who have argued that voter ID laws are necessary to help ensure ballot integrity. “When I was a congressman, I took the path of least resistance on this subject for an African American politician,” wrote Artur Davis, a former member of the Congressional Black Caucus who left office in 2010. “Without any evidence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation. The truth is that the most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African American community, at least in Alabama, is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.”9
It so happens that black voter turnout surpassed white turnout for the first time on record in 2012, even while more and more states were implementing these supposedly racist voter ID laws. “About two in three eligible blacks (66.2 percent) voted in the 2012 presidential election, higher than the 64.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites who did so,” according to the Census Bureau. “Blacks were the only race or ethnic group to show a significant increase between the 2008 and 2012 elections in the likelihood of voting (from 64.7 percent to 66.2 percent).” Was this simply a case of more blacks turning out to support a black candidate? Perhaps, but as the Census Bureau notes, the trend predates the Obama presidency. “The 2012 increase in voting among blacks continues what has been a long-term trend: since 1996, turnout rates have risen 13 percentage points to the highest levels of any recent presidential election.”10 The trend was most pronounced in red states like Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi. Black voter turnout in 2012 surpassed white turnout by statistically significant margins in Florida, Virginia, and the Carolinas, as well as in states with the strictest voter ID laws, such as Tennessee, Georgia, and Indiana. Democrats claim such laws deny blacks the franchise, but where is the evidence?
Obama typically has employed surrogates to make blunt racial appeals—recall Vice President Joe Biden telling a mostly black audience on the 2012 campaign trail that Republicans want to “put y’all back in chains”—but the nation’s first black president is not above personally using this sort of rhetoric, as he has sometimes done in response to the relatively few black critics of his presidency who have dared to go public. During Obama’s first term, Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri told the Wall Street Journal that he was “frustrated with the president” over the stratospheric black unemployment rate. The congressman said that he understood Obama’s reluctance to be too closely associated with the black community and thus be seen as favoring blacks over other Americans. Nevertheless, “you would think that if any group in America had 20 percent to 25 percent unemployment, it would generate all kinds of attention,” he said. “The Labor Department would understandably and necessarily begin to concentrate on what can we do to reduce this level of unemployment. Congress would give great time on the floor for debate on what can be done.” After other prominent black liberals—including academic Cornel West, commentator Tavis Smiley, and Democratic Representative Maxine Waters of California—began griping about Obama’s lack of attention to the economic problems of the black underclass, the president responded in a sharply worded address to the Congressional Black Caucus. “I expect all of you to march with me and press on,” he said, evoking the language of Martin Luther King Jr. and other black preachers of the civil rights era. “Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on.”
But racial allegiance doesn’t entirely explain black attitudes toward Obama, according to David Bositis, a political scientist at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies who specializes in black issues. “You have to put the choice that African Americans are making in context,” he told the Huffington Post in 2011. “Certainly there may be some residual good feelings from that historic moment in 2008. But support for the president remains strong because there is no real menu of political options for African Americans.”11
Bositis is a liberal who holds conservatives in low regard, but he is correct in noting that GOP outreach to blacks in recent decades has ranged somewhere between inadequate and nonexistent. In the main, black voters don’t choose between Democratic and Republican candidates; they vote Democrat or they stay home. Many liberals are quick to assume that racial animus explains the lack of any serious GOP effort to woo blacks. But in his memoir, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas offered an alternative explanation: political pragmatism. Recounting his days as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Reagan in the early 1980s, Thomas wrote that his “main quarrel” with the Reagan administration was that he thought it needed a positive civil rights agenda, instead of merely railing against racial preferences. “But I found it impossible to get the administration to pay attention to such matters,” he wrote.
Too many of the president’s political appointees seemed more interested in playing to the conservative bleachers—and I’d come to realize, as I told a reporter, that “conservatives don’t exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they’re welcome.”
Thomas next offered a theory as to why that was the case:
Was it because they were prejudiced? Perhaps some of them were, but the real reason, I suspected, was that blacks didn’t vote for Republicans, nor would Democrats work with President Reagan on civil-rights issues. As a result there was little interest within the administration in helping a constituency that wouldn’t do anything in return to help the president.
My suspicions were confirmed when I offered my assistance to President Reagan’s reelection campaign, only to be met with near-total indifference. One political consultant was honest enough to tell me straight out that since the president’s reelection strategy didn’t include the black vote, there was no role for me. 12
Prior to Obama’s win in 2008, the GOP had won five out of seven presidential elections. Over that same stretch, fewer than 10 percent of blacks typically identified as Republicans. Black voters today remain nonessential to GOP electoral success, and time spent courting one group leaves less time to court others who are deemed key to winning. When this dynamic changes—when GOP candidates begin to think that they need black voters to prevail—perhaps we will see a more sustained effort to win over blacks. In recent years, the GOP has been having a spirited intraparty debate over whether it can continue to win elections without more Hispanic voters, given the rapid growth of the Latino population. Republicans haven’t been paying half as much attention to blacks. This reality obviously has allowed Democrats to take the black vote for granted, and Barack Obama is no exception. But it has also resulted in a state of affairs that is arguably even more pernicious. To wit: Many blacks, at the urging of civil rights leaders and the liberal intelligentsia who share the Democratic Party’s big-government agenda, place a premium on the political advancement of the race. Whether political power is in fact a necessary precondition for group advancement is rarely questioned. It’s simply assumed to be true.
“What began as a protest movement is being challenged to translate itself into a political movement,” wrote Bayard Rustin in a 1965 essay, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” Rustin, chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, wrote that “More than voter registration is involved here. A conscious bid for political power is being made.”13 (Here and throughout this book, emphases in excerpted matter are from the original.) In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “How shall we make every house worker and every laborer a demonstrator, a voter, a canvasser and a student?” James Farmer, another prominent member of the civil rights old guard, also envisioned political power as the way forward for blacks. “We can no longer rely on pressuring and cajoling political units toward desired actions,” he wrote in 1965. “We must be in a position of power, a position to change these political units when they are not responsive. The only way to achieve political objectives is through power, political power.”14
By and large, black intellectuals today have not changed their thinking in this regard. “Black politics—African Americans’ ability to mobilize, influence policy, demand accountability from government officials, and contribute and influence American political discourse, all in the