Richard Benedetto of USA Today has filed a story about Ken Mehlman's recent speech before the NAACP. Here are Benedetto's opening paragraphs:
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to one of the nation's largest black civil rights groups Thursday, saying Republicans had not done enough to court blacks in the past and had exploited racial strife to court white voters, particularly in the South."Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."
Mehlman's apology to the NAACP at the group's convention in Milwaukee marked the first time a top Republican Party leader has denounced the so-called Southern Strategy employed by Richard Nixon and other Republicans to peel away white voters in what was then the heavily Democratic South. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Republicans encouraged disaffected Southern white voters to vote Republican by blaming pro-civil rights Democrats for racial unrest and other racial problems.
Progress, whatever its motivations, is always welcome. But let's not be fooled: the GOP is no longer as eager to play the race card as it was in the past primarily because the tactic is no longer an especially effective one. The GOP hasn't given up exploiting bigotry for political gain, after all. Its current willingness to exploit homophobia in support of its electoral goals shows that the GOP hasn't really changed when it comes to divisive culture war. The targets of its bigotry nowadays tend to be less numerous, that's all.
By the way, one reason for conservative complaints about political correctness — not that conservatives would admit that this is so, of course — is that exploiting white racism became much more difficult to do as expressions of racist attitudes, however mild, cryptic, or symbolic, became completely forbidden in respectable public discourse. Today Ronald Reagan couldn't get away with kicking off his presidential campaign with a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town in which three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
More: Bob Herbert of The New York Times has written a good response to Mehlman's speech.
