The Obama administration is casting the Republican Party as bigoted and discriminatory against blacks and Latinos as it seeks to ignite enthusiasm among minorities for the president’s re-election campaign.
In separate remarks to minority groups this week, Attorney General Eric Holder slammed Republican-backed voter ID laws as discriminatory and Vice President Biden characterized presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney as anti-immigrant.
The concerted offensive underscores Obama’s need to re-energize minority voters, whose record turnout helped him win the 2008 election but whose enthusiasm for the president has waned as they wrestled with the fallout from the recession.
Speaking to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Houston, Holder compared voter ID laws to Jim Crow-era “poll taxes” that some Southern states used to prevent blacks from voting.
“Let me be clear: We will not allow political pretexts to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious rights,” Holder said, bringing the roaring crowd to its feet.
The Republican-backed voter ID laws require people to present official photo identification cards before being allowed to vote. “Many of those without IDs would have to travel great distances to get them — and some would struggle to pay for the documents they might need to obtain them,” Holder said. “We call those poll taxes.”
Meanwhile, Biden warned a convention of Hispanic activists in Las Vegas that conservatives “fear” their inclusion in the voting process.
“Imagine what the Supreme Court will look like after four years of Gov. Romney,” Biden warned. “Imagine what it will mean for civil rights, voting rights and so much we have fought so hard for.”
Biden even managed to make Romney’s refusal to make public his tax returns for 2010 and 2011 sound like a racial issue.
“He wants you to show your papers, but he won’t show us his,” Biden told the Hispanic gathering.
The White House is characterizing Republicans as a threat to minorities at the very moment Obama and Romney are in a virtual dead heat in a number of swing states and when double-digit unemployment among blacks and Hispanics remains nearly double the unemployment rate of white citizens.
“The administration finds itself in a rather desperate situation, and they have no explanation as to why they haven’t been able to do more for African-Americans and other minority groups,” said GOP strategist Cheri Jacobus. “So they are now stooping so low as to play the race card, to push the whole racism barb against Republicans and engage in this race-baiting.”
Political expert John White said the White House is playing the “race card” for good reason: Republicans’ voter fraud initiatives will primarily affect minority voters.
“In the case of the voter ID laws, you have to look at who these laws are targeted at: Hispanics and African-Americans,” said White, a politics professor at Catholic University. “So it makes sense for the Obama campaign to call attention to this strategy.”
Obama won 96 percent of the black vote in 2008 and 67 percent of the Latino vote, according to exit polls. Turnout was up 20 percent among all minorities compared with the previous election cycle. Obama will need a similar turnout among minorities in November to offset an expected loss of white voters, according to polling analysts.
