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Confessions of a Congressional Candidate

So I am John Wood, Jr., and I am, and ‘till November the 4th of this year will be, the Republican nominee for congress in the 43rd district of California. I am running against a woman everybody (white and black) paying attention to the conversation knows, and that is Congresswoman Maxine Waters. She’s a hero to many in South/South Central Los Angeles, a flame of pure fire in the annals of black political history. On the liberal left she is a champion, and I like her in part cause she’s an old school liberal, a black liberal, and she carved out her place in American politics by embodying the militant convictions of black nationalism. She had the lightning of a true activist, and the elegant thunder of a lady of the church. She is an icon in our culture, and one of the more memorable political personalities in the history of America.

I do not think Maxine Waters needs to be representing the people of Los Angeles in congress anymore. But I think she is an extraordinary human-being. And while she is hated on the right for reasons I almost fully understand, those conservatives I know who truly know her love her the same, even if they disagree with her about everything.

My problem with Maxine Waters is that she has no vision for the future, and in that has become the past. It is not a matter of her being old. But she has no grand strategy to save the inner-city community, or to save America (both of which need saving). Ron Paul is Maxine Waters age, but for years he has been the candidate of the future; and his vision will still determine the future of American politics.

I’m just saying it’s not cause she’s old. :-/

There are certain overwhelming problems facing the future prosperity of inner-city America. Most of these problems reflect the shortcomings of liberal policy planning because, well, liberal Democrats tend to run everything. In black communities, that is almost 100%. (If Republicans ran everything, our problems would reflect the excesses of Conservatism, which there are.) But they equal a social spending system that doesn’t achieve assistance, financial and transitional, effectively enough; an educational system that maintains the social and economic vulnerability of black and brown communities rather than lifting them up from them; a criminal justice system that has yet to be deprogrammed from formulas of justice that unjustifiably promote generational cycles of incarceration among black boys and men, feeding a pattern of fatherlessness and familial deterioration in the deserts of gang violence and drug dependency. The system is rigged against us. It even teaches us to rig it ourselves.

It’s the Willie Lynch mentality. It’s the psychology we were gifted by master to always think less of ourselves, and more of him, to accept what he gives us. It has never really gone away. It has simply morphed through generations of political evolution in American society, and has survived the death of the mainstream acceptability of racism itself. It is the systematic broadcasting of messages across the societal spectrum formed perfectly to make black Americans think less of themselves. It is the patronizing of the welfare state and the hostility of the court. It is the neglect of the educational system and the brutality of the police. It is the confluence of sins from the right and  left wing of the political spectrum that ensure that one-hundred and fifty years after the end of slavery in America the black man isn’t free.

Now the truth is the black man is far freer today than he was yesterday; than he was 50 years ago. (It is also true that the institutionalized racism of many American institutions is not always a product of active racism but of the power structures of a more racist age that have flourished unto now.) But he is not as free now as white men have ever been in this country. Barack Obama is the exception, not the rule. And while that is to glide past a grand historical argument it is just to say that blacks in this country fool themselves when they are led to challenge only one half of the political system, which is to say not at all. Maxine Waters challenges one half of the system by justifying the other half. She can’t defeat the system. She is the system.

Maxine isn’t my enemy then; it’s the system she can’t reform. I can’t reform it either. I’m running to let people know they can.

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Why We Need Black Republicans

We need black Republicans. By black Republicans I don’t mean black people who will cheerlead for the Republican Party. I mean black people who actually speak for the interests of the black community within the GOP. There’s a big difference.

Anybody who knows me knows that this article has got to be a little self-serving; I’ll cop to that. I’m a candidate for congress in Los Angeles, and yes I am a black Republican. But the point here is a real one: the black community suffers materially, because the political conversation does not focus on our interests. It doesn’t, because black votes are not in play.

As blacks we vote Democrat because we do not trust the Republican Party. Why would we? The  Republican Party has done virtually nothing to earn the trust of black people for the last 45 years, and in fact has threatened the interests of black and poorer peoples, by threatening welfare and unemployment spending during times of recession (even while some of them continue to support government subsidies for oil companies and tax payer funded bailouts for big banks), and by maneuvering to suppress Democratic turnout by trying to pass cynically timed voter I.D. requirements in key states in the 2012 election. Of course, there is a lot that can be said about the ways in which the Democratic Party has actually betrayed the interests of black people as well, but such points do not absolve the guilt of the Republican Party.

I am a fan of neither party as they currently stand, though I understand why most black people would rather be Democrat than Republican. But it doesn’t change the fact that black people are left in a lousy political situation, taken for granted by the party we’re in and ignored by the party we’re not in. Why should Democrats work particularly hard for black votes on a broad scale when they are going to get them anyway? And why should Republicans when they know they are inaccessible? Black people often complain to me about how it is politicians always seem to be talking about Latino issues and Gay issues, fighting for immigration reform and the DREAM Act, gay marriage and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, etc., but seem much slower to move on issues of direct concern to African-Americans (inner-city education reform, the war on drugs, reparations…?). The answer to this lies in the politics. Latino-Americans and Gay Americans are predominantly Democratic, but between a quarter and a third of them routinely vote Republican. As such both parties feel they have a reason to compete for these votes.

The results of this show themselves in real legislation. Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed because Democrats and Republicans supported it as a matter of gay rights, and high profile Republicans one by one have been quietly indicating their support for gay marriage or at least greater rights for gay people (including Dick Cheney). And while immigration reform and the DREAM Act have not passed yet, the bipartisan support for these efforts (especially where you have Republicans representing significant Latino populations) is real, with some Republicans like Marco Rubio and John McCain showing a real willingness to fight their fellow Republicans and work with Democrats to get such reforms accomplished.

Any black American who knows the political history of the Civil Rights movement knows that the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were only possible because Republican and Democratic legislators joined together against segregationist Democrats and reactionary Republicans to make it happen. But in the sixties, there was a significant black population in both parties pushing them to accomplish this. In the early 20th century almost all blacks were Republicans, and we did not get that much accomplished politically. In the early 21st century we are almost all Democrats, and we are failing politically (in terms of getting key bills passed or even considered) for the same reason.

As a people we do not need to turn out a bunch of black Republicans overnight, but we do need to establish power within the Republican Party in order to push both parties to serve our interests. Furthermore there are Republicans that the black community can work with to find real common ground. Ron Paul’s campaign opened the flood gates for a wing of the party that is eager to put the brakes on the war on drugs, to renew voting rights for ex-convicts, to eliminate institutional racism in the criminal justice system and perhaps more importantly than anything to dismantle a bureaucratic and self-interested educational system that systematically punishes inner-city children of color and to replace it with a system of equality. But without blacks speaking for the black community within the Republican Party this coalition will not be forged, and in the mainstream legislative conversation we will continue to be ignored.