RACE CARD A NASTY JOKER BLACK VOTERS ILL SERVED BY DEMOCRATS' SCARE TACTICS.

Byline: Joe R. Hicks

IS it just me, or shouldn't there be some national outrage over the way the Kerry campaign used race as it stumped for black votes? With fear as the omnipresent backdrop, Sen. John Kerry and his running mate, Sen. John Edwards, repeatedly told black audiences that President George W. Bush and the Republicans ``stole'' the election in 2000 by disenfranchising black voters in Florida and that Republicans were planning to do it again in 2004.

Speaking to one of Ohio's largest black congregations, Kerry said that this time, ``we're not going to allow 1 million African-Americans to be disenfranchised.'' Such use of the race card might have made O.J. Simpson's ``dream team'' proud. Although the issue has simply vanished, we may pay a high price in damaged race relations for years to come.

Despite the dire predictions of black disenfranchisement in the recent presidential election, you will note that there has been a deafening silence since the election about ``black voter intimidation'' everywhere, including in key battleground states.

First, it challenges the imagination to believe that Republicans, who badly want a larger share of the black vote, would then make use of strategies that would universally repel black voters.

Secondly, had such tactics actually been used, they would have been detected immediately by a literal army of volunteer poll observers and a sea of legal eagles looking for any and every voting irregularity in states like Ohio and Florida.

The belief that Republicans conspired to keep blacks from voting has its roots in Florida 2000. The view that there was widespread black disenfranchisement in the 2000 elections has been both deep and widespread among blacks and liberal activists, even though there is no credible evidence that it ever occurred.

Bill Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, sent staff into Florida after those elections, responding to the complaints of Jesse Jackson and other civil-rights figures as the ballots were counted and recounted. She found no evidence to sustain the allegations. After a six-month investigation, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, headed by Democratic partisan Mary Francis Berry, was also unable to find any evidence that a racial conspiracy existed to deny black voters their franchise. The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division also conducted an investigation that was completed in 2002 and concluded in writing that ``no credible evidence (was found) that Floridians were intentionally denied their right to vote during November 2000 election.''

None of this mattered. The cacophony of allegations has been continuous since the 2000 elections. The theme of black voter disenfranchisement has been a rallying issue among America's civil-rights and left-liberal activists. This charge has fueled much of the pathological hatred and demonization of Bush by the professional protest crowd.

There is, of course, lots of history that comes with the allegations of disenfranchisement. America's past includes a shameful history of racial discrimination against blacks, which often took the form of the physical intimidation of voters, as well as the outright denial of the franchise. Blacks routinely braved threats to life and limb for registering to vote in many places throughout the South.

This kind of nonsense was incrementally done away with by the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. And by the late 1970s, the occurrences of black voter intimidation were as rare as they were aberrational. But in a contemporary sense, generalized stories of black voter intimidation are nothing less than insulting. After a long struggle to get the vote, black Americans, generally speaking, are not known for their timidity - being easily turned away from polling places.

Some observers argue that the use of the race card was precipitated by a view that the Democrats' usual disproportionate share of the black vote was shrinking. This is arguable, given the heavy-handed racial appeals delivered by the Clinton and Al Gore campaigns.

However, the election results in 2000 showed that only 8 percent of the black vote went to Bush. In the weeks running up to this year's presidential election, national polls showed that upward of 18 percent of the black vote was considering voting for the president. While these polls proved to have been optimistic - approximately 11 percent of the black vote went to Bush - these surveys shocked Democratic Party strategists. After all, a large black vote was critical to the Democrats' plans. To strengthen their hold on that vote, Kerry's surrogates employed all-out efforts, including efforts to sow fear among black voters.

Even before this polling became public information, former President Jimmy Carter was giving speeches claiming that ``several thousand ballots of African-Americans were thrown out on technicalities.'' He failed to tell people that these ballots were rejected because they were cast by convicted felons, who are not qualified to vote under Florida law.

Fliers circulated in St. Louis by America Coming Together, a liberal 527 organization, showed a 1960s-era snapshot of a firefighter hosing a black man. The copy said, ``This is what they used to do to keep us from voting. Don't let them do it again.''

Sen. Jon Corzine, D-New Jersey, sent out a fund appeal with the following claim: ``The GOP used voter intimidation and outright fraud to hand Florida to George W. Bush in 2000, and if we don't stop them, they'll do it again.''

Then, as the campaign entered its final phase, Jesse Jackson hammered home the now-familiar message. Standing in the pulpit, Jackson conjured up the hated name ``Bull Connor'' and told black church audiences that Republicans planned to keep them from exercising their vote. He toured black churches throughout battleground states - often with Kerry and Gore by his side - delivering the ominous message that the specter of Jim Crow still stalks the American landscape.

This attempt to play on the fears of black voters may reverberate for years. With the election over, civil-rights figures and their liberal allies - having lobbed racial hand grenades - have now moved on to other issues. The remaining legacy, however, is that many blacks will continue to feel angry and resentful, convinced that Republicans conspired against them. Democratic Party strategists' use of the race card will result in an even more entrenched view on the part of all too many blacks who feel that they are perpetually victims of this society.

Never mind that this view flies in the face of contemporary reality. The victim's view is that the glass is always half-empty - if that.

The shame of this entire affair is that those who made the unsubstantiated claims of black voter disenfranchisement have now walked away, smug and self-righteous in the belief that they simply could not have played racially divisive roles. The fact remains that they are, indeed, leaving behind a racial mess for others to now clean up.

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Photo:

(color) Sen. John Kerry and the Rev. Jesse Jackson visit a Baptist church in Cleveland before the Nov. 2 election.

Gerald Herbert/Associated Press