘Why?’ The news was part of my house every evening. My mother took me to the library every Saturday,” Anderson said. Asking “Why are we doing that?” is still a big part of the way she does business, Anderson said.

As a child, Anderson was very shy. It was the Army that changed her. In her Reserve Officer Training Corps, or ROTC, course (which she only took to fulfill a science requirement), she was told, “Today, you’re the platoon leader,” and she had to starting talking to people. ”You couldn’t sit in the corner anymore and observe,” Anderson said.

A milestone in her personal development — going from shy to outgoing — was when a professor of hers told Anderson that if you’re giving the speech, you’re the subject-matter expert. ”You know more (about that subject) than anyone else in the room so don’t worry about it,” he said.  One by one, your life experiences make you who you are. ”You just get better and better,” Anderson said. “It’s not about the grades you get in school. It’s what you do with it AFTERWARD that counts.”

So far, so good.

Dick Morris has a penchant for counter-intuitive analysis. And for being wildly wrong.

When the Hill‘s Twitter account sent out his latest column as “Opinion: Dick Morris: Black voters leave,” I retweeted it pre-pending “Opinion: Dick Morris is an idiot.” But it appears that the story is actually gaining traction in the blogosphere, so let me address it more substantively.

Dick Morris, “Blacks Leave Obama.”

Behind the president’s whining to the Black Caucus, begging them to “quit grumbling,” is a decline in his personal popularity among African-American voters that could portend catastrophe for his fading reelection chances.

According to a Washington Post/ABC News survey, his favorability rating among African-Americans has dropped off a cliff, plunging from 83 percent five months ago to a mere 58 percent today — a drop of 25 points, a bit more than a point per week!

Obama’s approval numbers are down across the board. Whites. Hispanics. Jews. His numbers are the lowest of his presidency, period.

The ABC/WaPo poll seems to be an outlier on the black vote, though. A Gallup poll from a couple weeks ago had Obama’s approval among blacks at 84 percent–which is still tied with his all-time low among that demographic. Worrisome, to be sure, but hardly catastrophic in the larger context. After all, Jews and Hispanics are more likely to vote Republican than blacks.

Nothing is more crucial to the president’s reelection strategy than a super-strong showing among black voters. In the election of 2008, he was able to increase African-American participation from 11 percent of the total vote in 2004 to 14 percent. He carried 98 percent of them. This swing accounted for fully half of his gain over the showing of John Kerry. Now his ability to repeat that performance is in doubt.

Obama got 66,882,230 votes in 2008, winning 53 percent to 46 percent. Kerry got 59,028,109 and lost with 48 percent to Bush’s 51. A slight uptick in the turnout for a demographic that constitutes less than 12 percent of eligible voters doesn’t explain the difference.

The mythology, propagated by pre-election polling and exit polls, was that Obama won by not only turning out blacks but also mobilizing young voters. In reality, the bump in these groups was quite modest–around 2 percent for blacks and 1 percent for the under-25′s. Much more significant: Obama got 43 percent of the white vote, compared to Kerry’s 41. And 53 percent of women compared to Kerry’s 51.

And the emergence of Herman Cain as a serious Republican candidate could not have come at a worse time for the embattled president. Cain’s alternate narrative — self-help, entrepreneurial skill, hard work and self-improvement — stands in stark contrast to the victimization/class warfare argument that the president has adopted.

Frankly, aside from a win in an essentially uncontested straw poll (hint: Alan Keyes won one of those last cycle) nobody’s paying attention to Cain. So, how exactly is he changing the narrative?

Besides which, Cain’s story is undoubtedly impressive: a child of poverty who went on to get degrees in math and computer science, become a respected analyst, and work his way up the corporate ladder to leadership positions at Pillsbury, Burger King, and finally Godfather’s Pizza, where he was CEO. But he’s also a failed politician who lost his bid to become a U.S. Senator from Georgia and is now a curiosity in a presidential race. Obama’s story, meanwhile, is nothing to be ashamed of. Granted, his parents were better educated than Cain’s. But he didn’t exactly grow up in the lap of luxury. He went on to get degrees from Columbia and Harvard, win his first bid to the U.S. Senate, his first bid for the Democratic nomination–against a much more formidable field, and was elected president. And he’s fifteen years younger than Cain.

