House of Eratosthenes

We never seem to make a dent in any of this stuff. We make new programs and laws, the money sloshes around, people inside the system get rich off the rest of us, and the problems continue. And if the statistics on this bad stuff do indeed go down, the next year they’re right back up again.

Just once, I wish Congress could pass a resolution saying something to the effect of “it seems this whole problem is out of harmony with the class of things that government can solve, and when we try, all we do is make men rich who have a vested interest in keeping the problem going.” Just to show me Congress has what it takes to come to this realization, when there is adequate reason to do so. Especially with regard to that first one, the racial/gender division.

This morning, the following editorial in the Wall Street Journal reached my e-mail:

‘A White Individual’
How the Voting Rights Act promotes racial polarization.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

With Congress poised to extend, for another quarter-century, certain “temporary” provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, it’s worth pondering some of the political mischief taking place these days in the name of “voting rights.”

Take New York’s 11th Congressional District, a safe Democratic seat covering several neighborhoods in Brooklyn. The seat is currently occupied by Major Owens, a black Democrat who has held it since 1983 and is retiring this year. One of the four candidates to replace him is David Yassky, a white Democrat who represents some of the same Brooklyn neighborhoods as a city councilman.

Mr. Owens has one of Congress’s most liberal voting records, and there’s nothing in the background of Mr. Yassky, a prot�g� of New York Senator Chuck Schumer, that suggests he would vote much differently. Even so, Mr. Owens and the three other candidates, all of whom are black, are on a mission to force Mr. Yassky out of the race. In the case of Mr. Owens, this has partly to do with the fact that his son is among those running in the September 12 Democratic primary. But Mr. Owens, the other black candidates and local black officials have stressed that their overriding concern is the color of Mr. Yassky’s skin. And they’re using the Voting Right Act to justify old-fashioned race-baiting.

New York’s 11th District is a product of racial gerrymandering linked to passage of the Voting Rights Act. When Congress passed the law 40 years ago to address black disenfranchisement primarily in the Deep South, some provisions were made permanent and others temporary. Gone forever were poll taxes and grandfather clauses, but Section 5 provisions of the law dealing with “preclearance,” or federal oversight of local election practices, were meant to be short-term.

Study after study shows that preclearance is no longer necessary. Black voter registration and participation rates, along with the growth of minority officeholders–often elected with white “cross-over” votes–demonstrate that blacks are no longer disenfranchised. Yet Congress continues to reauthorize these Section 5 provisions because they allow both Republicans and Democrats to keep drawing racially gerrymandered districts in the name of protecting voting rights.

“A law passed to protect minority voters–to ensure free and fair access to the polls–has become much like every other affirmative action policy,” says Edward Blum, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a forthcoming book on the unintended consequences of the Voting Rights Act. “It has become, literally, a racial set-aside. The law is being used to justify actual racial proportionality.”

It’s bad enough that such gerrymandering has all but eviscerated inter-party competition for seats in Congress, creating so many “safe” Republican and Democratic strongholds that the outcome of most races is a foregone conclusion. But another pernicious byproduct of gerrymandering is the racial polarization and hyper-partisanship that we see in places like New York’s 11th District. These so-called “majority-minority” gerrymanders tend to nurture political division and extremism by reducing incentives for candidates to make appeals to anyone other than their racial or ethnic voting base.

Representative Owens has labeled Mr. Yassky a “colonizer.” Al Sharpton, ever the statesman, has called the candidate, who is Jewish, “greedy.” And the New York Sun reported last week that Albert Vann, a city councilman who opposes Mr. Yassky’s candidacy, sent an email to black elected officials nationwide announcing that “we are in peril of losing a ‘Voting Rights’ district . . . as a result of the well financed candidacy of Council Member David Yassky, a white individual.”

Ironically, such rhetoric is one reason so few minorities are able to seek and win higher office. Once you’re appealing to people on completely racial grounds in order to win a House seat, you have a hard time making the broader appeals necessary to win statewide.

But don’t expect any of this to matter as Congress ramrods through another extension of the provisions that feed these bad outcomes. A House vote is due any day, and the Senate is expected to follow sometime prior to the July 4 recess. Congress has never let balkanization of the electorate get in the way of protecting its own political hide, especially when it can claim to be siding with the “voting rights” angels.

Huh. Now, I’m not black, nor am I jewish, nor do I live in the 11th district of New York, nor have I very often ventured within three thousand miles of said area. And I’m certainly not a left-wing Democrat. But I was born within a short time of the forementioned Civil Rights Act, and it’s interesting to me what’s going on now that I’m an old man. Congress has had the chance to twiddle around with this issue of racial division for all of my mortal life, every single second of it. Well, how we doin’?

Not so hot. Jesse Jackson is a rich man, but other than that, in places like the 11th district black-and-white might as well be two separate countries.

