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GOP: Losing Race by not Entering
On Monday, Arizona Republicans showed casual contempt and a dismissive attitude towards racial equality, and the public in Mesa, AZ saw it. The East Valley Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parade and Festival is a public-private partnership, with the City of Mesa officially involved in organizing and sponsoring the event. I will post photographs later, illustrating the parade as I did for Veterans’ Day, but what I saw, and did not see, prompts me to write before the day is gone.
What follows is a first-hand report of the parade: organization, the crowd, parade entrants, and the festival following the parade.
Parade Organization:
Unlike the Veterans’ Day parade, where a non-profit group has had primary responsibility for organization and funding over the years, today’s parade was a public-private partnership event. The City of Mesa takes lead responsibility:
The East Valley Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Parade is a collaboration by the City of Mesa and Mesa Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Committee.
Once again, the Mesa Police Department ran a first-class operation, discreetly providing excellent security without a heavy hand.
The Crowd:
The crowd looked like Mesa. There were young families and senior citizens. Most of the people who lined the parade route, standing or sitting in folding camp chairs, were white or Hispanic, with apparently more blacks marching in the parade than lining the route. This reflects Arizona’s demographics, as reported by the US Census Bureau:
Race and Hispanic Origin
White alone, 83.1%
Black or African American alone, 5.0%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone,5.3%
Asian alone, 3.5%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, 0.3%
Two or More Races, 2.8%
Hispanic or Latino, 31.4%
White alone, not Hispanic or Latino, 54.9%
The Parade Entrants:
There was some overlap in participants between the Veterans’ Day Parade and the Martin Luther King Jr. Parade. Groups dedicated to commemorating African Americans’ participation in our military, especially the Buffalo Soldiers role in the American West, were in both parades. The Civil Air Patrol and Commemorative Air Force were sure to get in front of the public, as were some school bands, cheer, and dance groups. The Mesa and Chandler Police Departments marched, the Mesa PD band leading and the Chandler restomodded police cruiser lighting up the bubble light, siren, and tires.
Historically black churches were well represented in the parade, still core institutions in community life. Music radio stations were represented, while conservative talk stations were not, differing from the Veterans’ Day radio station contingent. A highlight of this parade, which was not in the most recent East Valley Veterans’ Parade, was a group of Buffalo Soldier reenactors, on foot and mounted.
There was little overt ideological messaging, except for a few hand-crafted signs and a few standard leftist chants. Police officers walked the route shaking hands and giving children “junior police” stickers. The overall atmosphere was positive and celebratory, complemented by a wonderful Arizona January day, shirt sleeves, a few fluffy clouds, and sunshine.
A Tale of Two Parties:
Witnessing today’s parade, seeing who showed up to march, or set up a booth, and who did not, brought to mind Justice Clarence Thomas’s indictment of the national GOP in My Grandfather’s Son (emphasis added):
…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.” 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 did 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.
The Democrats showed up today. Two state legislative districts were proudly represented–as was Arizona State University, which has an East Valley campus–by their Democratic Party chapters. There was not a single self-identified Republican in the parade, which lasted over an hour, nor was there a single conservative group booth to be seen at the festival following the parade. This obvious snub is sitting at some level in the minds of all the parade viewers, ready to be activated by Democrats as they turn Arizona from reliably Republican to dependably Democrat.
A tweet is not sufficient engagement. Indeed, if you roll out this tweet, acknowledging you are aware of the holiday, your failure to show up becomes even more offensive:
“There is nothing more majestic and sublime than the quiet testimony of a people willing to sacrifice and suffer for the cause of freedom.”
This #MLKDay, we remember the impact Dr. King's life had on American civil rights and our dedication to building a more perfect union. pic.twitter.com/uzo48rKKh2
— AZ Republican Party (@AZGOP) January 21, 2019
Mitt Romney was rightly lambasted for writing off 47 percent of the American electorate. Donald Trump expressly reached out to all Americans who have been left behind, and continues to do so to this day. Romney, the “conservative” commentariat, and the Arizona GOP have shown they are not truly interested in being the Party of Lincoln, whereas President Trump, who they disdain or at best grudgingly acknowledge, has truly striven to gain back long-abandoned voters.
Laziness leads to losing. You can’t win if you don’t play. The fastest way to lose a race is by not showing up at the starting line.
Published in Politics
Yes, horses, dogs, and ponies win every time.
Do you understand how contemptuous and arrogant your words sound?
This is Mesa AZ we are talking about, not a “possible dangerous neighborhoods”.
Yes, and College Republicans had the day off, so where were they? Why didn’t the professional party staff, who just saw us lose a Senate seat, aggressively move on the public messaging offense?
This calls to mind a conversation recently with an escapee from California, who said the CA GOP had flatly given up and written off small businessmen and women who had the wrong last names. He was a successful salesman to businesses in the L.A. area because he treated business owners with respect, listening first and then offering solutions to problems. He was Anglo, they had Latin American ancestry, or were first generation, AND he refused to use that as an excuse to write off sales territory.
No, it is an American holiday and MLK was a great American. Mesa has a lot of Republicans. Be nice for them to participate in an organized way. I’m with @cliffordabrown 100% on this.
Yes, AND I need to get the photos posted up, to make the actual context clear. That report will be up late this evening.
Be happy to join you at next year’s parade. We can bring our own sign.
Sorry, I should have been clearer with my wording as I was thinking of Republicans competing with Dems on the local level in general, having nothing to do with Mesa. My experience as a Republican Party member and member of our womens’ clubs over the years has left me with the first-hand knowledge that we are better at writing checks than we are at knocking on doors in poor neighborhoods at election time or any other time. Years ago as a young wife in Anchorage, and a serious GOP volunteer, I was talking to a woman who was a Dem activist about the fact that I didn’t understand why the poor were more apt to be Dem than GOP, since our policies would be of more benefit to them. She didn’t miss a beat and said, “It’s easy. You gals have white-glove functions at Ermalee Hickel’s house (Walter Hickel was then the governor of Alaska), and we have spaghetti feeds for the whole family down at the park strip.”
Right on target.
Good point.
I’m not convinced that parades are a very important recruiting tool for the Republican Party. It is a nice gesture to have a presence in a parade, but if somebody votes for your Party based on who shows up in parades, he probably has extremely shallow ideals and probably wouldn’t fit in with Conservatives anyway.
Public displays of politics is almost an exclusive domain of the Left. For instance, public protests, oratories, demonstrations, and riots are done almost entirely by Democrats, Leftists or Liberals. Outside of an occasional abortion clinic, conservative protests are almost unknown. We don’t have a crowd mentality. As El Colonel and others have pointed out, Republicans are usually busy doing more important things than these public displays.
I think it is way more effective for conservative ideas to be spread by skilled verbal or written communication, especially one-on-one. Unfortunately, most of our elected Republicans are poor communicators.
Read comments from those who have actually done the local political work. Your proposed way has been losing us ground for years, I fear.
Easier said than done. Copiously illustrated post now up: The East Valley Loves a Parade: Martin Luther King Jr. Parade.
If you go strictly by election results, we have done pretty well in the last decade. Republicans managed to turn over something like 700 State Legislature seats during the Obama years, and we controlled 2/3 of the Governorships, not to mention dragging Big Orange across the finish line. True, the last midterm election was a setback, but not one of major proportions.
Long past results do not predict future performance. Further, we have watched solid Republican states slide to marginal status, while Democrats methodically build unbeatable control of the states they gain control of.