The remainder of Morris’ column has nothing to do with the thesis at hand, instead continuing with the “class warfare” theme. But, while I happen to reject much of Obama’s messaging on taxes and the wealthy, the polling seems to show that it’s quite popular. Most Americans prefer raising taxes to cuts in government programs. And taxing the rich is, not surprisingly, quite popular given that most Americans aren’t a member of that coveted minority status. So, it would seem reasonable to assume that Obama’s dropping poll numbers have to do with something else. Like, say, a horrendous economy and the toxic atmosphere in Washington.

UPDATE: Given that The Hill is a well respected publication with top-notch editors, I assumed the WaPo poll was an outlier. Steve Benen actually looked it up, though, and found that Morris got the numbers wrong:

If the president’s favorability rating among African Americans really had slipped to 58%, that would be a pretty significant development. But once again, Morris based an entire column on numbers he chose not to read carefully enough.

What the poll actually found is that President Obama enjoys an 86% favorability rating among African Americans — 28 points higher than Morris’ column claimed.

How’d he screw this up? The poll found that 58% of African Americans have a “strongly favorable” view of Obama, but that’s only part of the basis of a favorability rating. Morris apparently noticed one number, brushed past the relevant detail, and published a claim that’s plainly not true.

The point here isn’t that the president can ignore some of his key supporters, and win a second term with his current levels of support. Clearly Obama has a lot of work to do. The point is, The Hill keeps publishing Dick Morris claims that are demonstrably wrong. It’s not a matter of opinion — the columnist is making specific arguments about numbers that don’t exist.

Indeed, Morris said Obama was doing well when his favorability rating among African Americans was 83%. But right now, they’re 86%. By Morris’ reasoning, Obama is doing great with this constituency.

Also note, this wasn’t just some side detail Morris flubbed — just as with the clearly dishonest health care column a few weeks ago, the columnist is building entire print pieces around basic statistics that don’t exist.

Either Dick Morris can’t read or he’s assuming his readers won’t bother to check. Either way, maybe it’s time for The Hill‘s editors to start taking a closer look at his pieces.

This is just embarrassing and, as Benen notes, a pattern with Morris’ columns. Given his background, I can’t believe he doesn’t understand such simple numbers. The only logical conclusion, then, is Morris is intentionally misrepresenting the truth. And a highly respected institution is letting him use their venue to do it.

Is quoting President Obama without fixing his grammar “racist”? Some say it is.

Dylan Stableford, YahooNews (“Was the Associated Press transcription of Obama’s CBC speech ‘racist’?“):

By most accounts, President Obama gave a fiery speech at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual awards dinner in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, telling blacks to “quit crying and complaining” and support him in the fight for jobs, according to the Associated Press. But was the AP transcription of Obama’s remarks racist?

That’s the subject currently being debated afterthe issue was raised on Chris Hayes’ MSNBC show on Sunday.

On MSNBC, the African-American author Karen Hunter complained the news service transcribed Obama’s speech without cleaning it up as other outlets did–specifically including the “dropped g’s.”

Via the AP version:

“Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. “Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”

Hunter called the AP’s version “inherently racist,” sparring with New Republic contributing editor and noted linguistics expert John McWhorter, who argued the g-less version “is actually the correct one,” noting that the president’s victory in the 2008 election was due, in part, to how effortlessly “he can switch into that [black] dialect.”

Whatever the reason, Hunter found it offensive. “I teach a journalism class, and I tell my students to fix people’s grammar, because you don’t want them to sound ignorant,” she said. “For them to do that, it’s code, and I don’t like it.”

It’s worth noting that the same sorts of arguments arose during George W. Bush’s presidency, with the White House cleaning up the president’s speeches to make him sound smarter, and news outlets sometimes not doing so.

According to Mark Smith, the AP reporter who filed the story, Obama was making a point by dropping his g’s, making the transcription a no-brainer.

