The Republicans, Episode 5
The Republican frontrunners weren’t the only ones missing from Thursday night’s debate at Morgan State University. Our very own Andrew Kingsford was MIA (in heavy REM, we suspected), though we’re certain he loves black people. I would dare say, though, that anyone who votes for Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney or Fred Thompson is a race traitor – no matter what your race.
The rest of the Mystery Debate Theater team – Tim Willette and Steve Rhodes – gathered once again at Beachwood HQ to bring you the best coverage in the nation. Tom Joyner and Tavis Smiley moderated. As always, this transcript is edited for length, clarity and sanity.
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JOYNER: We may not agree on all the issues, but we do agree on the importance of an evening like this, and you demonstrate that sentiment with your presence. And to the esteemed candidates, whether you’re pro-life or pro- choice, for the war in Iraq or against it, for Kanye West or 50 Cent . . .
TIM: . .. pro-coming here tonight, or against it . . .
JOYNER: . . . it’s your turn to share your message with an audience that’s stretched further than it’s ever been stretched before, and that’s a good thing. And let me take a moment right here and now to say hello to those of you viewing from home. Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Senator John McCain. Governor Mitt Romney. And Senator Fred Thompson.
TIM: Good thing this isn’t a restaurant or they’d be saying we can’t seat you until your party is full.
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SMILEY: Some of the campaigns who declined our invitation to join us tonight have suggested publicly that this audience would be hostile and unreceptive. Since we’re live on PBS right now, I can’t tell you what I really think of these kinds of comments.
So I’m proud to introduce to you former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo. California Congressman Duncan Hunter. Former Ambassador Alan Keyes.
STEVE: Who among the other Republicans can ever say again in this campaign that the want to unite the country? They won’t talk to black people, they won’t talk to gays, they won’t talk to Hispanics . . . . why do they hate America?
SMILEY: Please tell me and this audience, in your own words, why you chose to be here tonight and what you say to those who chose not to be here tonight.
HUCKABEE: Well, Tavis, I want to be president of the United States, not just president of the Republican Party. Frankly, I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed for our party and I’m embarrassed for those who did not come, because there’s long been a divide in this country, and it doesn’t get better when we don’t show up.
PAUL: Well, the main reason I’m here is because I was invited.
BROWNBACK: I want to say just at the outset, I apologize for the candidates that aren’t here. I think this is a disgrace that they’re not here. I think it’s a disgrace for our country, I think it’s bad for our party, and I don’t think it’s good for our future.
TANCREDO: I am here likewise because I was asked and because I made a commitment on your show. I must admit to you that it is pleasurable and a little bit different to be in this kind of an environment with my colleagues who are here because the last time I was at an event of this nature, it was the NAACP convention and I was the only Republican that showed up.
And I am especially glad to be here to be able to talk about something that was mentioned during the original introduction, something you said, I believe, Tavis, when you talked about – we’re here to talk about the promise of America.
HUNTER: You know, when we have family reunions and some of the family members don’t show up, we do talk about them. But I’m not going to do that.
KEYES: Now, I wouldn’t want to seem to be the fellow who’s going to speak up in defense of our absent colleagues here.
But I think it is a little unfair to assume that they didn’t show up tonight because they were sending a message of some negative kind to the black community, for the very obvious reason that they didn’t show up at the Values Voters Debate, either – which, of course, sent a very negative message to the people who are interested in the issues that were discussed there.
Do you know what these two debates do have in common though? The Values Voters Debate was the first debate I was included in. And this is the second debate I’m included in.
I’ve been barred from the debate in Michigan, for reasons best known to the party there. And what do you want to make of that? The other guys will show up there.
Now, that suggests that they may or may not be afraid of all Black people, but there seems to be at least one black person they’re afraid of.
STEVE: It took him a really long time to get to the punch line, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.
