Editor's note: With the 2012 Republican National Convention about to begin in Tampa, CNN asked veteran insiders Donna Brazile, Democratic strategist and former campaign chair for Vice President Al Gore's presidential bid, and Ari Fleischer, Republican communications expert and former press secretary for President George W. Bush, to give us their tips on how to navigate a political convention. Here are Brazile's tips.

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2. Watch the media for reports that track delegate diversity.
The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies has been tracking the ratio of minority delegates at the conventions for 40 years. In 2008, it found that 36 of the 2,380 Republican delegates were African-American. Women delegates were at a 40-year low. Another nearly all-white convention will make it hard for the Republicans to sell themselves as a majority party.

Read more at CNN.

It is becoming abundantly clear that the opponents of President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act care little about minority health.

David Bositis, senior research director for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, has observed in the {Washington Post} that about 36 percent of African Americans have no health insurance (compared to approximately 12 percent of Caucasians).

“Because Americans of Color suffer from hypertension, diabetes and cancer at twice the rates of Caucasians,” he notes, “insurance companies, when permitted to do so, exclude us more often from coverage.”

“I wonder,” Mr. Bositis asks rhetorically, “why those who are fighting this law do not care about the high death rate and high rates of the illnesses of black Americans?”

Read more at The Afro.

The performance by the Rev. William Owens at the National Press Club last week was enough to make a cynic blush. In a nearly empty room, as the C-SPAN cameras rolled, Owens, a Tennessee minister and self-proclaimed leader of the civil rights movement called out the president for his changed position on same sex marriage.

“I didn’t march one inch, one foot, one yard, for a man to marry a man, and a woman to marry a woman,” he said.

Claiming to speak for thousands, he connected the prevalence of same-sex marriage to the collapse of the African-American family. And he threatened the president with a widespread revolt by black voters on Election Day. “He has not done a smart thing,” Owens said.

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“I would place the odds of African Americans defecting the president as about the same as the odds of an asteroid hitting the Earth and wiping out all human life,” says David Bositis at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. “It’s not going to happen.”


Read more at The Washington Post.

When President Barack Obama arrives in New Orleans on Wednesday to speak before the National Urban League annual conference, he will touch down in a state where his party, less than a month before the qualifying deadline, has yet to find a congressional candidate for any district outside the black-majority seat held by Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans.

For Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, D-New Orleans, who seized control of the party from Buddy Leach in April, it is a year for "grassroots rebuilding." But so too was last year, when the party failed to field a single major candidate for any statewide office, including governor.

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"Black voters and elected officials have less influence now than at any time since the civil rights era," David Bositis, an analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, wrote in a stark analysis late last year. It is the culmination of nearly a half-century process that began with the dismantling of Jim Crow, the empowerment of black voters and an explosion in black representation, but that now finds its ironic coda in a once-dominating Democrat Party transformed into a largely African-American enterprise that is only occasionally able to scrounge enough white votes to compete effectively outside black districts. The result has been the loss of legislative control in every Southern state save Arkansas.

Read more at the Times-Picayune.

The cliche "every vote counts" is sure to get a workout this election season. A new report from the National Urban League says the African-American vote could play a critical role in November. Host Michel Martin talks with Chanelle Hardy of the National Urban League and David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Read more at National Public Radio.

From National Public Radio's Tell Me More. The cliche "every vote counts" is sure to get a workout this election season. A new report from the National Urban League says the African-American vote could play a critical role in November. Host Michel Martin talks with Chanelle Hardy of the National Urban League and David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

On largely a party-line vote, legislators agreed Thursday to allow Secretary of State Ross Miller to spend $800,000 for a voter registration effort.

Two of the nine Republicans and all 12 Democrats on the Interim Finance Committee backed the plan, which Democrat Miller said was prompted in part by a lawsuit from the NAACP, La Raza and other groups against his office, which oversees voting in Nevada.

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Some Republicans questioned whether the voter drive was necessary. They said that political parties themselves are registering voters and that the funds should be used to buy or maintain voting machines.

None of them mentioned the obvious: that studies by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies found 95 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics voted for Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, and a voter registration drive might lead to more voting by minorities in November, with Obama on the ballot again.

Read more at the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

President Obama pleased gays and lesbians when he endorsed same-sex marriage. He thrilled women when he signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

But when it comes to African Americans, a group that gave Obama 96 percent of its votes, there is disappointment over what many believe is the president's failure to address their concerns.

With black unemployment at 14 percent - nearly double the rate among whites - and a steep rise in rise in poverty and incarceration rates, many blacks are expressing frustration at the president's leadership.

While no one expects African Americans to make an exodus to presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, there is concern among Democrats over whether Obama will benefit from as large a turnout and the same level of enthusiasm as he enjoyed in 2008.

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David Bositis, who studies African American voting patterns at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said Obama will need strong black support to keep several states in "the Democratic column."


Read more at the Pasedena Star-News.

President Obama pleased gays and lesbians when he endorsed same-sex marriage. He thrilled women when he signed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

But when it comes to African Americans, a group that gave Obama 96 percent of its votes, there is disappointment over what many believe is the president’s failure to address their concerns.

With black unemployment at 14 percent — nearly double the rate among whites — and a steep rise in rise in poverty and incarceration rates, many blacks are expressing frustration at the president’s leadership.

While no one expects African Americans to make an exodus to presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, there is concern among Democrats over whether Obama will benefit from as large a turnout and the same level of enthusiasm as he enjoyed in 2008.

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David Bositis, who studies African American voting patterns at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, said Obama will need strong black support to keep several states in “the Democratic column.”


Read more at Silicon Valley Mercury News.

For more than four decades, the people in Charles Rangel's Harlem congressional district have willingly kept him in office every two years.

For a repeat performance, he's got to first get through Tuesday's congressional primaries, where changed demographics in a redrawn district, shadows from an ethics controversy in recent years and strong challengers could result in something no one under the age of 42 has ever known:

Harlem represented by someone who isn't Charles Rangel.

"He's more than just a long-standing incumbent, he's a significant historical figure," said David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. "He's somebody who, when you think of people who symbolize New York, he symbolizes New York."

Read more at Real Clear Politics.