October 30, 2006
Former Prince George's County executive Wayne K. Curry, backed by five black members of the Prince George's County Council, today endorsed Republican Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele's campaign for the U.S. Senate.Mr. Curry, a Democrat who became the first black Prince George's county executive in 1994, and served two terms, is influential in Prince George's, the state's second-largest county, with about 846,000 residents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
But the endorsement itself, while very important, doesn't excite me as much as why Curry seems to be breaking ranks with the state Democratic Party.
Mr. Curry signaled his dissatisfaction with Maryland's Democratic Party last spring, when a Democratic poll was leaked to the press, calling Mr. Steele a "unique threat" to the Democrats.The poll advised Democrats to "knock Steele down" by linking Mr. Steele to President Bush and national Republicans, to turn Mr. Steele "into a typical Republican in the eyes of voters, as opposed to an African-American candidate."
Mr. Curry was incensed by the poll, and said at the time that Mr. Steele's candidacy presented an "enormously historic" opportunity for blacks that "may ultimately break this sort of vices grip by Democrats who feel entitled to black votes regardless of how they treat black voters."
I've long felt that lock-step voting was bad for blacks as individual voters and as communities, as Democrats felt they didn't have to give them anything other than lip-service attention to blacks during campaign season, while largely ignoring them between elections. The flipside of this, of course, is that Republicans running for office felt that they had no chance of picking up votes from blacks, and they ignored them, too. Both parties took black voters for granted in their own way, and black communities suffered as a result of their political capital being wasted.
Perhaps this movement by a small group of Prince George's County black Democrats is just an anomaly that will prove to be a one-off oddity in the realm of American politics. On the other hand, perhaps other black community and political leaders will key in on Mr. Curry's observations and realize that breaking the vice grip Democrats have on the black vote is the best chance they have of wielding real political power in the future.
Posted by: Confederate Yankee at
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