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SMILEY: Let me now introduce Lucille Victoria Rowels of Chicago, winner of our online contest in which we asked listeners of the Tom Joyner Morning Show to submit their questions to the Web site.
ROWELS: Even though a majority of individuals who have served as president since Abraham Lincoln have been Republican, I believe that most black Americans who will vote in the year 2008 are not able to name even one Republican president in the 142 years since Lincoln’s death who have left a positive and significant legacy for black Americans.
If you are elected president in 2008, what positive and significant legacy, if any, will you leave for black Americans?
HUCKABEE: Well, I would say, first of all, that I would hope they would name President Eisenhower. Because he sent those troops and federalized the National Guard in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, when it was a Democrat governor who stood at the schoolhouse door and said those young people couldn’t come in.
And I would like to believe, if I were fortunate enough to be the president, that at the end of my tenure – hopefully, eight years, by the way, not just four – that housing opportunities would be better, that we made some real strides in the criminal justice system so that you don’t have a different sentence for a 17-year-old kid caught with a lid of marijuana than you do some upper-middle-class white kid who gets caught with cocaine. He goes to rehab, and the black kid goes to prison for 10 years.
PAUL: I would like to believe that if we had a freer society, it would take care of blacks and whites and everybody equally because we’re all individuals. To me, that is so important. But if we had equal justice under the law, I think it would be a big improvement. If we had probably a repeal of most of the federal laws on drugs and the unfairness on how blacks are treated with these drugs laws, it would be a tremendous improvement.
SMILEY: Senator Brownback?
STEVE: I would try very hard to acquire a black friend if I became president.
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BROWNBACK: There are several things that I would do. One is focusing in on rebuilding the family.
TANCREDO: One of the things that I will do as president of the United States, to increase the economic opportunities for every American, especially people in the lower economic rung of the ladder in America, is to reduce the flow of illegal immigration into this country, which depresses wage rates for the lowest-income earners in this country.
And it’s got to be dealt with. It’s got to be dealt with forcefully. And I tell you, yes, Black America, Brown America, White America, all will be enhanced by actually enforcing our laws.
TIM: Everyone will be enhanced. Brown will be much more brown, white will be much more white.
STEVE: Photoshop for everybody.
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HUNTER: I think that we also have to add, with Governor Huckabee’s statement about Ike, that calm hand of Dwight Eisenhower that brought about desegregation – also, you know, in 1964, that Civil Rights Act was passed with a greater proportion of Republican votes in the United States Congress than Democrat votes, a fact that’s been forgotten over the years. I want you to remember that.
But, you know, I can’t talk about young black Americans . . .
STEVE: . . . ’cause I don’t know any . . .
HUNTER: . . . and the need for them to be shielded from pornography.
And in the barrio where I practiced law before I ran for Congress and got this job, I remember Mr. Sanchez down the street with his family, working 18-hour days, a need to have less regulation, less taxation. That would help all Americans.
And I guess I would go with Jack Kemp’s great statement: A rising tide lifts all boats. A Republican administration, my administration, would lift all boats.
STEVE: Jack Kemp? I thought Jack Kennedy said that.
TIM: What about PT109? Except for boats with big holes in them . . .
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KEYES: I would hope that the most important legacy of my administration would be to remind people that in spite of all the talk, I don’t believe there is this deep divide between Blacks and whites in America . . . blah blah blah.
STEVE: And if someone’s gonna get creamed by Obama in the general election, I’ve already done it!
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Tavis: Let me now turn this conversation over to a terrific and very able panel of journalists who will take us the rest of the way. Cynthia Tucker, editorial page editor for the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Ray Suarez, well known to PBS viewers for his work on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” And Juan Williams of NPR and a contributor to FOX News channel.
TUCKER: In 2006, the unemployment rate of black high school graduates – that’s high school graduates – was 33 percent higher than the unemployment rate for white high school dropouts. What do you think accounts for that inequity?
