"A black man voting Rep. Like A Chicken Voting for Col. Sanders"
cyberdock
washingtonpost.com Fade to White
The only African American Republican in Congress
is headed home. Can the party of Lincoln -- and
Trent Lott -- afford the loss of J.C. Watts?
By Jake Tapper
Sunday, January 5, 2003; Page W06 The empty
halls of the Longworth House Office Building echo
as Oklahoma Rep. J.C. Watts Jr. makes his way --
for one of the last times -- to his office.
With Congress in winter recess, much of the Capitol
is deserted, its usual hum of committee hearings,
press conferences, floor votes and political
maneuvering replaced by an unnatural, almost
melancholy stillness.
Watts cuts through the gloom in shiny black cowboy
boots and a yellow tie that matches his sunny
disposition. He's here to tie up loose ends. To pack
up. Move on. Bring his high-profile, frustrating years
as the country's sole black Republican congressman
to an end.
"I don't know where anything is," Watts says with a
chuckle as he enters the shambles that was his work
space as chairman of the House Republican
Conference. "I came here last night, and it looked
like a ghost town."
The bookshelves are empty, the University of Oklahoma
banners in storage, the mementos long gone. Most of
what remains is covered in bubble wrap. A sculpture
of an American eagle that once proudly supervised the
room is now pushed, face first, against a bare white
wall. Two elephants -- one black and one white --
stare each other down on Watts's desk.
"The most important things are still here," the
45-year-old lawmaker jokes with his press
secretary, Kyle Downey. "I got a place to sit,"
Watts says, patting his black "The most important
things are still here," the 45-year-old lawmaker
jokes with his press secretary, Kyle Downey. "I
got a place to sit," Watts says, patting his black
leather chair. "A place to write," he says rapping
his desk. "A place to watch ESPN," he laughs,
rubbing his TV with his palm. Downey assures his
boss, a former star quarterback at Oklahoma, that
they fought to keep the cable wired until the very
end.
Soon the 108th Congress will be sworn in, and
the desk, chair and cable connection will be
assigned to someone else.
Watts is ready. Despite being a star within the GOP
and holding a coveted leadership position for four
years, he was always a solitary figure on Capitol Hill.
More outsider than insider, unwilling or unable to
master the give and take of building alliances and
wielding power.
When he announced his retirement in July, he was
fed up, though he didn't come out and say so. Watts
has never been one for introspection. And his years
as a political lightning rod -- hammered by both
liberal black Democrats and conservative white
Republicans for not following the company line --
have only made him more cautious and circumspect.
But emotions have a way of spilling out, and, as Watts
talks, it becomes clear that a great deal of hurt and
anger churn beneath his genial, upbeat veneer.
The topic is golf wunderkind Tiger Woods, under
tremendous pressure to boycott the Masters golf
tournament because Augusta National Golf Club
has no female members.
"Look at what they're doing to Tiger Woods," Watts
fumes. "There's no other golfer in American today
being asked to do what Tiger is. Being singled out
to say, "You have to act a certain way. You are
being held to a different standard than the rest of
your colleagues on the PGA Tour.' Tiger's being
asked to do something that his association isn't
being asked to do! If you're going to ask somebody
to boycott the Masters, why not ask the PGA to pull
their certification?"
Watts's voice rises in outrage. "It's totally unfair.
They're singling him out, not because he's a great
golfer. They're singling him out because he's black . . .
I feel like I know exactly what Tiger's going through
right now. I suspect I could tell Tiger some stories
about my experiences, and he'd say, "Me, too.' "
He pounds the table for emphasis. He's endured all
sorts of indignities trying to build bridges between
blacks and Republicans -- efforts that often left
him isolated from both groups. His staffers look at
him, perhaps afraid that in these closing days he's
going to say what he truly feels, really let go about
what his eight years in Washington were like.
He doesn't. By the afternoon, in fact, Watts is
standing before television cameras to defend a
far different target of racial crossfire than Tiger
Woods: Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott. The Senate's
incoming majority leader has been hit with a storm
of criticism for praising Sen. Strom Thurmond's
1948 presidential campaign at Thurmond's 100th
birthday party. Since Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat
defender of segregation, plenty of people consider
Lott's remarks an outrageous endorsement of the
days of Jim Crow and racial oppression. He's being
slammed not only by liberal Democrats like Al Gore,
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, but by the
conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page
and the Family Research Council.
Watts initially sees the controversy as a cynical
Washington game, one that trivializes the issue
of race by focusing on some ill-conceived remarks
at a banquet rather than on larger matters of
economic inequity and failing schools.
