Republican leaders, from President Bush and John McCain on down, have fallen all over themselves to hail Barack Obama's election as the first African-American president. In McCain's concession speech, where he had to briefly calm down the mob he and Palin had stoked during the campaign with their coded appeals to racism and fear, he referred to Mr. Obama's victory Tuesday night as "a historic election" and hailed the "special pride" it held for African-Americans.
By emphasizing Obama's victory as a triumph primarily for African-Americans, it's also a not-so-veiled way of marginalizing him, as if he was some sort of affirmative action hire, the "token Negro" they can approve of -- and then blame if anything goes wrong as he tries to clean up the mess of a cratering economy and two endless wars they left him. By pigeonholing him as the "black" candidate, it overlooks the fact that's he's a once-in-a-generation leader who has stirred the admiration of people of all races around the world with his eloquence, intelligence and vision for change.
What's especially galling, of course, is that the Republican Party's political strength and election victories have been built in large part on cleaned-up appeals to racism and fear, starting with the "Southern strategy" of Richard Nixon appealing to whites infuriated by Democratic-led civil rights laws and federal interference, along with rising inner-city crime rates. The strategy was first proposed in The Emerging Republican Majority by Kevin Phillips.
Ronald Reagan built on those appeals by praising state rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi to launch his campaign, the site where local bigots killed civil rights workers, or referring to mythological "welfare queens" riding around in Cadillacs. Lee Atwater's handiwork with the Willie Horton ad and other smear campaigns, brilliantly documented in the Boogie Man movie scheduled for airing on PBS, set the template for modern Republican campaigning. Karl Rove's divide-and-conquer strategy also included coded appeals to racial divisions and resentments.
The continuing impact of such direct and indirect racial politics as cornerstones of the Republican Party are chronicled in such important books as Nixonland and Chain Reaction.
The RNC's then- director, the almost-moderate Ken Mehlman, admitted as much just a few years ago to the NAACP: "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."
But that didn't stop McCain, the Republican National Committee today and its allies from using racist appeals in this campaign. They featured ads flaunting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's incendiary speeches, while McCain proudly approved an ad featuring the image of Barack Obama hovering over little white kids as a symbolic predator while an announcer ominously lied that he approved a bill promoting "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarten students.
Now they're getting all weepy with crocodile tears of emotion and new-found tolerance in hailing this special moment for African-Americans, the election of Barack Obama as president. Don't believe any of it: it's a mix of pompous self-congratulation for being so "tolerant" along with a set-up to attack him in the future and return to their coded racist appeals, if they think that will work, in upcoming elections.
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You can hear more about about Republican hypocrisy, the impact of Obama's election and the prospects for progressive change on the Web radio show I co-host at Blog Talk Radio.