Joint Center News from the Convention Floor - Tuesday, July 27, 2004
Dems Hope Hip-Hop Plus Party Unity Equal a Winning Combination
BOSTON— Kim Alfred, a 24-year-old mother and student, is a changed woman.
“I feel empowered to vote,†she said yesterday as she left the Hip-Hop Summit at her school, Roxbury Community College, in Boston.
With that simple statement, Alfred represented what the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network has been trying to do with its two dozen gatherings across the country: register young people to vote. Several rap artists joined rap impresario Russell Simmons, along with U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters of California and Kwame Kilpatrick, the 34-year-old hip-hop generation mayor of Detroit, exhorting the large crowd to demonstrate its power on Election Day.
The Boston summit met just as delegates to the Democratic National Convention began their meeting elsewhere in the city to nominate Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry for president. National polls now show Kerry in a statistical dead heat with President Bush. If that trend continues, the votes of those traditionally less likely to turn up at the polls – young people in particular - - could be crucial to the election outcome.
It’s those voters that Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP, says he’s trying to register. The NAACP is supporting Sean “P. Diddy†Combs’ “Citizen Change†effort to register the hip-hop generation to vote.
In a crowded corridor of the Fleet Center, where the Democrats are meeting, Mfume said the NAACP is working to sharply increase the turnout of unlikely voters, those who have voted just once or not at all in the last five years -- people like Kim Alfred.
“We’re going after those persons,†Mfume said. Unfortunately, he added, “you find them everywhere.â€
Convincing them to turn out is a challenge. Mfume believes the key thing is to show these unlikely voters that their votes can make a difference. He cites his own political career as an example. Before he became the NAACP’s leader, before he was elected to represent Baltimore in Congress, Mfume was a Baltimore city councilman. He noted that he won his first city council race, in 1979, by only three votes.
Those three votes demonstrate the importance of every vote, a message Democrats have repeatedly pressed at this convention with its echoes of Al Gore’s November 2000 experience. Although Gore won the popular vote for president, he lost the Electoral College contest after a controversial Supreme Court decision stopped the recount in Florida and put George Bush in the White House.
Speaking from the podium last night, Gore tried to humor convention partisans, many of whom still feel cheated: “I know from my own experience that America is a land of opportunity, where every little boy and girl has a chance to grow up and win the popular vote.â€
Delegates here reacted with thunderous applause when former President Bill Clinton called Gore “the living embodiment, the principle that every vote counts – and this year we’re going to make sure they’re all counted in every state in America.â€
Putting it differently, Gore told the crowd: “Let’s make sure not only that the Supreme Court does not pick the next president, but also that this president is not the one who picks the next Supreme Court.â€
One thing that could help the Democrats reach that goal is the uncommon unity in their ranks. The lack of any lingering support for Kerry’s defeated primary opponents and the harmony among the various party factions are both as plain as the sea of Kerry/Edwards signs filling the convention floor.
That unity was obvious as well at a Monday morning meeting of African American delegates in the Sheraton Boston Hotel. “There are no factions as far as Kerry goes,†said David Bositis, a Joint Center senior research associate who was observing the meeting. “They all support Kerry.â€
Joe Davidson is the editor of FOCUS magazine at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.