For an hour he tells one reporter after another that
he has worked closely with Lott and never seen any
evidence of racism. Lott has assured him, Watts says,
that he didn't mean the comments in the way they are
being interpreted.
Watts believes him, despite Lott's record opposing
civil rights legislation, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
holiday and affirmative action, and despite his
willingness to speak to segregationist groups.
Watts is the man of the hour. Producers and
correspondents from Fox News, CNN, ABC, CBS and
NBC queue up to get their sound bites.
"Isn't the congressman concerned about being labeled
an Uncle Tom?" one reporter asks Downey, who retorts:
"And that would be different from the last eight years
how?"
From the moment he arrived in Washington, Julius
Caesar Watts Jr. has been a political curiosity. Even
his late father, Buddy, had trouble figuring out how
his son had wound up a Republican. "A black man
voting for the Republicans," he was often quoted
as saying, "makes about as much sense as a
chicken voting for Colonel Sanders."
Such distrust is widespread in the African American
community. Despite sporadic efforts by the GOP to
woo black voters, Democrats routinely win 90 percent
of the African American vote in national elections.
And the ranks of elected black Republicans remain
pitifully small. Of the 9,040 blacks elected to public
office across the country in 2000, only 50 were
Republican, according to the Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies, a Washington think
tank that studies black political participation.
The conservative fold does include some prominent --
and powerful -- blacks: Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice. But they remain rare. And, in
the minds of some in the liberal black establishment,
suspect.
Watts, the fifth of Buddy and Helen's six children,
certainly didn't start out as a conservative. Pretty much
everyone he knew in his tiny, hardscrabble hometown
of Eufaula, Okla., was a Democrat, including his father,
a farmer and Baptist minister who served on the town
council, and his uncle Wade, who headed the state
chapter of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People.
The civil rights struggle wasn't something Watts
studied in textbooks. It was something he
witnessed firsthand when the public schools
were being desegregated in rural Oklahoma. The
racism was open and debilitating. Once, as a boy,
he yelled at a teacher: "You think because we're
black that you can treat us like dogs!"
At the University of Oklahoma, Watts became a
star quarterback, leading the Sooners to Orange
Bowl victories in 1980 and 1981 as the most
valuable player in both games. But he wasn't
drafted as a quarterback by the National Football
League, which, at that time, remained the almost
exclusive domain of white quarterbacks. Watts
had to settle for the Canadian Football League.
After six seasons in Ottawa and Toronto, he
wound up back in Oklahoma, where the
Republicans began courting him.
Watts, who'd grown up poor, liked the party's
message of self-reliance. He liked Don Nickles,
the state's Republican senator. He also thought
liberal policies had failed to help the black
community and that Democrats took the black
vote for granted.
When he switched parties in 1989 to run for a
seat on the Oklahoma Corporation Commission,
it was considered a coup for the GOP. The party
had been trying to make inroads with black
voters since at least 1978, when Republican
National Chairman William Brock hired black
consultants to develop a program for minorities
and asked Jesse Jackson to come speak to the
RNC. The outreach hadn't had much impact.
But GOP leaders were convinced that Watts, a
handsome young football hero and a charismatic
public speaker, could help the party connect with
African American voters and improve its image
with suburban white swing voters as well.
Republicans embraced him eagerly -- too eagerly,
his father and uncle thought.
Though Watts had voted for Michael Dukakis in 1988
and had served as a state regulatory commissioner
for less than two years, he was asked to nominate
George H.W. Bush for president at the 1992
Republican National Convention.
His election to the U.S. House of Representatives
in 1994 made Watts the first black Republican
congressman from a Southern state in 120 years.
Republicans were jubilant and jetted Watts around
the country for speeches and fundraisers. His name
was perennially bandied about as a possible vice
presidential candidate. At the 1996 Republican
National Convention, the attention was so
overwhelming that he had to have police escorts
just to be able to walk across the convention floor.
Everybody wanted their picture taken with him.
The following year, Watts delivered the GOP's
rebuttal to President Clinton's State of the
Union speech.
Heady stuff, though it didn't protect him from the
sneers of black Democrats. People like Jackson
and Sharpton dismissed Watts as a sellout, a GOP
poster boy for diversity. Others were offended by
his refusal to join the Congressional Black Caucus,
which he regarded as a Democratic club that
forced its members to march in lockstep.
Watts doesn't pretend that his skin color had nothing
to do with his meteoric rise. "The fact is," he acknowledges,
"when you're the majority party you have to consider how
the head table looks at the banquet. It's just a fact,
just a reality in politics." Watts saw himself as a
trailblazer, not a token.