I “did a Google” on this guy Yassky. The results are pretty interesting. One of the pieces I got back was this New York Times article (link requires registration):

Black Leaders Fear Loss of Brooklyn House Seat
By JONATHAN P. HICKS
Published: June 12, 2006

A group of black and Hispanic elected officials from Brooklyn are scheduled to meet this morning to devise strategies to keep a white candidate from winning a Congressional seat of historical significance in black politics.

City Councilman David Yassky, who is running against three black candidates in the 11th Congressional District in Brooklyn, campaigned Sunday at the Jesus Is Lord Ministry, in a community center in Flatbush.

It is not the first such meeting of these officials, nor is it likely to be the last. That there are talks so steeped in ethnicity indicates that race is not just one of the issues in determining who will succeed Representative Major R. Owens. It seems to be the dominant one.

Mr. Owens, a veteran of more than two decades in Congress who turns 70 this month, is not running for re-election. The black and Hispanic officials gathering today are discussing how to prevent David Yassky, a white city councilman from Brooklyn Heights, from winning a seat that once belonged to Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress.

Mr. Yassky, a former law professor, has collected as much in campaign contributions as his rivals combined, more than $800,000 at the time of the last campaign finance filing.

And his three black opponents in the Democratic primary � as well as many black and Hispanic officials throughout the borough � have become increasingly agitated by the possibility that blacks would split their vote, allowing him to win.

Today’s meeting, which was called by City Councilman Albert Vann, a Brooklyn Democrat, will focus in part on whether one or two of the three black candidates might be willing to drop out of the campaign.

Two weeks ago, a fourth black candidate, Assemblyman N. Nick Perry, announced that he was withdrawing from the Congressional campaign and running instead for re-election. He said one reason was to reduce the number of black candidates and make it harder for Mr. Yassky to succeed.

Some black and Hispanic officials in Brooklyn have said they believe that the district � which, according to the Almanac of American Politics, is 58.5 percent black, 21.4 percent white and 12.1 percent Hispanic � would be best served by a black representative. But they also talked of the emotional importance of sending a black representative to Washington from the district.

As a result of a lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, several predominantly black neighborhoods of Brooklyn were consolidated into the 12th Congressional District. In 1968 it elected Ms. Chisholm, who in 1972 sought the Democratic presidential nomination. Mr. Owens succeeded her in 1983.

The district lines were later shifted, and much of the 12th District was incorporated into what is now the 11th.

“We want to see if there is a way that we might unite behind one black candidate in the race, as opposed to several black candidates running along with Yassky,” said Assemblywoman Annette Robinson, an organizer of the meeting. “We’re going to try to work this out, reminding the candidates that people have fought for this district to be a Voting Rights district.”

There have been many discussions by elected officials over the last year, since Mr. Yassky emerged as a candidate, about how the field of black candidates might be narrowed. And Mr. Perry’s withdrawal has fueled speculation about whether any of the others might follow.

All this talk about a “Voting Rights district” is troubling. Amongst the people who want to stop David Yassky, there appears to be a fundamental agreement on the task at hand — keep the cracker out of there. Make sure the district is represented by a black guy. You may like that mission or you may not, but like any other mission, it strikes me as having a better shot at success if people who support it, call it what it is.

A “Voting Rights district,” here, is a “black district.” It’s a concern echoed by this anonymous source quoted on the website of Chris Owens, son of incumbent congressman Major Owens:

Two additional white Democratic leaders told The Brooklyn Papers this week that they will not endorse Yassky because they feel the 11th Congressional district was drawn to elect a black candidate. One of the leaders, who requested anonymity, … added, “I don’t think he should be running in this district.”

This is the argument against David Yassky, that his skin is the wrong color. That’s right. Weird-beards out in the Middle East want to incinerate us, some people think our President lied to get us into a war, and is spying on us, plus maybe our megacorporations are warming the globe with their toxic emissions, making the planet ultimately uninhabitable. And the paramount concern for some is the color of a congressman’s skin.

And, his support of Israel…

David Yassky is pissing me off

The primary race in NY-11 has been fairly nasty on some levels, and a lot of that nastiness–especially race-based nastiness–has been aimed David Yassky’s way. See, for example, today’s New York Times article on the subject:

Black Leaders Fear Loss of Brooklyn House Seat
By JONATHAN P. HICKS

A group of black and Hispanic elected officials from Brooklyn are scheduled to meet this morning to devise strategies to keep a white candidate from winning a Congressional seat of historical significance in black politics.

It is not the first such meeting of these officials, nor is it likely to be the last. That there are talks so steeped in ethnicity indicates that race is not just one of the issues in determining who will succeed Representative Major R. Owens. It seems to be the dominant one.

Mr. Owens, a veteran of more than two decades in Congress who turns 70 this month, is not running for re-election. The black and Hispanic officials gathering today are discussing how to prevent David Yassky, a white city councilman from Brooklyn Heights, from winning a seat that once belonged to Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress.