“Normally, I lean toward the clean-it-up school of quote transcribing—for everyone,” Smith told Mediaite. “But in this case, the President appeared to be making such a point of dropping Gs, and doing so in a rhythmic fashion, that for me to insert them would run clearly counter to his meaning. I believe I was respecting his intent in this. Certainly disrespect was the last thing I intended.”

“The AP Stylebook counsels against using spellings like gonna or wanna–or in this case, complainin’ and cryin’–’in attempts to convey regional dialects or informal pronunciations, except to help a desired touch or to convey an emphasis by the speaker,’” Tom Kent, the AP deputy managing editor for standards and production, said in a statement to The Cutline. “In this case, our reporter, who was there in person, felt the spellings were appropriate to convey a particular touch that President Obama appeared to be intentionally making use of.”

This isn’t of a piece with a discussion of dressing witches and pink and avoiding white paper and other such nonsense that links any association with color as potentially racist. The rendering of informal speech into a formal setting can indeed make the subject come across as less intelligent and play into racial, ethnic, and regional stereotypes.

This hit me starkly yesterday reading a column by Jason Whitlock on Michael Vick. This quote in particular stood out:

“Everybody seen the game,” Vick said. “I’m on the ground constantly, all the time. Every time I throw the ball, in all my highlights, just watching film in general, every time I throw the ball I’m on the ground, getting hit in the head. I don’t know why I don’t get the 15-yard flags like everybody else do.”

My immediate reaction was that Vick, who attended Virginia Tech for two years before departing for the NFL, was an illiterate moron. The repeated issues with basic subject-verb agreement is jarring in written form in a way that it isn’t in an informal television interview or even a press conference.

Whitlock, himself a former college football player and a black man, is neither a racist nor trying to make Vick look dumb in the column. Indeed, he staunchly supports Vick’s grievance here. But accurately quoting Vick had the impact of reinforcing the notion that he’s an ignorant thug.

My informal rule in quoting is essentially the AP’s: I’ll naturally clean up the quotations transcribed from speeches so that they fit the expectations of the written form. My intention, whether in reporting on a session I’ve attended or an interview I’ve conducted, is to convey the speaker’s message as clearly as possible and doing so using their own words. To the extent there’s a conflict, I err on the side of the former. Similarly, when I quote a commenter or something on another blog, I’ll quite often correct typos and obvious spelling errors so that the conversation is about the ideas, not the grammatical acuity of the person being quoted.

In this case, AP made the right call: Obama was purposefully affecting an informal idiom in his speech and presenting that informality in the transcript captures that.

It helps that the reader is likely to already have a firm sense of Obama’s intellect and verbal skills. If the speaker were a not particularly well known black man, a different judgment might have been called for–particularly in the news reports about the speech, if not the transcripts.

Responding to an apparently ongoing controversy over diversity standards in admissions, the Berkely College Republicans are holding a Bake Sale:

BERKELEY, Calif. — A bake sale sponsored by a Republican student group at the University of California, Berkeley, has incited anger and renewed the debate over affirmative action by asking students to pay different prices for pastry, depending on their race and sex.

Last week, the Berkeley College Republicans announced its “Increase Diversity Bake Sale,” scheduled for Tuesday. On Facebook, the group listed the price for a pastry at $2 for white students, $1.50 for Asian students, $1 for Latinos, 75 cents for African-Americans and 25 cents for Native Americans. Women of all races were promised a 25-cent discount.

“Hope to see you all there! If you don’t come, you’re a racist!” the Facebook event page said. (It has since been taken down and replaced with milder text.)

“We expected people to be upset,” the group’s president, Shawn Lewis, 20, a third-year political science major, said Monday in a telephone interview. “Treating people differently based on the color of their skin is wrong, and we wanted people to be upset about that.”

The bake sale was scheduled to protest a phone bank organized by the Associated Students of the University of California, the campus student government group, where students planned to call Gov. Jerry Brown and urge him to sign a Senate bill that would allow public universities to consider race, gender and ethnicity in admissions decisions. In 1996, voters in the state passed a ballot initiative, known as Proposition 209, prohibiting affirmative action in admissions.