"Is it tokenism to say I think more black men should
be schoolteachers?" he asks. "No -- I think it matters."
In second grade he was one of two black kids to
integrate all-white Jefferson Davis Elementary School.
From that point on, he didn't see a black teacher until
his sophomore year in high school. "That's not symbolism,"
he insists. "These things are important. I take great pride
when I see General Powell giving a briefing. Black kids
know where to look to find the wrong kinds of role models."
Being the only black guy in the room wasn't easy,
though Watts usually treated it with eye-rolling
good humor. When party leaders asked him to
appear at welfare reform press conferences,
he'd privately remark that since a majority of
those on welfare were white, he didn't really
see the point in his attendance. But more often
than not, he'd show up.
Sometimes in the halls of Congress, a clueless
colleague would make a point of introducing him
to a black constituent, as if the constituent and
Watts had to be long-lost friends, members of
some club who might slap-five. Watts would grin
and bear it.
Far more damaging were Watts's tangles with
House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, his frustration
at his lack of clout within the Republican leadership
and his growing sense that he wasn't being treated
with the same respect as other House leaders.
All of it, say those who know him well, took a psychic
toll. His wife, Frankie, had never moved to the capital,
preferring to stay in Norman, Okla., with their five
children. (Watts also has a sixth child, who was born
when he was 17 and was raised by his uncle.) Watts
flew back to Oklahoma almost every weekend to see
his family. In truth, he was more comfortable there
anyway.
A devout Christian and part-time Baptist preacher,
Watts doesn't drink, doesn't smoke and doesn't
have much of an appetite for the capital's party
circuit. He bonded with staffers while watching
reruns of his beloved "Andy Griffith Show," but
he never developed the kind of close personal
ties that give Congress its clubby atmosphere.
"I can see why people might say, "It's not easy
to get to know J.C.,' " says Watts, who admits
that he doesn't confide in people. "It's one of
my weaknesses. I don't open up to people and
tell them personal things. It's just not my nature."
Watts had colleagues, but not friends. He was
lonely in Washington, says one senior GOP
leadership aide: "I mean, J.C. isn't a white guy
with black skin. He's a black guy."
Now the black guy is going, leaving Congress bereft
of even one elected African American Republican
voice for the first time since 1990. It is a worrisome
development for a party trying to sell itself as the
home of compassionate conservatism. Every bit as
damaging, in its own way, as public nostalgia for
segregation.
It was a dozen years between the defeat of Sen.
Edward Brooke (R-Mass.) in 1978 and the election
of Rep. Gary Franks (R-Conn.) in 1990; before that,
it was 32 years in the wilderness.
"I think for any caucus on any level to be absent the
black perspective is a deficiency," says the Rev.
DeForest "Buster" Soaries, a black Republican who
lost a race against Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) in
November.
"There are racial dynamics to everything," he says,
and whites can stumble into offensive statements
without even realizing it. Sometimes "it gets down
to a certain word in a press release that the majority
just misses but the minority community picks up on
it." Soaries has spent a great deal of time explaining
the loaded term "state's rights" to young white
Republicans. "They're thinking of a conservative
model of a government construct, but if you say it
to black people they're thinking George Wallace or
Mississippi and those states that wanted the right
to continue with segregation." Without Watts,
Republicans in Congress will have to work hard to
to bring non-elected black Republicans into their
process, Soaries says.
Jim Dyke, a spokesman for the RNC, says that
Chairman Marc Racicot is doing just that. "He is
adamant about these outreach efforts," says Dyke,
who points out that the party holds regular events
like one in Charlotte, N.C., last August featuring
second-tier black Bush administration officials.
And while November didn't prove fruitful for either
Soaries or Las Vegas City Councilwoman Lynette
Boggs McDonald -- a black Republican who lost
her bid to unseat Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.)
-- Dyke points out that other African American
Republicans won, including Maryland Lt.-Gov.-elect
Michael Steele.
"As far as the farm team goes," McDonald says,
"it's stronger than it's ever been."
Democrats, of course, don't buy it. They've long
questioned the sincerity of Republican efforts to
win over black voters, labeling the outreach all talk
and no action. They point out that the vice chair of
the RNC's New Majority Council, launched with
great fanfare several years ago to court black
voters, resigned in 2000, saying that the RNC
didn't stand for more than "the oratory of inclusion."
Soaries reports that "some Republicans were
a little nervous because of my potential appeal
to black voters, because if black voters turned
out in large numbers for me, many Republicans
were afraid that would help other Democrats in
other races." He was stunned when some
Republican officials urged him to not campaign
in black areas.