While I don’t support the guy or agree with him on many issues, I thought this was a little unfair. That was before this morning, when I went to look for some things on Yassky’s website in order to comment on this post of Steve Gilliard’s on that NYT article. That’s when I started to believe there might be something to Bouldin’s claim that

…[t]he Yassky strategy is cynical, reaching out as it does to Jewish voters on Jewish issues, and otherwise appealing to other voters on the basis of color-blind competence. That is not merely starkly hypocritical, it is intentionally and knowingly divisive.

Yassky used to have a page in the issues section of his website that pandered pretty outrageously to religious Jewish voters, talking about his efforts to divert funding to religious schools and to get a state-paid nurse in every yeshiva. When I went to look for it this morning, though, it wasn’t there.

I mentioned that in my comments at Gilliard’s, and reproduced a snippet of my brilliant Left Behinds analysis on that NY-11 poll, which included a link to the “Defending Israel” issues section of the Yassky website. Lo and behold, the Yassky team redesigned its website today, and perhaps coincidentally (as an anonymous user alerted us in the comment thread later) the “Defending Israel” section is gone and my link is dead.

Excuse me, but fuck that. Yassky doesn’t get to pander and run a second time. This time I went to the Google cache and got screenshots of that issue page, which I will now post so they don’t disappear forever. Again.

Full sizes here and here.

Kind of interesting how a subtle bigotry can stumble onward, decades and decades into our modernized era of Harmony between Ebony and Ivory, if the bigots just pay the proper lip service to “Voting Rights.” And, of course, exercise their bigotry in the right direction. Against Israel, and against anybody who isn’t black.

I just don’t understand, poor living conditions or no, how & why anybody thinks this is on any kind of path to success. If identity politics must be the order of the day, because only a black guy can represent other black guys, then why keep sending someone to Congress? You need 218 people to agree to do something there, or to stop something from happening; there are far less than 218 black congressmen there. White guys can represent the issues of black guys and black guys can address the issues of white guys — yes, or no. If no, then the exercise is futile, as it is an exercise in getting black guys elected to represent black districts in Congress, on the floor of which they will be systematically outvoted. The premise, after all, dictates that no multi-racial coalitions will be formed, on anything. Ever. So they get their asses kicked. If the answer to the premise is yes, so that the multi-racial coalitions can be formed on the floor of Congress, what then happens to the argument that Yassky has to be defeated because he’s a white guy? What happens to the whole “Voting Rights district” angle? It is decimated, that’s what.

See, I don’t think the rank-and-file voters are noodling this out. In order for grievances like these to attract any sort of currency, voters have to be hauling resentment and hatred into the voting booth, and not a whole lot of anything else.

I suppose a cursory reading of our blog might have left a person with the opinion that I don’t think much of Israel, but it would have to have pretty much a hit and run. In fact, I am Jewish and do support Israel’s existence. I’m not going to repeat what you’ve quoted here, I think it’s pretty clear on its own to anyone not attempting a deliberate misreading. I’m objecting to Yassky’s peddling positions to one slice of the NY-11 electorate while trying to hide them from everyone else. He can believe and say whatever he wants; it just annoys me that he keeps pulling the Jewish-targeted stuff from his site.

Finally, I can’t believe you expect anyone to take seriously the idea that we “haven’t made a dent” in “healing racial/gender division” since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. That’s bizarre. Racial equality is clearly in a radically different place now than it was in 1965.
- Antid Oto | 06/21/2006 @ 08:33
In matters local to the 11th district, for reasons already stated I’ll have to defer to your better knowledge.

But if a candidate is regarded by so many as unsuitable to represent people because of the color of his skin — you cite other reasons, some other people do not — that’s racial division. It’s an open and shut case; it’s the very definition. Your impliciation is this is diminishing. It appears a lot of people are working pretty hard to keep it going.

Tell me again how you can’t believe I expect anyone to take it seriously; seems like a given.
- mkfreeberg | 06/21/2006 @ 09:12
You’re offering a false choice: either we’ve solved all our racial and ethnic divisions or we’ve made no progress. The fact is that we have made great progress (seen any race riots or lynchings lately?) but we still have a lot left to do.
- Antid Oto | 06/21/2006 @ 13:08
Actually I should amend that slightly, since we have had race riots within the last 15 years. Nothing on the scale of the 1960s, however, and I would still contend we’ve made enormous progress despite the problems that remain.
- Antid Oto | 06/21/2006 @ 13:11
Yes I’m familiar with that little reassurance. It’s what the power brokers tell the little people when they want a blank check and abhore any discussion of what’s actually being accomplished. It isn’t confined to matters of race.

At this blog we call it CALWWNTY.

In this case, I’ll believe racial division is healed when whites let blacks represent them, and vice-versa. It does not appear to me that those who direct the course of these movements, even have a plan for such a thing, let alone can point to any progress toward it.
- mkfreeberg | 06/21/2006 @ 14:03

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Tuesday, June 20th, 2006