“The bake sale is a misguided attempt by the Berkeley College Republicans to make a political point about their opposition to a particular bill,” said Gibor Basri, the university’s vice chancellor for equity and inclusion and a professor of astronomy. “A lot of students, especially students of color, read it as placing a higher value on white students.”

In response to the bake sale, the Associated Students, which provides money to the Berkeley College Republicans and other political groups for events on campus, called an emergency meeting on Sunday, leaders said. It passed a resolution condemning discriminatory events on campus whether or not they are meant to be satirical.

Not long after the bake sale page went up on Facebook, hundreds of people posted comments expressing outrage over or support for the sale and affirmative action in general.

“Perhaps you should be charging women and Latinas double to better reflect the fact that we’re being paid 78 cents and 59 cents to the white man’s dollar,” wrote Ally Wong.

Others worried more about the pastries. “The educational value of this exercise will be lost when Pocahontas walks away with a truckload of free cupcakes,” wrote Mike Creamer.

This isn’t a new idea, of course. David Weigel uncovered news stories going back to 2002 reporting on the same event happening on other campuses, with the prices unchanged ironically enough (which tells that at least when it comes to baked goods, the value of the dollar remains strong). I seem to remember hearing about it happening before 2002 as well, although I haven’t been able to uncover any news stories confirming that. In any event, this strikes me as another one of the silly little events that college students do when they like to pretend they’re being politically involved. In this particular case, it’s also being done to be deliberately provocative. Although I’m sure everyone on campus appreciates having easy access to bear claws and muffins.

Photo via ABC News

Reuters (“Madison, Wisconsin ranked as best educated city in U.S.“):

Los Angeles is the entertainment capital of the United States and New York is the financial hub but Madison, Wisconsin gets the highest marks as the most educated American city.

The midwestern metropolis, which Men’s Health magazine described as the city “where the average household has more degrees than a thermometer” edged past Plano, Texas and Raleigh, North Carolina to score the highest grades in magazine’s ranking of the 100 cities with the best educated population.

Burlington, Vermont and Seattle rounded out the top five, while Las Vegas, Cleveland and Miami were the least erudite.

“It is all about education there,” said David Zinczenko, editor-in-chief of Men’s Health and editorial director of Women’s Health, about Madison. He added that the city has a large population of students, unemployment is low compared to the national average of 9.3 percent and it has good businesses, including biotech and medical supply companies. ”Cities with thriving, interesting businesses have people living intellectual lives,” he explained in an interview.

The magazine compiled the list by looking at the high school graduation rates of the cities, as well as U.S. Census figures on school enrollment and the education levels of people over 25 years old. It also researched the number of households with student loans and people taking adult education courses.

Weather seemed to have had no impact on the rankings with balmy San Diego and Honolulu and bitterly cold Fargo, North Dakota and Portland, Maine making the top 10, along with Lincoln, Nebraska.

Despite being the political center of the nation, Washington D.C. scored 34th in the rankings, just behind Little Rock, Arkansas but ahead of Jersey City, New Jersey.

Surely, “thriving, interesting businesses” are not the reason Madison, Plano, and Fargo top Miami, Los Angeles, and New York. Rather, the former are either college towns, affluent bedroom communities of more diverse cities, or both.

Gallup (“Record-High 86% Approve of Black-White Marriages“):

Americans are approaching unanimity in their views of marriages between blacks and whites, with 86% now approving of such unions. Americans’ views on interracial marriage have undergone a major transformation in the past five decades. When Gallup first asked about black-white marriages in 1958, 4% approved. More Americans disapproved than approved until 1983, and approval did not exceed the majority level until 1997.

This is almost certainly the biggest attitudinal change on a major social issue in my lifetime. Interpolating roughly from the trendlines, there was something like 14 percent approval in 1965; it’s now 14 percent disapproval. I graduated high school and college–indeed finished my PhD–with approval below 50 percent.

My guess upon seeing the headline was that blacks were holding down the opposition almost equally with whites. That’s not the case at all:

Approval of black-white marriages is at a record high among blacks and whites. Blacks have always been more approving than whites of interracial marriage, going back to 1968 when Gallup first was able to report reliable estimates on each group’s opinions. However, the gap in approval ratings has narrowed considerably, averaging 13 percentage points since 1997 but 32 points from 1968-1994.

