Katrina Exodus Could Change Political Mix By NANCY BENAC, AP


Getty Images The strong Democratic political machine in New Orleans that helped elect Mayor Ray Nagin and Sen. Mary Landrieu may take a hit.



WASHINGTON (Sept. 11) - Population shifts caused by the exodus of hurricane victims from the Gulf Coast could have ripple effects for years to come in Louisiana political races and perhaps beyond.

How big depends on how many people stay away, which ones stay away and where they end up putting down roots.
The early thinking is that the evacuees least likely to return to their homes in Louisiana may be the poorest - and thus, Democrats for the most part. That would hurt the party in a state where Republicans already were making inroads.

If the lion's share of those leaving settle in Texas, that could work to the advantage of Democrats in President Bush's home state.
"I'm believing that the greatest displacement occurs among those who are traditionally Democratic voters," said Elliott Stonecipher, an independent political consultant from Shreveport, La.
"Based on sheer demographics, those who are Republican voters have the wherewithal and, we believe, the will to go home and rebuild," he said.

Stonecipher sees the New Orleans area losing Democratic voters and a political network that was of great benefit to Sen. Mary Landrieu and other Democrats.
"On Election Day there is a well-oiled machine that knows how to turn those votes out from specific neighborhoods and in specific ways," Stonecipher said.

Landrieu was elected in a 2002 runoff by a 52-48 margin, a difference of just 42,000 votes. New Orleans was the base of her support.
"If that's compromised, that could be a problem for her," said John Maginnis, who publishes a political newsletter in Louisiana.


Landrieu is not up for re-election until 2008. Kathleen Blanco, the Democratic governor, who also won by a 52-48 margin, faces re-election in 2007.
Ray Nagin, the Democratic mayor of New Orleans, is up for re-election in February. No one knows if the city could even hold an election by then.
Overall, said Maginnis, Republicans have made gains in Louisiana in recent years and "the effects of the storm aftermath probably will help them." President Bush carried the state in 2000 and 2004; Democrat Bill Clinton did so in the previous two presidential elections.

Still, demographic shifts within the state could work to the Democrats' advantage in some cases, Maginnis said.
For example, if the sizable evacuee population now in Baton Rouge, the capital, decides to settle in, that could make the 6th Congressional District, a politically competitive one now held by GOP Rep. Richard Baker, more Democratic.

In Texas, which stands to gain the largest number of evacuees, analysts do not expect much impact on statewide races. But local races - for everything from school boards to legislative seats and perhaps even congressional districts - could be affected.
The place to watch is Houston, which has taken in the most evacuees, at least temporarily.

Richard Murray, director of the Center for Public Policy at the University of Houston, said Republicans hold every elective office in Harris County, which takes in most of Houston, but do not win by much.
"This could accelerate the tipping of the county, which was expected to happen in the next four to six years," he said.

While politics is taking a back seat for now to the urgent needs of the hurricane victims, "my Democratic friends are smiling," Murray said.
Bob Stein, professor of political science at Rice University in Houston, said the political impact on Texas depends in large part on how concentrated or widely dispersed the evacuees are.

He noted that sprawling Houston is one of the nation's least segregated big cities because it has no zoning laws, so hurricane victims could well be broadly scattered, diluting their impact in any particular race.

In any event, though, with Texas' Hispanic population surging and its black population growing faster than the white population, demographic shifts already are pushing the state toward the Democrats. Katrina could help hasten the trend.
"Our politics may be Republican," Stein said, "but that's just a temporary condition."
The thought is echoed by David Bositis, a senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a think tank focused on black issues. He said adding a substantial number of blacks to the state could "potentially make Texas more competitive in the not-too-distant future."

As for Louisiana, Bositis said, "If proportionally more whites come back than blacks, it'll make Louisiana somewhat whiter, which would statewide be to the advantage of the Republicans." But he, like other political analysts, said it will take time to see where evacuees end up settling and how many ultimately return home.




NICE TO SEE THAT PRIORITIES ARE IN ORDER.

Gulf Coast Isn't the Only Thing Left in Tatters; Bush's Status With Blacks Takes Hit -->--> By ELISABETH BUMILLER -->--> WASHINGTON

From the political perspective of the White House, Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than an enormous swath of the Gulf Coast. The storm also appears to have damaged the carefully laid plans of Karl Rove, President Bush's political adviser, to make inroads among black voters and expand the reach of the Republican Party for decades to come.

Many African-Americans across the country said they seethed as they watched the television pictures of the largely poor and black victims of Hurricane Katrina dying for food and water in the New Orleans Superdome and the convention center. A poll released last week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center bore out that reaction as well as a deep racial divide: Two-thirds of African-Americans said the government's response to the crisis would have been faster if most of the victims had been white, while 77 percent of whites disagreed.

