---No party has changed more in my lifetime from the 40-50-60 Republicans too today---
You're right. The Democrats haven't changed much.
Republican Chairman Michael Steele's Admission That the Party of Lincoln Betrayed African-Americans by 'Focusing on the White Male Vote in the South' for 40-Plus Years Predictably Draws Fire From White GOP Conservatives, But the Republicans Are Still Using Their 'Southern Strategy' -- This Time Against Hispanic Americans
Demonstrators hold up a giant American flag during a mass demonstration in support of comprehensive immigration reform on the National Mall in Washington in March. In an extraordinary admission, Republican National Chairman Michael Steele acknowledged that his party -- founded in 1854 as an anti-slavery party -- betrayed African-American voters in 1968 by openly appealing to conservative Southern whites opposed to the civil rights movement. But the party's infamous "Southern Strategy" is far from dead. With GOP-dominated Arizona's newly-enacted crackdown on illegal immigrants, combined with incendiary anti-Latino rhetoric by several prominent Republicans on the immigration issue, the GOP is now running a serious risk of permanently alienating Hispanic Americans -- the nation's fastest-growing voting bloc. (Photo: Ryan Roderick Beiler/Sojourners Magazine)
April 27, 2010
By SKEETER SANDERS
An extraordinary thing happened in Chicago last Tuesday night.
In a speech at DePaul University, Michael Steele, the Republican Party's first African-American national chairman, told some 200 students that black voters "really don't have a reason" to vote for Republicans.
"We [Republicans] haven't done a very good job of really giving you one," he said.
In a remarkably candid assessment of his party's standing with black voters, Steele told his audience that the GOP had lost sight of "the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans."
Noting that the Republican Party was founded in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854 by anti-slavery activists, "This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass," Steele said. "The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don't walk away from parties, Their parties walk away from them."
CONSERVATIVES BLAST STEELE -- FOR TELLING THE TRUTH
Steele's candor didn't sit well with a number of conservatives. In an e-mail to Washington Post blogger David Weigel, conservative economist Bruce Bartlett slammed Steele's remarks as "his biggest gaffe so far."
Bartlett acknowledged that "The term 'Southern strategy' is such a loaded term, like 'states' rights,' that it's hard to use it without conveying a certain racial stereotype. The fact that Steele used that term is, therefore, significant in and of itself."
"Ironically," Bartlett noted, "the Voting Rights Act is what made it possible for Republicans to compete in the South. Once blacks could no longer be kept from voting in primaries [where winning the Democratic nomination was tantamount to election], there was no longer any reason for whites to remain Democrats. Many found the Republican Party more attractive. Of course, the national party reached out to them, but the idea that they used racial code words like 'law and order' is nonsense. . ."
Bartlett said he thought that it was "too bad that Steele gave Democrats reason to believe that their distorted vision of how Republicans came to dominate the South is correct. It may be his biggest gaffe so far."
Greg Alexander, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise institute think tank, was even more dismissive in his own e-mail to Weigel. "For four decades, national GOP strategists and candidates have certainly valued Southern white voters," Alexander wrote. "At the margins, that's meant accommodating them on some racial issues. But notice that Nixon did not repeal and instead enforced the '64 [Civil Rights] Act, did not 'retreat' on school desegregation nearly the way he has been indicted for doing, and launched affirmative action and minority business contracting as we now know them."
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