From over at the Althouse Blog we have some observations about the crowd at President Obama's speech at UW (at Madison), earlier in the week. Basicaly it is about the fact that the crown in attendance looks like what the mainstream media and Democrats say a Tea Party gathering looks like—very "white".
Regards — Cliff
5 comments:
I see Census Data.
Reminds me of an old Chris Rock joke about NH, "Let's just say, it is hard for a brother to find good hair products."
Jack went to the same place I did, but somehow got the 2006 data. In 2007 Blacks were 6.0% of the Wisconsin population, compared to 12.8% nation-wide. I lost a quarter on that, to my wife, earlier in the day. But still, between Blacks and Latinos there are half a million folks in Wisconsin, out of under six mission.
Regards — Cliff
Cliff, would you say the membership of the Tea Party to which you belong does or doesn't mirror the current City of Lowell population demographics? (Which would be, roughly, 70% "white" and 30% of everything else?)
Per the 2000 census:
68.6% "White"
16.5% "Asian American"
4.2% "African American"
10.&% "Native American, Pacific Islander, Other Races and Two or More Races"
Well, I am a little slow in answering Kad Barma, but I had to run errands. I take his point about the mixture at the local Tea Party, but it is "The GREATER Lowell Tea Party". That would include Chelmsford, with 33,552 people (2000 Census), of whom 0.8% are Black and 1.2% Hispanic. There were 1563 Asian extraction residents, which is 4.66%. Dracut, with 28,288 people, is 95.1% Caucasian. And so it goes.
Now, as many will note, it takes some effort on the part of any group to get political participation by the local Lowell Asian Community. This was made evident by the briefing given on this last Friday by Professor Luna of Salem State, over at Middlesex Community College and undertaken at the behest of ONELowell. It was blogged about by Richard Howe Jr, here. (I hope to get my notes out tonight or tomorrow.) At this location you can find a link to the report, hi-res or low-res. The conclusions at this time suggest that if your precinct is college educated, speaks English and tends to stay in one home (rented or owned) for more than five years, you will have a high percentage of registered voters and they will turn out to vote in greater numbers. That would be the Belvedere and Ward 8, Precinct 3, in the SW corner of the Highlands. I hope no one is surprised at that.
The flip side of this is that one of the groups strongly supporting Sam Meas in his run for the Republican nomination for the 5th Congressional District was the Greater Lowell Tea Party, from the Chairperson on down. To my mind, that should speak for something. And while Sam didn't win, he did very well in terms of votes garnered. He was number two and way ahead of a nuclear engineer and a former pharmacist/software engineer.
Regards — Cliff
So it's the "Greater Lowell But Not Lowell Tea Party"?
My observation is that political opportunists (e.g. on the one hand, creationists and anti-immigration and anti-gay rights folks jumping into any particular movement that was originally supposed to be based on individual liberty, and then ignoring the premise entirely, or, on the other hand, "liberal" activists pretending to be open-minded, yet criticizing everyone else's right to speak out, no matter how non-sensically) have denied since the dawn of party politics their own homogeneity against all prima facie evidence to the contrary.
Or, as I'd put it: There's nothing wrong with being white and politically active. There is, however, something profoundly unsettling and hypocritical about folks being white, politically active, and in an endless argument with other white and politically active folks about who, really, represents the best interest of the whole country.
Let's call a spade a spade--white politically active people represent the best interest of white politically active people. Claiming that policies that favor white politically active people are coincidentally good for everyone else is disingenuous at best.
It's manipulative political snake oil if you want to know one man's opinion. And that goes for BOTH sides. (Which is to say, watching Tea Partiers and Obama-ites argue over who is whiter is one of the funniest things to be found in our headlines today).
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