Here’s a great one for the Actions Speak Louder Than Words file: For the fifth year in a row, President Bush couldn’t find the time to address the annual convention of the NAACP… and instead sent RNC chair Ken Mehlman, who took the bold step of apologizing for the GOP’s race-baiting "Southern Strategy" of the past thirty years.
It says all you need to know about where the Republicans stand on race that admitting they “were wrong” for using racial wedge issues to woo southern voters is, in 2005, still considered news. (And that it still really upsets the GOP base… but more on that in a minute.)
So Bush keeps his distance, and Mehlman thinks he can paper things over with some long, long overdue rhetoric. Typical. One more example of the Bush administration’s belief that the right rhetoric can trump the wrong reality. I’m surprised that Mehlman didn’t claim that racism in America is in “its last throes”.
Time and time again we hear the refrain from Republicans that the reason roughly 90 percent of African Americans vote Democratic is because the GOP has failed to get its message out to the black community. The implication being that if blacks just knew what the Republican Party really stood for, we’d suddenly see a tidal wave of African American support for GOP candidates.
It’s an incredibly condescending position. Has it ever occurred to Bush and Mehlman that, perhaps, African American voters actually know exactly what policies the Republican Party stands for and are voting accordingly?
Apologies are nice, but actually doing something is better.
For instance, if Bush and Mehlman really want to redress their party’s history of racial polarization, how about doing something about the ongoing disenfranchisement of African American voters? According to the U.S. Commission of Civil Rights, African Americans are ten times more likely to have their ballots rejected.
Or they could stop the GOP’s support of the permanent disenfranchisement of felons, which continues to disproportionately affect black voters.
They could also shift the focus of the nation’s war on drugs, which has turned into a war on America’s minority communities. While blacks make up 13 percent of drug users, they account for 35 percent of those arrested for drug possession, 55 percent of those convicted, and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. And the average prison term for black drug offenders is 69% longer [pdf] than for whites (memo to the Dems: you guys have been just as bad on this issue!)
You really want to win over black voters, Ken? Then follow your apology by getting the president to shift his position on affirmative action. Who better to take a stand on leveling the playing field than a guy who got into Yale despite a C average because he was “a legacy”?
And what about if the architect of the Leave No Child Behind Act actually did what it takes to really not leave African American kids behind? Because, despite some modest gains in the recent test scores of black and Hispanic school kids, the gap between the average math and reading scores of black students and their white counterparts is still over 20 points across all age groups. In addition, African Americans still have much higher dropout rates than whites, and a much lower percentage of blacks graduate from college.
The biggest hurdle for Mehlman and the president is that the GOP’s problems with race are not a thing of the past. As The Carpetbagger Report points out, these problems are still very much a part of the Republican Party’s DNA.
So given all this, will Mehlman’s placating words be followed by concrete action? I’m guessing they won’t. Particularly when you look at how much flack he and the White House are now catching from their base. Here was the nub of Rush Limbaugh’s blowback: “In the midst of all this, in the midst of all that’s going on, once again, Republicans are going to bend over and grab their ankles.”
Ah, yes, the party of Lincoln… comparing an apology for racist campaign tactics to buggery.
Just imagine what the reaction would have been if Mehlman had offered up some actual policy shifts -- and not just hollow contrition.