By writing off blacks and latinos, the GOP should just rename themselves the Tighty Whitey party

[MrScorpio]

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 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 , 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 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."


The rest: http://www.skeeterbitesreport.com/2010/04/gop-wrote-off-blacks-with-southern.html

[old mark]

1. The VERY SMALL tighty whitey party, getting smaller by the day...

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:


:patriot:

m

[Zywiec]

2. Didn't 96% of Blacks vote for President Obama?

It's not like they are on the fence about party affiliation.

:shrug:

[MrScorpio]

3. The article discusses the long arc, not just recent events

The GOP gave up on the black vote a long, long time ago