Sept. 11 Killed The Race Card

It only seems like nothing happened.

For hour after hour on election night, the wires reported no change, no change, no change. But that "no change" was a big change from elections past. The president's party typically loses seats in off-years -- an average of 30 House seats and almost always Senate seats as well. In recession years like 1982, 1970 and 1958, the president's party does much worse. As we went to press last night, however, the Republicans seemed at least to be holding their own.

There are many reasons why the Republicans have avoided the usual bad fate of presidential parties, but there is one that deserves special attention -- because it portends so well for the future of the United States. In state after state, Democrats rested their case on crude appeals to racial resentment. A consultant to Maryland gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Kennedy Townsend unguardedly told the press that it was his plan to depict the Republican, a harmless moderate named Robert Ehrlich, "as the Nazi he is." The consultant was fired, but the strategy was followed.

The Democrats tried the same strategy in Florida, where they tried to stoke minority resentments over the 2000 recount to topple Governor Jeb Bush, and in Missouri, where they accused the Republicans of trying to intimidate black voters away from the polls.

It failed everywhere. Ehrlich won his race. So, of course, did Jeb Bush. And at press time, the future was not looking bright for incumbent Missouri Democratic Senator Jean Carnahan.

In every case, the Democrats blamed their defeat on the unwillingness of minority voters to turn out in large numbers against the Republicans. In Florida, the Democrats suffered the extra disappointment of losing the Hispanic vote -- and even the non-Cuban Hispanic vote -- to Jeb Bush.

The 2000 election provoked a spasm of racial resentment in the United States. Many black voters felt they had been cheated in ways that reminded them of the ugly injustices of the Jim Crow past -- and that resentment was for a long time expected to animate the 2002 election. But in at least this one way, 9/11 changed America's political map.

One of the most unexpected consequences of the terror attack -- and the surge of patriotism the attack inspired -- was an ebbing of racial hostility in the United States.

Americans watched white firemen and black policemen brave death together. Their conservative white Republican President accepted guidance from the black woman who ran his National Security Council and the black man he had selected as Secretary of State. They grieved together for the black and white victims of the anthrax killer and celebrated together the victories of the United State's multiracial armed forces in Afghanistan.

They felt what Franklin Roosevelt called "the warm courage of national unity." And in that warm glow, their old internal animosities suddenly seemed less important.

In the weeks after Sept. 11, even The New York Times -- a newspaper always on the lookout for signs of racial rancor -- ran features acknowledging the strange and sudden diminution of racial tension in New York. Fourteen months later, this diminution of tension has had political results.

In 1996, Bill Clinton revved up his party's black voting base by discovering an epidemic of arson in black churches. It later proved that most of the burned churches were empty, ramshackle wooden buildings in remote rural areas -- and that the burnings were the work of drunks and teenagers and vagrants. But the story did its work. Memories of real church burnings still lingered in black America, and black voters went to the polls to vote for the president who promised to protect them.

In 2000, Al Gore revved up the base again by making a political issue of the murder of James Byrd, dragged to death behind a truck by three white men in Jasper, Tex., two years before. Texas tried and convicted the killers -- and Governor Bush signed death warrants for two of them -- but Bush did not support the hate-crimes law that Byrd's daughter demanded as a monument to her father.

It was not that long ago that black men were murdered with impunity in towns like Jasper, and the radio ads that Stella Byrd taped for the NAACP used the murder to excite African-Americans to turn out to vote against Bush. The appeal worked -- and black voters nationwide turned out in huge numbers.

But 2002 was the year the racial appeal stopped working.

There were signs even before election night. Two Democratic congressmen with histories of race-baiting -- Georgia's Cynthia McKinney and Alabama's Earl Hilliard -- lost primaries in heavily black districts to more moderate black Democrats earlier this fall. (McKinney's father, a member of the state legislature, appeared on television the night his daughter lost to explain why. He gave a one-word answer: "Jews." Then for good measure he spelled it out: "J-E-W-S." A week later, he lost his primary, too.)

The differences in voting patterns and values between white and non-white voters remain large and real. But those differences are becoming both more complex -- and, on the evidence of this one election, less angry.

That was bad news for the Democrats last night. It's good news for the United States.