COURTESY OF AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
BREATHING
FIRE
tures the moral imagination of the
American public.”
Being the poverty-fighting party
isn’t just about winning over lower-income voters — it’s a way for
the GOP to do better with people
who, regardless of their income,
care about poverty: minorities and
suburban women are two of the
most obvious groups.
After the lunch, I was introduced to a Heritage researcher
who talked on and on for several
minutes about how calls for the
GOP to reach out to minorities
were misguided, because, he said,
most minorities are not going to
vote for Republicans anyway.
The researcher prattled on, even
after a friend tried to interrupt
to introduce me to a young man
named Ja’Ron Smith. Smith is a
30-year-old Howard University
graduate whom the ultra-conservative Republican Study Conference tasked with overseeing an anti-poverty study. Smith’s presence
offered an unusual and intriguing
juxtaposition: a young black man
doing work to help lower-income
people among the most hardcore
right-wingers in the House, a hothouse of Tea Party sentiment.
Smith is the kind of person who
should be a star at a gathering of
HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
conservative think-tankers and
policy experts. Yet the Heritage
researcher droned on, oblivious to
Smith’s presence.
I thought of the Heritage researcher a few days later as I sat in
another conference room in another conservative think tank across
town from Capitol Hill. It was a
panel discussion at the American
Enterprise Institute exploring the
GOP’s miserable showing in 2012.
AEI scholar Henry Olsen showed
an odd cartoon short, in which
Henry Olsen,
a scholar with
the American
Enterprise
Institute.