Opinion: Senator Ted Cruz, Republicans and Nigerian Americans

by Ekerete Udoh

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The unstated or subliminal message in what Senator Cruz was sending out to his base was that Obama is a fraud, its health care reform is a fraud and that as a black man- a man of African ancestry he is a disaster to America. His message resonates with that band of a very narrow minded intellectually incurious section of the Republican bloc.

Senator Ted Cruz- the Canadian born Tea Party enforcer represents the face of today’s Republican Party: ideologically inflexible, blissfully obstructionist, gleefully racist, deeply sanctimonious, shockingly mean-spirited, awfully insensitive and strategically obtuse. The result is that the Grand Old Party (GOP), the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party of Theodore Roosevelt, of Ronald Reagan- a party that once dominated American politics and controlled the White House from 1968 till 1993, except the four years of the Carter Presidency, and had within its electoral blocs and coalitions, moderates to liberals and even those who ideologically defined themselves as leftists.

The Party of Nelson Rockefeller, of  East coast moderates like George H. W. Bush, of Al. D’Amato has today been reduced to a regional party made up of deep south ideological bomb-throwers, who demand and seek ideological purity and constantly manufacture  concerns that  live and thrive in their heads .The party of  independent- minded president like Eisenhower, has lost its ideological moorings, forgetting that there is a growing browning of America, and that the ‘brown Americans’ loathe, detest, and forswear extreme ideological  professions, they  cringe in horror at efforts to describe those Americans who do not look like them as the ‘others’ and would punish those who use such platforms to seek  electoral advantage at the polls.

The party that for over a century had a clearly defined ideological bent, an ideology that was grounded in Hamiltonian market approach to economic planning and other social issues today has become a party that is defined by a losing fight for abortion rights, of gay rights, of waging a war to stop the Affordable Care Act or “Obamacare’ as the unhinged right wingers have taken to labeling the historic health care reform act- a party that adopts divisive platform that can only guarantee them one thing: massive defeat at the polls.

The Grand Old Party it seems has signed a suicide pact with a small band of right wingers who are motivated by the imaginary fear that America is losing its foundational principles because they have a ‘socialist’ in the White House, a man who to them “does not understand how America works nor the awesome power she wields” a man who wants “to turn America into a Third World country from where his father came” and  a man who “ is at war with success and those who create wealth for America”.  To these people with whom the GOP has been joined in a romance of the grave yard, everything Obama stands for is bad for America, and every vile and morally objectionable approach to demonize him is an open Sesame.

It was in the spirit of defining Obama downward that led Senator Ted Cruz, the Canadian born presidential hopeful (hope he has gotten his birth certificate ready, because the left wing Birthers will soon be after him, like the right wing Birthers led by the folically challenged  Donald Trump had hounded Obama over his birth certificate) had, while commenting on the technical snafu that had attended the first day of the  unveiling of Obamacare Website, royally insulted Nigerians by stating that the website may have been run by Nigerian internet scammers.

The attendant backlash the senator suffered from a cross-section of Nigerian Diasporas was overwhelming. Even though Nigerians in the Diaspora are generally not united on most issues, there was a wholesome sense of indignation from all quarters. They community rightly demanded and  finally received an apology from the Senator who in his Me-Culpa said he was joking and that his wife once lived in Nigeria, ad that he has great respect for Nigerian-Americans whom he said had contributed immensely toward the growth of the American society. The Nigerian Ambassador-Professor Adefuye was also in the vanguard of those who called the senator to carpet on his ill-thought out stereotypical definition of the Nigerian Diaspora community.

The unstated or subliminal message in what Senator Cruz was sending out to his base was that Obama is a fraud, its health care reform is a fraud and that as a black man- a man of African ancestry he is a disaster to America. His message resonates with that band of a very narrow minded intellectually incurious section of the Republican bloc. Problem however, is that that bloc is monolithic in its voting pattern and only listens to sermons from the mountain of inflexibility. For Senator Cruz to be preaching to that congregation and repeating songs they are already very well-versed in singing, shows him to an ideologically obtuse politicians.

Most Nigerians in the United States are very conservative and would normally have gravitated toward the Republican Party, but majority would never vote for the party because of the activities of people like Ted Cruz. I remember engaging a Republican Party activist- an African American last year at the Akwa Ibom Economic Summit in Houston, Texas on the need for the party to moderate its views on social and cultural issues and the gentleman had told me, that he is sometimes, at  a loss as to why a party that should be cultivating different electoral blocs have instead elected to demonize such groups, but that he was drawn to the party because of its economic message of independence and personal responsibility.

If the likes of Ted Cruz continue to be the face of the party, then one can conclude that America may be lurching towards a one-party state.  His apology to me is an after-thought and does not wash with me.

 

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Read this Article in the Thisday Newspapers

 

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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