MICHAEL STEELE ACKNOWLEDGES GOP HAD 'SOUTHERN STRATEGY' FOR DECADES

This was sent to us via email with the subject line reading “Duck, the shit is hitting the fan at the GOP…” Ain’t that the truth! Republicans who try to excuse their racism and inability to attract black voters with some spin on the vote on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that says it was passed without Republicans are going to have to go back to the drawing board on that one. That’s because the RNC Chairman Michael Steele is calling out his own party regardless of that. On Tuesday, he spoke at DePaul University in Chicago and sort of paraphrased Ronald Reagan by saying black people didn’t leave the Republican Party, but rather the Republican Party left black people. Now we can go on and on about how this is definitely the case, but there’s something else at play here. Steele, who is only a hair’s breath away from being thrown under the bus for his incompetence as chairman, is going to be taking anyone that tries under there with him. For a top GOP leader to admit the racism of the GOP is pretty much the point of no return. It’s a war now, and all we have to do is sit back and watch how it unfolds. For the GOP’s sake the right people better win that war too, because you can only spin the Civil Rights Act vote only so many times before someone notices that when you break down the at congressional vote by region, the Southern Congressmen and Senators regardless of party overwhemingly voted against it, including Barry Goldwater who was the GOP nominee. Anyway, it is going to be interesting to see what survives out of this.

The Plum Line

A lot of people are pointing to a new set of remarks Michael Steele made about the Republican Party and race, in which Steele acknowledged that the GOP hasn’t given African Americans a reason to support the party.

But I think folks are missing the real news in what Steele said. The RNC chairman also appeared to acknowledge that the GOP has had a race-based “southern strategy” for four decades, which is decidedly not a historical interpretation many Republicans agree with.

Steele made his remarks at DePaul University on Tuesday night. He acknowledged that “we haven’t done a very good job” of giving African Americans a reason to vote Republican. That’s actually unremarkable. But here’s what he also said:

“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans,” Steele said. “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. 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.

“For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

I’m not sure this is an interpretation most Republicans would agree with. The standard line is that, yes, Nixon did employ a “southern strategy.” But most Republicans would strongly contest the idea that Reagan tried to use racial division for electoral gain, an idea advanced by liberals who point out that Reagan opened his 1980 presidential campaign in the town where Civil Rights workers were murdered.

Similarly, many Republicans would reject the claim that Republican candidates like George H.W. Bush engaged in a race-based strategy with the Willie Horton ads, or that Bush the Younger or John McCain engaged in subtle race-based appeals.

But here you have the chairman of the Republican National Committee saying, in effect, that liberals are right to have argued that Republicans have used race for political gain for the last four decades. Seems significant.