The anger has invigorated the president's critics. Kanye West, the rap star, raged off-script at a televised benefit for storm victims that "George Bush doesn't care about black people." Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said in Miami last week that Americans "have to come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age and economics played a significant role in who survived and who did not."

At the White House, the public response has been to denounce the critics as unseemly and unfair. "I think all of those remarks were disgusting, to be perfectly frank," Laura Bush said in an interview with the American Urban Radio Network, when asked about the comments of Mr. West and Mr. Dean. "Of course President Bush cares about everyone in our country."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the administration's most prominent African-American, weighed in, too. "Nobody, especially the president, would have left people unattended on the basis of race," Ms. Rice said, en route to her native Alabama to attend a church service.

But behind the scenes in the West Wing, there has been anxiety and scrambling - after an initial misunderstanding, some of the president's advocates say, of the racial dimension to the crisis.

One of Mr. Bush's prominent African-American supporters called the White House to say he was aghast at the images from the president's first trip to the region, on Sept. 2, when Mr. Bush stood next to Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama, both white Republicans, and praised them for a job well done. Mr. Bush did not go into the heart of New Orleans to meet with black victims.
"I said, 'Grab some black people who look like they might be preachers,' " said the supporter, who asked not to be named because he did not want to be identified as criticizing the White House.Three days later, on Mr. Bush's next trip to the region, the president appeared in Baton Rouge at the side of T. D. Jakes, the conservative African-American television evangelist and the founder of a 30,000-member megachurch in southwest Dallas.

Bishop Jakes, a multimillionaire and best-selling author, is to deliver the sermon this Friday at the Washington National Cathedral, his office said, where Mr. Bush will mark a national day of prayer for Hurricane Katrina's victims.

The bishop's style of preaching is black Pentecostal - he roars and rumbles in performances that got him on the cover of Time magazine as "America's best preacher" in 2001. More important to Mr. Rove, he has become a vital partner in the White House effort to court the black vote.

Last week, the White House continued its political recovery effort among African-Americans through its network of conservative black preachers like Bishop Jakes. Many of them have received millions of dollars for their churches through Mr. Bush's initiative to support religious-based social services - a factor, Republicans say, in Mr. Bush's small increase in support among black voters, from 9 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2004.

On Tuesday in the Roosevelt Room, Mr. Bush met with black preachers and leaders of national charities, and sat next to Bishop Roy L. H. Winbush, a black religious leader from Louisiana. On Thursday, two senior White House officials, Claude Allen and James Towey, held a conference call with black religious leaders to ask what needed to be done. Mr. Towey is the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and Mr. Allen, who is African-American, is the president's domestic policy adviser.

One Bush supporter, the Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III, the president of the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation, a coalition that represents primarily black churches, said last week that something positive might come out of the crisis. "This is a moral and intellectual opportunity for the Bush administration to clearly articulate a policy agenda for the black poor," Mr. Rivers said in an interview.

Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, who has made reaching out to black voters a priority, put it simply. "We're going to work with them," Mr. Mehlman said. "This disaster showed how important it is that we do these things."

Actually I don't think Bush is too concerned (or ever has been) about his 'Status With Blacks'. I mean in terms of the 'politics' the 'black-element' plays zilch in the status of power in the US set-up. What beats me is that anyone could think otherwise.

Now with this 'Breaking News' about the shift in voting demographics, it shows how the black-element is going to become even less of a factor. By the way the 'nullifying' of the black vote in the 'democratic process' has been building up momentum (the antics in Florida being a case in point) long before the Katrina effect.

The wake up call to black Americans is not just in regard to their value as American citizens but also in regard to their relevance (and influence) in the 'democratic process'. On both measures there should be no illusion as to where they stand.

Respect

It will not change much.The American south outside of the big cities with large Black populations vote overwhelmingly Republican anyway. The mid-term elections next year is a bell-weather if there will be a shift.I doubt it.Depends if the rebuiilding is relatively swift.If there is further buggling the GOP may take a hit.

I also think Nagin maybe the last Black mayor of NOLA anyway due to the gentrification shift that's occuring in many metropolitian areas .

September 16, 2005, 8:34 a.m.
Hillary’s Sister Souljah
Kanye West and 2008.

By Wynton C. Hall
With national polls already picking up the split between white and black Americans' views over the handling of Hurricane Katrina, it's not too soon to begin asking how the obligatory post-Katrina debate over "race and poverty" will affect Hillary's 2008 electoral calculus.



'); } else if (_version Indeed, if campaign history teaches us anything, it is that presidential candidates seldom deviate from tactics used successfully in their past campaign. If true, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton just might have found herself a new "Sister Souljah" in Kanye West. After all, it was Team Clinton who, so many years ago, taught the Democrat party how to win back disaffected white, blue-collar voters, while maintaining its vice-like grip on nine out of ten black voters. A dirty secret within the Democrat party, the history of the Democrat race-based voting strategy is an important one, riddled with critical implications for 2008.