HUCKABEE: Cynthia, part of that is it is that there is still racism in this country, and the opportunities aren’t the same. Some of it has to do with the fact that there are people who unfortunately still look at a person’s face and their skin, and that’s something that government can’t change, but leadership certainly can speak to.
PAUL: Walter Williams, a very astute free-market economist, has studied this extensively, and he has found that prior to minimum wage laws there was no discrepancy like this. So he put a lot of blame on the minimum wage law.
BROWNBACK: What you have to do to try to stimulate [the economy] is really have a tax policy, something I’ve talked about, about an optional flat tax . . .
TIM: An optional flat tax? I’m a billionaire and I think I’ll take the flat tax this year!
TANCREDO: OK, I just cannot agree with this race-baiting kind of comments about the reason why we have these problems.
My friends, I’ll tell you that I believe, with all my heart – look, why was it that in the ’50s, in the ’40s, and actually leading up into the early ’60s, the ability for blacks in the United States to improve themselves economically was working? They were moving up the ladder.
Families were in tact – in better shape, by the way, than most white families of that same period of time. What happened? Two things have happened to – I believe – to devastate the black community when it comes to economic opportunity.
STEVE: Integration.
TANCREDO: One, the welfare state; it began to pay people to not be in the home.
STEVE: I thought it paid people to stay home. They certainly weren’t at work.
TANCREDO: And when that happened, what we saw is a decline in wage rates. And two, of course, is the importation of millions upon millions of low-income workers that depress the wage rates for the lowest income among us. Those two things are responsible, and it’s got nothing to do with race.
HUNTER: You know, Republicans, when we had that great match up of a Republican majority in Congress in the ’90s and President Bill Clinton, the Republicans initiated legislation three times . . .
TIM: . . . to throw Clinton out . . .
HUNTER: . . . to reform welfare. The first two times, President Clinton vetoed it, and the third time he signed it and took credit for it. It’s something I’ve done every now and then in my career.
But lastly, there is one party that is very important to jobs, jobs in the community for everybody. That’s the small businessman. If we help the small businessman, and that’s a Republican trademark, we’ll do it . . .
STEVE: Yes, we must help the small businessman!
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KEYES: I have to say I think the most important factor in all of this does have something to do with policies that had an impact on race, but it was the disproportionately destructive impact that a lot of government programs had on the moral foundations and family structure in the black community.
You talk about folks finding job opportunities. You know where a lot of black men find job opportunities these days? In prison.
And that is something that reflects the reality that when you allow the family to break down, when you have government regulations that drive the father from the home, you have established the conditions for the upbringing of children to be nonproductive, to be violent, to be turned in directions that will be destructive of their economic future.
And when you add to that the promotion of a culture of promiscuity, a culture of selfish hedonism . . .
STEVE: Like that of my daughter.
KEYES: . . . that leads people not to understand that that marriage partnership is the most important foundation of any real economic life, then you have especially destroyed the black community.
STEVE: Especially gay blacks, who shouldn’t be allowed to get married.
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SUAREZ: The most commonly cited statistic for the number of illegal immigrants living in the United States is 12 million people. Is it desirable, is it even practical to try to send them all home?
PAUL: It’s pretty impractical to get an army in this country to round up 12 or maybe 20 million. But I do believe that we have to stick to our guns on obeying the law, and anybody who comes in here illegally shouldn’t be rewarded.
But I see the immigration problem as a consequence of our welfare state. Welfare because we encourage people not to work here, but the welfare we offer the people who come – they get free medical care. They get free education. They bankrupt our hospitals. Our hospitals are closing. And it shouldn’t be rewarded. That means that if you don’t round them up, you don’t reward them, you don’t give them citizenship. At the same time, you can’t solve this problem until you have – you get rid of the welfare state, because in a healthy economy, immigrants wouldn’t be a threat to us. There would probably be a desire for more, because we would be starved for workers.
But today, they have become scapegoated because of the weak economy and the lowering of our standard of living.
