The GOP can do one thing to avoid being relegated to a near permanent, also ran party nationally. That is to turn the party reins over to Michael Steele, an African-American. Steele is one of six candidates for the Republican National Committee top spot. Ken Blackwell, who's black, is also a candidate for the RNC chair. But he is a hard line social conservative. He has near nil appeal to minority and younger white college educated business and professional voters. His election as chair would send the same old signal that the GOP is still stuck deep in a political time warp. Worse, Blackwell is still widely reviled for stonewalling an accurate presidential vote count in Ohio in 2004 that effectively tipped the election to Bush.
Steele by contrast is a moderate, consensus builder who pulled off a near political miracle by making a credible showing in the Senate race in Maryland in 2006. The state is lopsided Democratic and black voters make up nearly thirty percent of the state's electorate.
The country's fast changing ethnic vote demographics, though, tell why the GOP faces the peril of being shoved to the political margin without a quick volte face. From 1992 to 2008 black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters soared from 12 to 25 percent of the nation's electorate. College educated whites make up about thirty five percent of the vote. During the same period, blue collar white voters shrunk from more than half of the nation's voters to less than forty percent. Obama handily won the Hispanic and Asian vote and obliterated McCain with the black vote. He split nearly even with McCain the votes of college educated whites. This isn't likely to change. Immigration, higher birth rates, and the youth trends will continue to swell the numbers of minority and youth voters. The white electorate overall will continue to decline.
It's not only the numbers that work against the GOP. It's also ideology. The Democrat's expanding core base of voters is more moderate, socially active, and pro government; the diametric opposite of what the GOP purports to stand for.
Ultra conservative talk show shock jocks and a narrow band of Southern GOP politicians loudly protest that the GOP should resist all talk of reversing political direction and touting diversity and inclusion. Other GOP purists scream that race should have nothing to do with picking a new RNC chairperson. That would fly in the face of the decades old sacred credo of a color-blind America.
That's nothing but PR political shop talk. Race politics has always been a major part of the GOP's political calculus. The Southern Strategy typified that. The strategy was simple; say and do as little as possible about civil rights, talk God, country and patriotism, use racially tinged code words and furiously court white males. The strategy worked like a political charm for four decades. It was the path to the White House for Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush.
The first hint that the strategy had begun to fray came in 2000. Bush faintly sniffed the wind of change and pushed diversity and inclusion at that year's GOP presidential convention. The number of black and Hispanic delegates at the convention modestly jumped and Bush paid mild lip service to the notion that the GOP had to be a bigger tent for voters. But it was mostly talk. Bush still banked heavily on winning the white South and the Border States to bag the White House. He got nearly all of these states that election. But that was no guarantee that he could win them all again in 2004.
Bush, and then political kingpin Karl Rove and RNC chair Ken Mehlman, bought some insurance. They nakedly played the GOP version of the race card and dumped millions into a campaign to court Hispanic and black and Hispanic conservative evangelicals, and younger black business and professionals. It worked in Ohio and Florida. Bush modestly bumped up the percentage of the black vote he got in those must win states. He got more than forty percent of the Hispanic vote and an even bigger percent of the Asian vote nationally. That helped seal the White House for him.
This should have been the wake up call that the nation's voter demographics were changing, and changing fast. And that if the GOP was to win, or even to stay competitive nationally with the Democrats in 2008 with a crashing economy and failed war, it could not do political business in the old way. But the call was ignored. If the RNC turns a tin ear to the call this time, it will slide even faster toward becoming the incredibly shrinking party. Steele is the GOP's last and best hope that this doesn't happen.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is How Obama Won (Middle Passage Press, January 2009).
They are the party of the rich white man and have been for 150 years.
Nearly everyone in my all white office votes Republican except for myself. They are unabashedly racist. All except the boss (who is actually not a racist but Republican probably for financial reasons) would be better off financially if they voted Democrat but they won't "because of the blacks".
Don't you understand that a good chunk of the GOP base votes for them because it is a racist party? How is the Heritage Foundation's propaganda going to change that? They have to reach out to black people without losing the racist base they've groomed for an era.
The Republican party does not need a black face to lead it. It needs a new philosophy for the white folks who belong to it. A party that, at its national convention, can only muster 36 black faces as delegates (and a mere 115 Hispanics) has a systemic problem of racism. ANY black person who tolerates the Republican party as it is today, is hardly nothing more than a token.
Look at the rhetoric that has oozed from this party during this campaign. When you measure the racist remarks catalogued by either the mainstream media or the blogosphere, you must be struck by the sheer volume emanating from the Republican side of the aisle, not to mention how almost all of those attacks were the most vile and nasty comments. These were not (are not, as they are still coming) veiled, coded language attacks, but the most racist -- worthy of sheet wearing, cross burning KKK meeting.
Neither Michael Steele nor Ken Blackwell nor any other self-respecting black person should grovel to be the leader of, let alone a member of a party that so vividly does not like nor want them in its party.
The best thing for the Republican party to do is shrivel on its vine, fall to the ground and rot away.
Wilbur
People like to think that it was identity politics (minorities that identified with Obama) that elected Barack Obama, but I argue that the country finally woke up and said ... O.K., it's time to elect the smart guy for a change if we want our lives to be better.
If the GOP wants to win, they need to change minds.
The most important strategy shift the republicans need is to work to break up the D's stranglehold on black voters: you are correct.
But the black community voting as a racial block is the problem.
The republicans need to change the minds of the AA community, not attempt to appease the status quo.
The republicans need to change the minds of the AA community, not attempt to appease the status quo."
How? The conservative philosophy is, ironically, the same as Darwin's Theory, paraphrased, "If you're good enough, you'll succeed on your own." But this flies in the face, for blacks, of any message of opportunity, since blacks are predominantly still rising up from the weaker position. What black person would vote for a platform that includes keeping down those already down and raising up even higher those who are already up? Social conservativism, something that the strong religious black communities actually do share with the GOP, is not enough to get them to vote against their economic interests. (One of the areas that the blacks definitely deserve much praise for, their sense of pragmatism.)
The GOP has bet on racism, and bet heavily. But they are in the process of losing, and so should lose as heavily as they bet.
I think he's a better choice for RNC lead than Blackwell who disenfranchised most of the African-American urban voters in Ohio by moving the majority of voting machines into the suburbs resulting in 10 hour waiting lines in the rain so a lot of voters went back to work and gave up, not to mention some dubious donations from Diebold to Blackwell.
Why can't they have good candidates that aren't tainted? Have they driven all of them away from the GOP to the Democratic party?
They are always underestimating people,even some in their own party.
They used Sarah Palin with the thought that would draw Hillary Clinton supporters,now
they think a black Republican,named Micheal Steel will draw African-Americans.
Just shows how really out of touch they are.Micheal Steel is not and never could be
Barack Obama.GET-A-GRIP GOP,YOU'RE NOT ON AFRICAN-AMERICANS RADAR,
NOR MOST MINORITIES.YOU MIGHT WOULD HAVE HAD A CHANCE WITH COLEN
POWELL,BUT YOU BLEW THAT.