Watts, too, recalls that before his 1990 race for
Oklahoma corporation commissioner, a prominent
state Republican predicted that Watts would be
a disaster for the rest of the GOP ticket. Blacks,
the Republican reasoned, would turn out in huge
numbers for Watts, but vote Democratic for every
other office.
Watts considers this a "sick, pathetic theory," but
it continues to hold sway with some Republicans,
and he acknowledges that it may be part of the
reason the party hasn't made minority outreach
a higher priority. The lack of strong commitment
exasperates Watts. Republican Strom Thurmond,
Watts points out, won 22 percent of the black
vote in his last Senate race in South Carolina.
If a former segregationist can do that in the
South, Watts argues, there's no reason why the
national GOP can't do the same.
There are other cracks in the black Democratic
fortress, Watts adds. In a poll released by the
Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
in October, 63 percent of blacks identified
themselves as Democrats, down from 74
percent two years ago. The number of blacks
who identified themselves as Republicans grew
from 4 percent to 10 percent. And for the first
time, Colin Powell scored a higher approval
rating on civil rights than Jesse Jackson.
But David Bositis, a senior researcher for the
think tank, doesn't believe any of this has translated
into more black votes for the Republican Party: "It's
just not there. The fact is George Bush got the
lowest percentage of the black vote of any
Republican since Goldwater."
If Watts's mission was to build bridges between
blacks and Republicans, he has failed, Bositis
says. "The party hasn't changed. There's some
moves within the party to change, but it hasn't
changed. And Trent Lott's a perfect example
of it."
Watts's real legacy wasn't making the GOP more
attractive to blacks, Bositis says. It was keeping
the party from making itself less attractive.
In 1996, the revolution that had swept Republicans
to power in the House was in full swing, and
conservatives were on a tear. With most of the
"Contract With America" already passed into law,
they set their sights on dismantling affirmative
action.
Franks, the only other black Republican in
Congress, and Rep. Charles Canady of
Florida introduced a bill to eliminate racial
preferences designed to make up for past
discrimination against minorities. They called
the proposed legislation the Civil Rights Act
of 1996. It was a hot issue. While affirmative
action had broad and vociferous support
within the black community and among many
Democrats, many Republicans argued that
racial preferences of any kind made it
impossible to achieve a colorblind society.
Watts had reservations about affirmative action,
too, but absent an alternative, a "Plan B," he
decided to oppose Canady and Franks. Just as
his family's self-reliance ultimately led him to
support welfare reform, Watts's personal
experiences led him to conclude that the
United States was not yet ready to end
affirmative action altogether. Much had
changed from his childhood days when
Watts had to sit in the balcony at the
Eufaula Theater. But racism hadn't
disappeared. Driving his Chevy Blazer in
Oklahoma one day, Watts had been pulled over
by the police six different times. The sole reason,
he believed, was his skin color.
Watts worked for weeks to arrange a private
meeting with then-House Speaker Newt
Gingrich. One afternoon, he finally found himself
in Gingrich's office. On the wall hung an immense
portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who
appeared to be watching as Watts asked Gingrich
to kill the Canady-Franks bill. Doing anything less,
Watts said, would send a signal that the GOP
believed racism no longer existed in America.
Politically, the party hadn't laid the groundwork
for such a move, Watts argued. And what were
the Republicans proposing other than just ending
affirmative action?
"Look, in principle, I don't agree with affirmative
action," Watts said. "But in practice, we still don't
have a level playing field." It was an emotional
issue for Watts. "I don't know, Newt, I'm thinking
with my heart here, not my head."
Gingrich listened, then leaned forward and touched
Watts's arm. "That's why I like having you around,
J.C.," he said. "Don't ever stop listening to your
heart. I need your heart."
Gingrich told Franks to pull his bill.
But the next year, Canady continued his crusade
without Franks, who had been defeated at the polls.
Canady and the other backers of the bill knew they
needed Watts's support to make their case that
race was no longer an issue in America -- an irony
not lost on the party's only black congressman.
They brought in Ward Connerly, a conservative
African American for whom ending racial preferences
had become a raison d'etre, to try to persuade Watts.
The meeting got a bit tense.
"Affirmative action isn't the problem," Watts
remembers telling Connerly. "Lousy education
for black kids is the problem. Until you fix these
schools don't talk to me about equal opportunity."