HUNTER: Folks that are here illegally have to leave and let me tell you why. Today, if you’re a dry wall contractor and you play by the rules and you pay $27 a loaded hour for each of your employees, you will be constantly under-cut by contractors who use people who are here illegally.
That’s not fair to Americans who play by the rules. And we just talked jobs a few minutes ago. That’s one reason you have, in certain areas, especially in the construction trades now, higher levels of unemployment.
KEYES: The border is a matter of security, first of all. And we have to make sure that we control it, or no laws we pass have any significance. People will still cross on their own terms.
So the very first priority has to be to get back control. But we also have to remember why we lost control, because these elites who have been under the thumb of certain corporate interests have an interest in cheapening the price of labor in America.
STEVE: I thought he wanted cheap labor. He contradicts himself all the time – just like the Bible.
KEYES: Do you want to know who’s first hurt by that cheapened price of labor?
Black folks are first hurt, as they’ve been hurt in the rebuilding of New Orleans, in the rebuilding of other parts of the United States that were affected by those hurricanes. It’s time we stopped fooling around with this issue.
I think people, including a lot of the Black liberals, are more worried about what we do with illegal immigrants than they’ve ever been about the impact of illegal immigration on Black Americans who have been in this country all along. I’m sick of seeing it.
HUCKABEE: Until something is done to touch the people who are employing illegal immigrants because of the very reason that they’ve talked about on this stage, to create what amounts to another version of slave labor, then we’re never going to stop the flow.
What we have to do is to start putting the penalty on the people who are most benefiting from them, the employers who are using those laborers in order to keep from having to pay decent wages.
STEVE: So they’re pro-union?
TIM: They’re pro-union, anti-corporate, anti-exploitation, this is great! It’s not your father’s Republican party.
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WILLIAMS: Name one reform that you would endorse to assure young Black and Latino people in America that they will have equal justice in America’s courts.
BROWNBACK: I may be the only person up here on this stage that’s spent a couple nights in jail . . .
TIM: I sat under a tree that was whites-only.
BROWNBACK: . . . I went in to look at the system. I spent a night in a prison in Kansas and I spent a night in a prison in Louisiana. I’ve stayed in homeless shelters to answer and to get a feel for what you’re talking about.
TIM: I want to assure everyone I was in no danger.
SMILEY: Congressman Tancredo?
STEVE: I will put myself in jail.
TIM: If I become president, I’m gonna put Sam Brownback in jail.
TANCREDO: I believe that it was mentioned earlier, and I certainly agree with the fact that first of all, there are far too many criminal statutes at the federal level. The Constitution establishes the roles for the federal government and the state government, and we have taken on far too many things at the federal level, especially drugs laws – mandating certain penalties and that sort of thing.
STEVE: Now he’s just pandering.
HUNTER: Juan, I don’t know as much about the facts as you do in this particular case.
TIM: After all, I’m just running for president.
HUNTER: But the facts, related, that I read in The Washington Post was that the one young man there was knocked unconscious and was kicked in the head while he was unconscious.
SMILEY: Your answer notwithstanding, Mr. Williams’ question was not answered by you, respectfully. And that is: Is there a particular policy that you would support to guarantee young Black and brown men watching right now a fairer equal justice system? That part you did not get to.
HUNTER: I don’t think there’s any way you can be more fair then to have people in this country, under this wonderful Constitution that we put together, where people who are tried for criminal acts are tried by a jury of their peers.
Juries, obviously, are blemished in many ways and are not perfect, but a jury trial under the law is, I think, the best system of justice on the face of the Earth.
STEVE: So he’s proposing a jury system.
KEYES: Well, I’ve always favored, and if you look at a book I wrote some years back called Masters of the Dream, there was a proposal in it that was part of a package of what we need to do to restore real local self-government, which in our case would be neighborhood self-government in a lot of our urban areas.
