Black Tuesday
On the Monday before Election Day, hundreds of black voters came home from work, pressed play on their answering machines and heard a man’s official-sounding commentary on public schools.
“The fact is, Kansas City Democrats like [Emanuel] Cleaver will say anything to block parental choice,” he said. “That’s because their relatives drawing fat paychecks from the [Kansas City School] District, like Dianne Cleaver, want more of our money no matter how bad the schools get. The Cleavers aren’t fools. They put their own kids in high-performing private schools. If you want that kind of choice for your children, vote for the party that will make it happen: the Republicans.”
The message seized on last summer’s controversy surrounding Dianne Cleaver’s six-figure, eleven-month contract to help the school district boost parental involvement and improve relations with Kansas City’s civic leaders. It also used the Cleaver children’s Catholic-school upbringing to equate black Democrats with graft.
Caller ID revealed a Johnson County number and the name Richard LeClerq. But the number belongs to Rich Nadler, a conservative pundit from Overland Park once visible on KCPT Channel 19’s recently mothballed Ruckus.
“I was the consultant on those,” Nadler says of the ads. He would not tell the Pitch who paid for his expertise.
Two years ago, Nadler drew flack for producing a TV ad for the Kansas-based Republican Ideas Political Committee. It featured a woman complaining that her son’s violent, drug-infested public school offered “a bit more diversity than [she] could handle.” Among the Republican leaders who immediately branded the sixty-second spot “racist” were then-Senator John Ashcroft, gubernatorial candidate Jim Talent and U.S. Representative candidate Sam Graves.
This time around, Nadler isn’t facing a stampede from his fellow elephants. “That’s not necessarily the route we would have taken,” says Scott Baker, spokesman for the Missouri Republican Party. “But I can’t comment on whether it was good, bad or otherwise.”
From the left, however, Nadler’s recent tactics are provoking harsh criticism. “It’s a pretty low blow,” says the Reverend Wallace Hartsfield, pastor of the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church and cochairman of the Kansas City Black Agenda Group. The phone message, Hartsfield says, “is a move to pit African-Americans against one another. … But to take highly visible people and hang them out as a negative example, that is deplorable.”
“There were all kinds of tactics used this past election by the Republicans,” says Nancy Tully, spokesperson for Missouri Democrats. “This seems like a misguided one.”
“I’m tempted not to dignify it with a response,” says Dianne Cleaver. “Sometimes I’m sorry to see what our political campaigns descend to.”
“Obviously Democrats don’t like it when Republicans campaign for what they regard as their voters,” Nadler responds. “Let me put it this way: I was pleased with the outcome of the election. The black share went up for Republicans in this area.”
But in this year’s highest-profile partisan race — in which Talent beat Democrat Jean Carnahan for a U.S. Senate seat — Talent suffered a worse beating than Ashcroft did in 2000 in Kansas City voting wards with the highest percentage of black voters. In Ward 3 — which runs from 31st Street south to 41st and from Troost east to Indiana — Republicans eked out a .3 percent increase over 2000’s numbers. But in Ward 14 — which runs from Truman Road south to 31st Street and from Prospect east to Van Brunt — Talent earned a meager 3.5 percent, down from Ashcroft’s whopping 5.3 percent two years ago. In all but five of these wards’ seventeen precincts, Talent’s vote totals didn’t even rise into double digits.
Yet Republicans are proud of their work to get those votes. “We made a concerted effort to reach out to black voters like never before,” Baker says. “We decided we would not concede to Democrats the black vote.”
And come next election, Nadler promises he’ll be right back in the fray. “I would do it again,” he says.
