New day for two-party politics

With Republican Chairman Michael Steele shaping and steering the course for that party’s future, Americans will have two very distinct options for who best represents their beliefs.

The heads of both parties are black men of great competence, intelligence, ambition and idealism. Obama is Christian and liberal, Steele is Roman Catholic and conservative. NCRegister considers the ramifications. 

Steele’s election is a very interesting one for many reasons, not least because it highlights the wide discrepancy between President Barack Obama’s views and those of many other black Americans on hot-button cultural issues like homosexual rights.

Few political observers dispute that the GOP’s selection of Steele was motivated substantially by a desire to

signal that the party is sympathetic to the aspirations of the black community, and other ethnic Americans.

But blacks generally vote overwhelmingly in favor of Democratic candidates over their Republican opponents. And that disparity only became more glaring in the 2008 election cycle dominated by Obama’s candidacy and his election as the nation’s first African-American president.

However, this African-American attachment to Democratic candidates in general, and Obama in particular, obscures the reality that Obama’s extremely liberal stances on social issues and his relative disinterest in religion (a recent Washington Post article reported Obama has not attended church regularly for at least five years) are unrepresentative of the black community.

Whereas…

According to Steele’s RNC campaign website, he spent three years as a young man at a Catholic seminary studying to become an Augustinian priest before discerning he had a different vocation. Currently, Steele serves on the the administrative board of the Maryland Catholic Conference.

The Register notes that on the same day Steele was elected as Republican Chairman, a Pew Research Center Forum on Religion & Public Life study was released.

“The analysis finds that African-Americans are markedly more religious than the U.S. population as a whole on a variety of measures, including reporting a religious affiliation, attendance at religious services, frequency of prayer and the importance of religion in people’s lives.

“Compared with other racial and ethnic groups, African-Americans are among the most likely to report a formal religious affiliation, with fully 87% of African-Americans describing themselves as belonging to one religious group or another. The analysis also finds that nearly eight-in-ten African-Americans (79%) say religion is very important in their lives, compared with 56% among all U.S. adults.”

The Register recalls this important fact:

And the outcome of California’s Proposition 8 ballot measure that amended the state constitution to define marriage as a one-man, one woman institution provided clear evidence that the collective religiosity of black Americans has important political consequences. According to CNN’s exit polling data, African-Americans voted in favor of the measure affirming traditional marriage by an overwhelming 70%-30% margin.

It’s not a conclusion, but certainly key markers on a path forward.

Of course, electing a charismatic, religiously motivated black politician as the Republican National Committee’s new chairman can’t be expected to do much by itself to tug the black community away from its close political embrace of the Democratic Party.

But it’s a new beginning, a course-correction, to re-establish what the two parties stand for and do it with clarity. And then give Americans a real and representative choice.