Not surprisingly, approval is lowest in the South, among the elderly, those with a high school education or less,  conservatives, and Republicans. But all those groups except the over-65s are tracking only four years behind the nation as a whole; the elderly are stuck in 1993:

Truly remarkable.

The trendline is stark:

He started out with 58% approval among whites; he’s now at 33%. His incredible 75% approval among Hispanics has dwindled to 48%. Ironically, though, his approval ratings are still through the roof among blacks, who are bearing the brunt of the recession and loss of jobs.

The problem with looking at these numbers, though, is that they’re looking at a single variable. It would be more useful if we could see how the trend looks when factoring in at such things as party identification, income, and education level.

Just so we’re clear that the inflammatory, and uncalled for, rhetoric is not solely a province of the right, I give you Congressman Andre Carson, representing Indiana’s 7th Congressional District:

A top lawmaker in the Congressional Black Caucus says tea partiers on Capitol Hill would like to see African-Americans hanging from trees and accuses the movement of wishing for a return to the Jim Crow era.

Rep. Andre Carson, a Democrat from Indiana who serves as the CBC’s chief vote counter, said at a CBC event in Miami that some in Congress would “love to see us as second-class citizens” and “some of them in Congress right now of this tea party movement would love to see you and me … hanging on a tree.”

This isn’t any different than a Republican who says President Obama is a Secret Muslim, or a Kenyan Socialist (apparently it’s possible to both in some people’s minds), or that he is consciously acting to destroy the country. So far, I haven’t seen anyone on the left condemn Carson, and I doubt I will. However, if you’re going to jump on the right when they say something outrageous and offensive, then you either do the same to your side, or your just a hypocrite.

Congressman John Lewis had an Op-Ed in yesterday’s New York Times that effectively compared the current push by Republican legislatures around the country to rationalize voting procedures with poll taxes and other Civil Rights Era measures that were used to prevent minorities from voting, his argument, like much of the liberal argument against such measures is totally ridiculous:

As we celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, we reflect on the life and legacy of this great man. But recent legislation on voting reminds us that there is still work to do. Since January, a majority of state legislatures have passed or considered election-law changes that, taken together, constitute the most concerted effort to restrict the right to vote since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Growing up as the son of an Alabama sharecropper, I experienced Jim Crow firsthand. It was enforced by the slander of “separate but equal,” willful blindness to acts of racially motivated violence and the threat of economic retaliation. The pernicious effect of those strategies was to institutionalize second-class citizenship and restrict political participation to the majority alone.

We have come a long way since the 1960s. When the Voting Rights Act was passed, there were only 300 elected African-American officials in the United States; today there are more than 9,000, including 43 members of Congress. The 1993 National Voter Registration Act — also known as the Motor Voter Act — made it easier to register to vote, while the 2002 Help America Vote Act responded to the irregularities of the 2000 presidential race with improved election standards.

Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states — despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.

Having fought for voting rights as a student, I am especially troubled that these laws disproportionately affect young voters. Students at state universities in Wisconsin cannot vote using their current IDs (because the new law requires the cards to have signatures, which those do not). South Carolina prohibits the use of student IDs altogether. Texas also rejects student IDs, but allows voting by those who have a license to carry a concealed handgun. These schemes are clearly crafted to affect not just how we vote, but who votes.

John Lewis played a prominent role in the protests of the Civil Rights Era, including leading the March on Selma in 1965 and being beaten by police after trying to cross the Edmund Pettis Bridge. He deserves both credit and respect for the role he played in bring Jim Crow to an end. That’s why it’s so unfortunate to see someone of his caliber waving the flag of Jim Crow in a situation like this. Accusing people who want to ensure the integrity of the voting process of racism is both vile and incorrect. To deny that there are legitimate reasons to be concerned with these issues is to merely put blinders on for what are quite obviously partisan reasons. Sadly, I don’t think Lewis cares so much about civil rights when it comes to this issue as he does about the fact that enforcing voting regulations, and taking steps to ensure that only people who are legally entitled to vote are allowed to do so, would hurt his party. Turning that into an argument over racism is just pathetic.

