GOP politicians still don’t get it
It was an anniversary that passed with hardly a peep. Last week marked one year since Republicans unveiled that 100-page report they called the “Growth and Opportunity Project.” Sigh!
It was considered an “autopsy” of the GOP’s dwindling support among women, African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics and gay voters.
“I think our policies are sound, but I think in many ways the way we communicate can be a real problem,” said GOP Chair Reince Priebus at the time.
Translation: “Republicans insult lots of voters who aren’t white men. So, we’re going to say nice things about non-white male voters and hope they don’t notice our policies don’t really benefit them.”
Well, that was last year. This year, that 100-page report is collecting dust on somebody’s basement bookcase. Republicans haven’t exactly toned down their rhetoric or made their policy proposals any more appealing to women, African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics or gay voters.
There was that recent attempt by the Arizona legislature to allow the state’s business owners to openly discriminate against gay men and women — on religious grounds.
That particular chapter opened old wounds, caused a national outcry and a rift in the Republican Party, until Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, vetoed it.
For an even more egregious example of how Republicans still haven’t learned their lesson, let’s look at how one Republican state legislator in South Dakota looks at racial discrimination. Phil Jenson has somehow come up with the twisted logic that if a business owner in his state would like to refuse service to an African-American, they should have that right.
“In a matter of weeks or so that business would shut down because no one is going to patronize them,” Jenson opines.
He feels that businesses shouldn’t have to be bound by legalities, if they decide to refuse to serve anybody based on their race. To him, that’s purely a matter of the “free-market economy.” Soon after a black person is refused service, according to Jenson, everybody will go elsewhere, and the business will be forced to close its doors.
Just think. If he’d been around during slavery, he could’ve argued that it would eventually end by itself because the “free-market” would cause slave owners to go out of business. How’s that for “Growth and Opportunity?”
Then there’s good old vice president (of the Sore Loser’s Club) Paul Ryan. The usually articulate Republican recently got into hot water for saying, “We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities of men not working and just generations of men not thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”
He’d just called entire communities of inner city black men lazy. There goes the black vote — again.
After one of Ryan’s indignant U.S. House colleagues, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), chastised him, he offer this tepid response.
“I was not implicating the culture of one community — but of society as a whole,” he said, as if he hadn’t used the words “inner city.”
Once again, how’s that for “Growth and Opportunity?”
But the crowning achievement of Republican tone-deafness in recent weeks is the bizarre flap involving fair pay for women in the state of Texas. The Lilly Ledbetter Act was one of the first pieces of legislation signed into law by President Obama. It allows any woman to seek redress in federal court if they discover they’ve suffered from pay discrimination.
Wendy Davis, the Democratic candidate for governor, has come out for such laws. Her Republican opponent, Greg Abbott, has remained mum on the subject. Probably because he’d once argued in a Texas Supreme Court case that federal fair pay protections aren’t valid in Texas. Instead, executive director of the Republican Party of Texas, Beth Cubriel, has added her two cents.
“Men are better negotiators. And I would encourage women, instead of pursuing the courts for action to become better negotiators,” she claimed.
Translation: “It’s a woman’s fault she gets paid less than a man to do the same job. Women need to be tougher.”
Here I go again. How’s that for “Growth and Opportunity?”
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net