“Democrats take us for granted,” Rev. Jesse Jackson told a small group of black columnists last month, “Republicans take us for fools.”
Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele wasn’t at that meeting, but he should have been. Maybe if he’d heard Jackson’s honest analysis of how blacks are treated by the nation’s leading political parties he might have chosen his words more carefully during an interview Monday on the Tom Joyner Morning Show.
But instead, Steele – a black Republican – tripped all over his tongue during his 7.5 minute conversation with Joyner and his morning show crew.
Listen to the TJMS interview with Lt. Governor Michael Steele
“Stop with the rhetoric. Stop with the rhetoric and deal with the facts,” Steele said during a heated exchange over what the GOP is doing to court black voters. Facts are often hard to come by in debates, especially during this political season. So BlackAmericaWeb.com offers our readers this fact-checking assessment of what was said during this interview.
Steele: “Black unemployment has gone down from 10.3 percent to 10 percent and is trending downward over the last 18 months.”
Fact: According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, black unemployment during the month of July was 12 percent. Eighteen months ago it stood at 10.6 percent. Last month’s black unemployment rate represents a nearly 50-percent increase in black joblessness since January 2001 – the month George W. Bush entered the White House. At that time the black unemployment rate was just 8.4 percent.
Steele: The incarceration of African-Americans rose during the Clinton years.
Fact: The number of persons in prisons and jails did increase during Clinton’s presidency – and it has continued to increase during the Bush presidency.
Of the 1.9 million people in prisons and jails in June 2000 (the last year Clinton was in the White House) 131,496 of them were in federal custody. Eighteen months after Bush took office, the nation’s prison and jail population rose slightly to more than 2 million inmates with 161,681 of those inmates in federal prisons, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a unit of the U.S. Department of Justice.
In June 2000, there were 791,600 black men and 69,500 black women in state or federal prisons or local jails. In June 2002, there were 818,900 black men and 65,600 black women in these penal institutions.
Steele: “Bubba took it back in 1992. The white male vote went back home to the Democratic Party in 1992, that’s how Bill Clinton got elected. So that vote is not locked into the GOP anymore.”
Fact: A majority of white men have voted for the Republican candidate in every presidential election since 1968. Clinton received fewer white votes than his GOP opponents in 1992 and 1996. Most analysts attribute Clinton’s 1992 victory over George H. W. Bush to the third party candidacy of Ross Perot, who captured 19 percent of the general election votes.
“But Clinton didn’t win a much higher percentage of the white male vote than (Jimmy) Carter, (Walter) Mondale and (Michael) Dukakis did; the GOP margins fell in the 1990s because independent candidate Ross Perot siphoned away so many white men from Bush in 1992 and Bob Dole in 1996,” the Detroit News reported in a 2003 analysis of white male voting in presidential elections.
Steele: “You guys need to deal with the facts and the reality here … Do you know what the Democrat-run election committees in Florida did…with the new voting machines that they got? ... The breakdown in Florida had a lot less to do with someone stealing an election than the committees and commissions and election boards basically gerrymandering with the machines,” Steele said when asked about voting irregularities in Florida’s 2000 presidential voting.
Fact: In a 2001 analysis of that election, The Miami Herald concluded if every vote that was cast had been counted, Al Gore would have defeated Bush by 23,000 votes, instead of losing to him by 537 votes. That victory would have made Gore president.
Also in 2001, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that many eligible voters in Florida “were, in fact, denied their right to vote, with the disenfranchisement disproportionately affecting African-Americans.”
Florida’s top election official in 2000 was Katherine Harris, the Sunshine State’s secretary of state. At the same time that she was responsible for ensuring the proper conduct of the election, Harris also served as co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign.
Joyner: In his introduction, Tom Joyner described Steele as “the first African-American elected to statewide office, and the first Republican lieutenant governor in Maryland.”
Fact: Unlike lieutenant governors in states like Virginia, Colorado and California who are actually voted into office, Steele was selected to his post. While his name appeared on the state ballot as the running mate of Robert Ehrlich, the 2002 GOP gubernatorial nominee, voters in Maryland could only cast ballots for gubernatorial candidate and had no direct involvement in Steele’s selection. Lieutenant governor candidates in Maryland are usually chosen for their ability to help the gubernatorial candidate win the support of some segment of the state’s voters.
According to a Washington Post analysis of that election, Steele’s presence on the GOP ticket had little effect on black voters in Maryland. Ehrlich’s Democratic opponent, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend “claimed nearly nine out of 10 black votes” the paper reported days after the election. That was the same percentage the Democratic candidate got in the previous two gubernatorial elections, which were won by Democrat Parris Glendening over Republican opponents who selected white men as their lieutenant governor running mates.