As far as some of the proposals that Lewis criticizes, there are legitimate reasons to at least consider these ideas without tainting them with the smear of racism. Requiring people who vote to present some form of identification at the polling place is eminently reasonable. Without such a requirement, someone can walk into a polling place with only a few pieces of information, say they are person X and get a pass into the voting booth. Here in Virginia, a voter can present any one of a number of forms of valid identification to prove both their identity and their address, not just a driver’s license. At the same time, I don’t see a Photo ID requirement as being overly burdensome, especially since every state Motor Vehicle agency will, for a small fee, issue a non-driver’s license Photo Identification that can be used for such purposes. Proving that who you say you are in order to vote doesn’t strike me as unreasonable, and since it has a rational basis, doesn’t strike me as being overly burdensome to minorities.

Lewis also brings up the issue of college student voting. This has been a contentious issues in college communities for years, primarily because most students are merely transitory residents with no ties to the communities in which they live. After their four years, most of them move on rather than establishing residence in the community. Can they really be considered residents of the community where their college is for voting purposes? Many communities say no, for what I think are entirely valid reasons. When I was in college and law school the vast majority of my fellow students were registered to vote in their hometowns, not where their school was located. Allowing them to use student ID to register to vote would be akin to giving them the opportunity to vote twice in two different locations. Moreover, I can see plenty of valid reasons why communities would not want college students voting in local elections when none of them pay taxes, use the school system, or participate in the daily life of the community. Again, this isn’t a question of racism or discrimination against the poor, Lewis’s arguments notwithstanding. However, it is interesting to note that college students are more likely to vote Democratic, so Lewis’s concern about this issue is likely motivated by partisan concerns.

Lewis also bemoans the fact that several states are cutting back on early voting, which some people believe makes it easier for people to vote and increases voter participation:

In Georgia, Florida, Ohio and other states, legislatures have significantly reduced opportunities to cast ballots before Election Day — an option that was disproportionately used by African-American voters in 2008. In this case the justification is often fiscal: Republicans in North Carolina attempted to eliminate early voting, claiming it would save money. Fortunately, the effort failed after the State Election Board demonstrated that cuts to early voting would actually be more expensive because new election precincts and additional voting machines would be required to handle the surge of voters on Election Day.

Lewis repeats the conventional wisdom that early voting makes it easier for people to vote and thus increases voter turnout. As I noted back in October, however, the most recent comprehensive study of the practice found that early voting had exactly the opposite effect:

Early voting offers convenience and additional opportunities to cast a ballot. Common sense tells us that this should mean higher turnout. But a thorough look at the data shows that the opposite is true: early voting depresses turnout by several percentage points

Our research, conducted with our colleagues David Canon and Donald Moynihan at the University of Wisconsin, is based on a three-part statistical analysis of the 2008 presidential election. First, we analyzed voting patterns in each of the nation’s 3,100 counties to estimate the effect of early voting laws on turnout. We controlled for a wide range of demographic, geographic and political variables, like whether a county was in a battleground state.

Controlling for all of the other factors thought to shape voter participation, our model showed that the availability of early voting reduced turnout in the typical county by three percentage points.

Lewis’s anecdotal evidence about African-Americans utilizing early voting disproportionately in 2008 was, in all likelihood, a manifestation of the immense enthusiasm in that community for Barack Obama’s candidacy. There’s no reason to believe that it holds up in other elections. Early voting costs states money, which is not an invalid concern in the current economic climate, and if it isn’t actually increasing turnout then states are completely correct in determining that it is not a worthwhile investment of time, money, and resources.

The election process in this country is needlessly out of date, and needlessly insecure. As we upgrade and update it, we surely need to keep in our minds the concern that such reforms will be used to disenfranchise people. However, to imply, as Lewis does, that even the most elementary reforms are evidence of racism and the return of Jim Crow, is little more than paranoid hyperbole. Congressman, I expect better of you

Photo via Boston.com