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The missed chance at the Morgan State debate Thursday night wasn't that the four top Republican presidential candidates didn't come to speak but that they didn't come to listen. The questions that came at those who did show up at the All-American Presidential Forum reflected an audience whose experience and assumptions are way beyond these guys' radar. It would have done them good.
Held at the historically black university in Baltimore, the Sept 28 debate gave second-stringers like Huckabee, Hunter and Tancredo extra exposure, not always to their advantage. Nonetheless, they managed moments of compassion along with others of clueless insensitivity and unintended hilarity.
Host Tom Joyner got off the best one-liner of the night when he welcomed those 'viewing us from home', then listed the no-shows--Romney, Giuliani, Thompson and McCain--one by one. The atmosphere was staid and preppy, with plenty of black Republicans and a female fighter pilot in the audience, along with two veterans of the Little Rock desegregation battle of the 1950s, a reminder of what it took to become a successful black professional.
When the show started, everyone pretty much agreed that slavery had been a bad idea and was willing to applaud the civil rights movement, too, at least in the abstract. But when the conversation on race returned to our own century, the black questioners and white respondents seemed to be communicating between two tin cans placed on separate planets. (Alan Keyes, the only black candidate in the line-up, was busy channeling Cotton Mather and couldn't help.)
The low point occurred when NPR's Juan Williams asked what the candidates would do to ensure fair treatment for minority youth in the criminal justice system, and unlucky Sam Brownback had to answer first. Apparently non-plussed at the idea that injustices had indeed occurred, Brownback ran out the clock with a stumbling reply about his visits to jails and homeless shelters.
Duncan Hunter then went for Racially Sensitive Man-of-theYear by supporting the prosecution of the Jena 6, prompting moderator Tavis Smiley's sole intervention of the evening to request a 'respectful' answer to the question, which he didn't get.
Mike Huckabee usually provided a note of realism and generosity to the proceedings (not to mention relief--he followed Keyes in the line-up, whose hellfire & damnation riffs threatened to spill over into glossolalia). He said prisons were bankrupting states because we're filling them with substance abusers instead of providing rehab, setting himself up for an attack using the 'L' word (and I don't mean Lesbian). But he avoided, not by raising his hand against evolution this time, but with a segué out of genocide in Darfur into fetus-slaughter.
Ron Paul, speaking for the many libertarian anarchists in black Republican ranks, plumped for eliminating government and giving the state of nature another try. Tancredo caromed issue after issue onto the Mexican border wall, and Hunter repeatedly intoned his former life in the 'barrio' although he stopped short of trilling his double-Rs.
Not surprisingly, the most interesting exchanges of the evening concerned the candidates' understanding of racial politics in the country, and there the answers were diverse. Several candidates praised Eisenhower and claimed the civil rights mantle for their party, gingerly avoiding what might have caused the entire white South to switch to the GOP after passage of the 1964 civil rights act.
Tancredo took the color-blind pitch and discouraged race-specific programs. He rethumped the immigration issue and reminded the crowd that blacks were here first although he avoided specifics on how they arrived.
Hunter bridged to the more comfortable topic of pornography, which 'people of all races need to be shielded from.' Huckabee and Brownback, on the other hand, said racism was still alive and the color-blind society only an ideal.
Over the 90-minute session the Morgan State questioners, Williams, Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Constitution and Ray Suarez of The News Hour, wove a different tone and avoided a lot of standard debate fare. No one raised the war on terrorism, for example, although there were probably plenty of military families in the crowd. In fact, the Iraq war only came up in the context of a question about falling enlistment among minority youth. Nor were there any whiffle-ball prompts to promise us lower taxes. All in all, it was a reminder of how much Caucasian concerns dominate our everyday political discourse.
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