One of the features of that neighborhood government would be the reinstitution of what were called in the old days things like justices of the peace.
They were people who lived in the community, came out of the community, were empowered to judge offenses committed by folks who were in and lived in that community so that there would be sensitivity to the truth that you’re not just dealing with crooks.
TIM: So we’d have a Wicker Park judge? Who would that be?
STEVE: The alderman. Or Bob at the Beachwood.
HUCKABEE: Well, first of all, we really don’t have so much a crime problem in this country. We have a drug and alcohol problem. Eighty percent of the people who are in our prisons and jails are there for a drug or alcohol crime. They either were high or drunk when they committed the crime, or they committed the crime to get high or drunk.
And what has made a huge mistake is that we’ve incarcerated so many of the people who really need drug rehab more than they need long-term incarceration.
In our state, we established over 20 drug courts, that gave people an alternative course, rather than just putting them in prison, giving them the opportunity to get what they really needed, which is off the addiction.
We’ve got to quit locking up all the people that we’re mad at and lock up the people that we’re really afraid of, the people who are sexual predators and violent offenders.
But the nonsense of three strikes and you’re out has created a system that is overrun with people, and the cost is choking us.
I would go for more drug courts and for a lot less incarceration of drug-addicted people.
STEVE: He’s so much better than the others. If there are any Republicans watching, he just lost the nomination.
TIM: It’s on PBS at a historically black college. I can say whatever I want!
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TUCKER: Recently a push to give the District of Columbia voting representation was defeated because of heavy Republican opposition. In addition, many voting rights advocates are worried about rigid voter ID laws, which require photo ID, like a driver’s license.
Are you concerned that some eligible voters will be denied the right to vote simply because they don’t have a driver’s license?
KEYES: I think the most important thing to remember about Washington, D.C., is that it was established to be a unique representation of the whole people of the United States.
That’s a city that’s supposed to belong to the nation, not to any one group and not to any one region. That’s why it was put together in the first place.
I think it’s terribly important to maintain that symbol of the unity of our country. We’re a free people. If folks don’t want to live in the conditions that prevail in Washington because of its unique status, they can go to Maryland. A whole bunch of folks have done so.
They can go to Virginia. A whole bunch of folks have done so. Some of the biggest churches and everything else now exist in Prince George’s County, because people left the District.
They have that right, and I think that they can exercise it. But I think that the country is entitled to have this possession that symbolizes our whole united people, standing together as one community. I think it’s terribly important that we sustain it.
HUCKABEE: Well, I may be a little different on this one. I believe that the people of D.C. should be able to vote for representation.
I think that’s appropriate, for the simple reason of equality and justice. And if we need to amend the Constitution to make that possible, it should happen.
D.C. is not the same city it was when it was first created, and I think it just makes sense to not have a group of people – I don’t care what color they are, I don’t care how they vote – they ought to be able to vote, and their color and their political affiliation ought to have nothing to do with the equality that we should give them.
As far as identification – I have to show photo ID to get on an airplane in my home town. I think it’s not asking too much to make sure that people who are voting are truly eligible voters.
But look, if it’s a driver’s license issue, we’ve gone to Motor Voter – let’s have Photo Voter so, when you register to vote, they take your picture, put it on a card, and you simply are able to make sure that you’re a registered voter.
STEVE: Can we just have drawings on our Ids? Caricatures?
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SUAREZ: The Federal Agency for Health Care Research and Quality recently reported that both Latinos and blacks receive “significantly worse,” in their words, medical care than whites in the United States.
One out of three Hispanics, one out of five black Americans is uninsured. Hispanics are 2.5 times as likely as non-Hispanic, white Americans to be uninsured. One of three Hispanics hasn’t been to the doctor in more than a year. And as has already been mentioned, diabetes, asthma, hypertension are untreated or under-treated in communities across America.
What does your health care plan contain to address some of these disparities in access to care and access to quality health care?
