It's something that understandably got buried in the rubble of Rovegate, the London bombings, and the invention of Testtube McNuggets, but last week RNC chair Ken Mehlman did something puzzling: He told the NAACP that the Repubs had been wrong to use race as a wedge issue for the last forty-some years.
As the story goes, when Lyndon Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, he said ruefully, "There goes the South for a generation."
He was right. He was optimistic, even, since the South has been lost to the Democrats for much longer than a generation.
It had already begun before 1964, of course, which is why the Senate that kept refusing to make a move against lynchings was full of one-time Democrats who had switched to the GOP in protest against civil rights legislation. This was back when the GOP was still the Party of Lincoln anywhere but on faded bumper stickers. But by the time of the Civil Rights act and the Johnson/Goldwater campaign, the South had switched over at the presidential level, and remains so even though two Democratic governors from the South have been elected President in the last generation.)
By 1968, candidate Richard Nixon was able to build a successful campaign around the "southern strategy"--built from an amalgam of emphasis on moderate positions for most of the country and code-word racism (e.g., "states' rights" and "law and order"), the linguistic secret handshake that reassured white Republican voters in the former Confederacy that they would get what they expected (although some Republicans seem to have a better grasp of the fundamentals of the "code word" part than others).
By the late 1980s, the "southern strategy" had matured (metastasized?) to incorporate appeals to class and religion, rather than just race, and in the 1990s it added gay-bashing to the mix. One of its clearest and brightest symbols became the nearly obligatory pilgrimage by Republican presidential candidates to what might be considered the Vatican City of the "southern strategy," Bob Jones University.
Bush was invited to address the NAACP convention, but turned the offer down--as he has turned down NAACP invitations to address their annual convention every year since first becoming President in 2000.
True, the Democrats' claim to have done better for minorities has often amounted to little more than simply not being as hostile and cynical as the GOP--a dubious achievement.
What to make of the guy's apology, though? The GOP of the 21st century--the GOP of Karl Rove and his mentor Lee Atwater, the GOP of Bush v. Gore and nonexistent WMDs and Terri Schiavo and the "nuclear option" and outing a CIA operative as payback to her spouse--is all about power, baby. Not for them the pathetic dithering about ethics and honesty. Not for them the worry that win-at-all-costs politics is ultimately corrosive to the very form of government they aim to control. Leave that to the Democrats.
So why apologize? If the US economy remains on the sorry course that five years of the Bush Administration has firmly set it, the ground will be ready for another round of thumping up culture-war wedge issues like flag-burning, gay weddings, and so on, as a distraction from the meat-and-potatos issues the GOP is hopeless on: Iraq, the federal deficit, government corruption, standard of living, living wage, health care, and on and on. With the weapon on the table in plain view, who would expect the GOP not to use it?
And certainly, the vaunted "Republican base" is not terribly thrilled with Mehlman's apology--at least to the extent that Rush Limbaugh can be said to speak for them. And DC Media Girl notes that Limbaugh, in his attack on Mehlman, even managed to put a little gay-bashing top-spin on it.
These are the people who are going to renounce wedge issues like racism and homophobia?
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