This time, though, the bill seemed headed for a vote
on the House floor. Then something surprising
happened: When the House Judiciary Committee
took up the bill, eight Republicans didn't show up
and four Republicans moved to kill the bill. Watts
strongly suspects Gingrich was at work behind the
scenes.
The party of Lincoln had, in effect, endorsed the
need for affirmative action -- or least acknowledged
that America had yet to reach its colorblind promise.
And J.C. Watts's voice had been heard.
Watts ran for chairman of the House Republican
Conference in 1998, a time of tremendous turmoil
on Capitol Hill. President Clinton was being impeached,
and Gingrich had survived a coup attempt by fellow
Republicans.
The Republicans desperately needed to soften
their strident image, and, as conference chair,
Watts would handle communications for the team.
Calm, affable and compassionate, he was able to
take down conference Chairman John Boehner, a
Republican from Ohio who'd been one of the
participants in the failed coup.
On his 41st birthday, Watts became the fourth-ranking
Republican in the House, putting him on track for even
bigger things. But he soon found himself at odds with
one of the Hill's most formidable political pit bulls:
Tom DeLay.
A former pest exterminator from Texas nicknamed
"the Hammer," DeLay didn't have much use for
anyone who wasn't part of his bare-knuckles,
vote-gathering machine. And Watts wasn't.
"Have you ever seen the movie "A Few Good Men'?"
Watts asks as he ruminates about DeLay and the
whip's frequent run-ins with the media. At the film's
climax, a young lieutenant played by Tom Cruise
needles Jack Nicholson's Col. Nathan Jessup into
his courtroom confession. "When Colonel Jessup
was on the stand down in the stretch there, and
Cruise knew he was going to convict him? The
reason he knew he would convict him is, he knew
Jessup had too much pride to lie. He said, "Did
you order the Code Red?' and Jessup said, "You're
damn right I ordered the Code Red!' "
Watts smiles, letting the analogy hang there. It's
an interesting comparison, considering the villainous
Nicholson character is a man who took the Marine
Corps code to extremes.
"Tom's a very proud conservative," Watts observes.
"He knows one way, he's very hard-charging." And in
1999, it was clear that DeLay was charging right for
him. That summer, DeLay's office distributed an
array of communications materials to the House
Republican Conference, publicly doing Watts's job
for him. Then, in December, conservative syndicated
columnist Robert Novak wrote that "dissatisfaction"
with Watts as conference chair was "being voiced
by his congressional colleagues, including other
members of the party leadership."
Watts, who considered resigning or retiring then,
says the criticism of his performance was unfair.
Elected conference chairman in November 1998,
"I didn't get a staff and budget until the middle
of March," Watts says. "And everybody was saying,
"Oh, he's gotten off to a rocky start,' but I didn't
have the ability to do the job I was elected to do."
He was used to the Uncle Tom broadsides from
the Jacksons and Sharptons of the world. But
public sniping from "other members of the party
leadership," as Novak put it, that was too much.
"There was, I am convinced, an orchestrated
effort to cause me problems and to keep me
from doing my job," Watts says.
DeLay's office didn't return numerous phone calls
to comment for this article. But a Republican
source describes DeLay's thinking this way:
"Tom's very frustrated when the message
doesn't get out. Tom wants the whole team to
work together, and he wants the message part
to work . . . "Just do the job. If you're going to
do the job, great. If you're not and you want
help, we're here to help. If you're not and you
don't want help, then we're going to do the job.' "
Watts eventually appealed to House Speaker
Dennis Hastert for support and got it, but he
remained frustrated. Some came to view him
as petulant. He "threatened to quit leadership
half a dozen times that I know of," one
Republican says. "He's very high maintenance."
It took a long time for Watts to come to terms with
how betrayed he felt. He didn't understand, at first,
"the dynamics of the leadership table, the challenges,
even some games being played at that time, some
turf grabbing," Watts says. "I was naive in thinking
that, "Gosh, we all wear the same colored jersey,
we're all going to be one big happy family and
we're all going to work as a team for the cause.'
"Being at the leadership table is often like the
company that keeps two sets of books, one public
set of books and one private set of books, and I
just never got into that and never wanted to get
into it."
Even so, late in 2001, when House Majority Leader
Dick Armey announced he would retire at the end
of 2002, Watts considered running for Armey's
leadership job. His opponent would be Tom
DeLay. Watts asked some of his colleagues to
"keep their powder dry" while he took a couple
of months to contemplate a run. It was a naive
request. While Watts was mulling his future,
DeLay began buttonholing colleagues. Though
the election was still months away, DeLay quickly
nailed down enough votes to assure victory. The
Hammer would be the next majority leader.
----