HUNTER: Well, Ray, the first thing I’d say is I can’t – as a guy who practiced law in the barrio . . .
STEVE: Here with the barrio again . . .
HUCKABEE: The first problem with our current health care system is that it’s upside down. It focuses on intervention. We wait until people are catastrophically ill, and then we spend enormous amounts of money trying to fix them. We need to be putting the money on the preventive side. Prevention is a lot less expensive than is intervention.
The second thing, there has to be ownership of the individual consumer. As long as the government, the employer, as long as the doctor is in charge of your health care, and you have no idea what it costs, and you have no idea what they’re doing, and you don’t control it, we’re never going to get the system fixed.
And the third thing that has to happen is that we have portable medical records so that your health care records go with you. They don’t stay with your doctor. You shouldn’t have to ask permission to see the records of your own body. Those are your own records. They don’t belong to anybody else.
And the policies that we can put in place have to start with individuals buying in, not only on insurance, but buying in on health, their own personal, to start with.
TANCREDO: You should be able to get your drugs from any place that, in fact, it’s cheaper to get drugs. If it’s cheaper to get drugs in Canada, get drugs from Canada – it’s OK with me.
STEVE: They have the best pot anyway.
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WILLIAMS: What do you say to the one-third of the nation that’s minority and overwhelmingly opposed to the continuation of this war, even as the GOP in Congress continues to block attempts to set a deadline to end this war?
KEYES: I think the most important thing to remember is that our efforts in Iraq and elsewhere right now that followed in the wake of September 11 aren’t an effort to defend Black people, white people, Jewish people, Christian people, et cetera.
They’re an effort to defend the United States of America from a deep and terrible threat that came against us in disregard of the fundamental — the fundamental moral principle that is supposed to govern all international affairs, all wars that are conducted by countries, and that is that you do not consciously target innocent human life.
HUCKABEE: One of the tragedies is that our military veterans have kept their promises to us . . .
STEVE: But we haven’t kept our promise to them.
HUCKABEE: . . . we have not kept all of our promises to them.
There are still people who believe that Iraq had something to do with 9/11, yet 15 of the people were from Saudi Arabia.
STEVE: One of them just spoke on the stage – the black one!
HUNTER: Ladies and gentlemen, we can leave Iraq, and under my leadership, we will leave Iraq in victory. And let me tell you what I would propose.
The key to handing off the security apparatus in Iraq, now that we’ve stood up a free government — and it is a free government. It’s stumbling along, it’s inept, but it’s a free government.
TIM: Kind of like another government you may have heard of.
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HUNTER: I think there is a need for the death penalty. And it’s called deterrence. And that means that, when that Charles Manson is getting rid to pull the trigger on an innocent American, just maybe the idea passes through his mind that he, himself, is going to lose his life.
STEVE: Okay, I just saw an interview with Charles Manson. That’s not gonna happen.
KEYES: We can only dispatch you to the ruler of us all so that he may ultimately judge you for your misdeeds.
STEVE: Let’s just dispatch us all right now and get it over with.
SMILEY: Good night from Baltimore.
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Beachwood Analysis: Mike Huckabee was the clear winner tonight. He’s found his stride and he has crossover appeal. He appears to be a reasonable, likable, nice man – unlike the stinkin’ frontrunners without the courage to face black people. Sam Brownback really helped himself; this was his best performance. He showed a compassionate side many times and presented himself as far more well-rounded than the caricature conservative he’s appeared as so far. Tom Tancredo also showed himself to be more interesting than in the past, but certainly not presidential – not even close. Duncan Hunter is a cartoonish, one-dimensional figure. While Mike Gravel on the Democratic side is full of (justified) outrage, Ron Paul is more of a theoretician. Kind of like an obscure professor who is always interesting for the first 15 minutes and then after that he’s just nuts. Alan Keyes is nuts from the outset.
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See the entire Mystery Debate Theater series. It’s really funny.
Posted on September 28, 2007