In 1985, pollster Stanley Greenberg — a Harvard Ph.D. who taught Marxist theory at Yale and is also the husband of liberal Democratic Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut — was asked by the Democratic party of Michigan and the United Auto Workers to conduct a study to determine why Walter Mondale had received such anemic support against Ronald Reagan in Macomb County, a Detroit suburb. According to Greenberg, party officials had told him: "Use whatever techniques you need but get to the bottom of Ronald Reagan's thrust into the heart of working America." Hence, Greenberg set out to dissect the electoral anatomy of the "Reagan Democrats" living in Macomb County.

The demographic makeup of Macomb County held (and continues to hold) important electoral implications. Roughly 97 percent of Macomb's 700,000 residents were Catholic Caucasians. At the time of Greenberg's study the average annual income in the area was $24,000. What's more, before Ronald Reagan's presidency, Macomb had been the most Democratic suburb in the entire nation. By 1985, however, Greenberg says "Macomb was now the national home of Reagan Democrats and the working material for a new American political alignment." According to Eleanor Clift and the late Tom Brazaitis, Greenberg's series of focus groups conducted in the area did not bode well for Democrats:

Greenberg's study of Macomb concluded that many of its white, blue collar voters felt abandoned by a Democratic Party that they perceived as caught up in the civil rights movement and catering to the interests of minorities....Part of his critique was that the Democratic Party did not identify with, and did not really respect, working-class culture....Democrats had to recognize that the uproar over busing, for example, was not just racism; people felt, justifiably, that their values and their neighborhoods were being threatened.

The Los Angeles Times book reviewer, William Greider, put it another way, "Greenberg's basic formulation for fixing the Democratic Party is...Democrats need to get some distance from black people and the poor, so the angry white guys will like them again." Greider then clarified that, "Naturally, he does not put it quite that crassly."

When the pollster was asked to present his findings to party officials in Washington, D.C., prominent members like Paul Kirk, then-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, interpreted Greenberg's strategic prescriptions much as Greider had. Said Kirk, "I found the conclusions inflammatory that what Democrats have to do is pay less attention to minorities." While many in the Democratic leadership were angered by Greenberg's campaign advice on how to win back members of "the forgotten middle class," a young Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton found pragmatic value, not vitriol, in Greenberg's findings.

Then-Governor Bill Clinton, one of the founding members of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) — the group of moderate Democrats who had organized in the aftermath of Reagan's 1984 landslide in an attempt to change the Democratic party's image — latched on to Greenberg's findings The notion that members of the middle class were frustrated with the Democrats attentiveness to minorities at what they believed was their own expense seemed to embody a message that could help win back disaffected members of the party. Hence, during then Governor Bill Clinton's 1990 bid for reelection the embattled incumbent looked to Greenberg to conduct focus groups in an effort to devise a message that would resonate with Arkansas voters. Greenberg's pivotal role in creating the theme, "Don't turn the clock back" opened the door for Greenberg to replace Clinton's longtime pollster Dick Morris. The trick, however, stayed with Clinton and became the basis for his denunciation of cop-killer rapper extraordinaire, Sister Souljah. At a Rainbow-PUSH Coalition event, Clinton humiliated Jesse Jackson when he used the event as a backdrop to condemn gangsta rap's violence-filled messages.

Fast forward to today and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

While Democrats secretly cheer on the racially charged demagoguery ushered forth from the usual suspects, like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the newly anointed race baiter, Kanye West, Hillary and the rest of Team Clinton are too shrewd to join in the fray. Even as Howard Dean is busy fanning the flames of racial divisiveness, Clinton and her inner circle know all too well the lessons learned in 1992. Indeed, voters should not be surprised if today's Kanye West ends up becoming the new "Sister Souljah" who became the pivot point in a Clinton triangulation to disassociate with the radical race baiters of the Democrat Left.

Regardless, Hillary's shrewdness on maters of identity politics will preclude her from being linked in any way to the dismissive attitude toward the lawlessness, looting, raping, and murdering committed in Katrina's aftermath. While any racial triangulation will likely come after the midterm elections and well into her official bid for the White House, one thing is sure: Hillary will find a "Sister Souljah" prior to November 2008. The cynical, dirty Democrat secret on race requires that they use black voters to deliver a 90-percent base of electoral support while simultaneously disassociating themselves from negative black stereotypes by co-opting a Republican message of independence, self-reliance, and individual responsibility — all the while espousing policies that are antithetical to such virtues.

Should Kanye West receive an invitation to attend a Rainbow/Push Coalition event with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, he would be well advised to think twice. Just ask Sister Souljah.