On Tuesday’s Laura Ingraham radio show, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, author of “Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?,” predicted that President Obama’s re-election team would launch an all-out effort to reinvigorate the black vote.
“Here’s what’s going to happen in the fall,” Buchanan said. “The African-American vote I think was 13 percent of the electorate last time, which was its highest ever. And he won it 95-to-4. I mean, that was 24-to-1. He’s fearful there’s going to be a slippage there and a much greater lack of enthusiasm.”
Buchanan said he doesn’t believe Obama would promote the issue himself, but instead there would be his surrogates making the suggestion that Republican candidate Mitt Romney would be less sympathetic to the African-American community than Obama would be. Buchanan suggested it might be something like Al Gore’s 2000 attempt to pin the horrific death of James Byrd, a black man, to then candidate George W. Bush.
“What you’re going to see in the fall campaign is not Barack Obama, but surrogates in the African-American community to re-raise the racial divide and to energize the African-American community in the way it was energized for example, I think it was the year 2000 when they put out that terrible ad, I think it was that George W. Bush was coldly indifferent to the dragging death of that black fellow down in Texas, James Byrd,” he continued. “It was an awful thing to do and you remember, what was it Al Gore said — ‘George Bush says he’s a constitutionalist? Recall that African-Americans were three-fifths of a person under that old Constitution.”
“The idea of elevating and inflaming that old issue in order to raise the turnout among your core constituents — that’s exactly what I think going to happen,” Buchanan said. “But I do agree, Barack Obama himself will separate himself over and above that and not touch it.”