November 02, 2009
In my last piece at Taki’s Magazine, I discussed the unprecedented phenomenon of a few Republican Party pollsters and strategists admitting, most times begrudgingly, that winning more White votes might be more effective than pandering to minorities (That is, they’ve awaken to what VDARE.com has called “The Sailer Strategy.”)
The backlash of White voters against Gatesgate put Obama’s approval ratings into a freefall. A few Republicans realized this, and it looked like the Stupid Party’s IQ might breach room temperature. Obama & Co. gave Whites even more reasons to oppose him with the Van Jones and ACORN scandals.
The President’s ratings are down 25% since April”the biggest drop in over fifty years. Even White Democrats are jumping ship. Healthcare, the economy, and the War are the main factors behind Obama’s plummeting ratings, but no one denies that Gatesgate spurred the decline and that many white who voted for Obama might be suspecting that their candidate might not be so “post-racial” after all. (The faltering economy and Afghanistan is not hurting Obama among blacks.)
Republicans are expected to reap the benefits of his unpopularity in the coming days. Democrats have all but given up on retaining the Governorship in Virginia and they are likely to lose in Blue New Jersey. This is in large part due to projected low black turnout. According to the Washington Times,
Voter doldrums—especially among blacks far less energized than they were for Barack Obama’s historic presidential bid last year—pose problems for Democrats struggling in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey.
Pollsters and election analysts expect a steep drop-off of black voters—who historically back Democrats—in the nation’s two gubernatorial contests and in congressional races Nov. 3, and they predict it is likely to cast a shadow in 2010 over at least 10 House Democrats with large black constituencies.
So with the increased White anger towards Obama and low Black turnout turning blue and purple states red, what is the Republican Party’s new strategy?
It’s decided to return to the tried-and-true strategy of pandering to minorities!
Well, at least things are back to normal with the Stupid Party.
The most craven and humorous example f this can be found is the redesigned GOP.com, the official website for the Republican National Committee. The Republicans’ uncool stationwagon of a website has gotten a “Hip Hop Makeover“ and been transformed into the pimped-out ride the party needs to achieve victory. Originally, Michael Steele had a blog on the site called “What Up?” (but apparently this title became too embarrassing, even to groveling Republicans, and was replaced with the less jiggy “change the game.”)
The “O” in GOP has given way to a picture of a smiling Republican face that changes everytime you refresh the site. Sometimes the surfacing visages are “heroes” and other times they are just random under-35 Republicans who are the New Face of the GOP. Get it? There is even a GOP “faces” application on the site in addition to a RNC Facebook page.
In an unofficial study, I refreshed the site over and over to see what the hue of the face of GOP might be. There were not a large variety of faces, as many showed up four or even five times before I made it to 15 (excluding heroes.) According to my count, there were three black males, three black females, one hispanic female, one hispanic male, five white females (who, to their credit, were generally attractive), and a grand total of two white males.
In contrast, when I went to the “GOP faces“ section of the website, there were only four blacks, two people who may have been Hispanic, and 54 whites in the one page I looked at. But these faces were handpicked, of course. Continuing my next unscientific test, I went to the official RNC Facebook page and looked at the first sixty people who signed up as “fans” of the Republican National Committee: 58 were white, one was Hispanic, and one was Asian. None were black!
That’s the young Republican Party base of 2009.
According to GOP.com’s version of GOP history, this is a departure from the GOP of yesteryear, which was dominated by women and minorities.
GOP.com prominently features s a Patriots: American Heroes and Famous Republicans section to showcase the fact the “the Republican Party has a rich history of men and women who fought for freedom and equality.
This is just a sample of the many historical heroes who have long since gone but left a lasting impression on the Party, the country, and the world. The current leadership is committed to continuing these traditions and making sure that today’s Republicans know their past so they can draw from it for future success. Who will be the next member of the Republican Party to achieve greatness?
Who are these Heroes and Famous Persons? Of the 18 people currently listed, we can divide them into three categories. Four are well known women and minorities: Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Jackie Robinson, and Clara Barton. Nine are not so famous women and minorities”usually Reconstruction politicians who were only elected by disenfranchising Whites: Pinckney Pinchback, Jose Celso Barbosa, Joseph Rainey, Octavius Catto, Hiram Revels, Edward Brooke (maybe a few people know who he is), John Langston, Ellen Foster, and Mary Terrell. Only five are White males: Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, Everett Dirksen, Frank Johnson, and Ronald Reagan. Compare this to, I don”t know, the Founding Fathers who were all white males.
Of these various minorities and women, there are a few fun facts:
John Langston is supposedly a great Republican because the Communist Langston Hughes was named after him.
Edward Brooke“the only African American or Female Politician they mention from the last 80 years, co-sponsored a number of Great Society bills and fought against attempts to defund much of the Great Society.
José_Celso_Barbosa is known as “The father of the Statehood for Puerto Rico movement.” Presumably if Puerto Ricans knew this and we gave them statehood, they would all vote Republican.
Jackie Robinson, it turns out, wasn”t a Republican, but a self-described independent who supported Nixon in 1960 and Rockerfeller in 1964. However, when Barry Godwater received the presidential nomination over Rockerfeller, Robinson wrote in his autobiography:
That convention was one of the most unforgettable and frightening experiences of my life. The hatred I saw was unique to me because it was hatred directed against a white man. It embodied a revulsion for all he stood for, including his enlightened attitude towards black people. A new breed of Republicans had taken over the GOP. As I watched this steamroller operation in San Francisco, I had a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.
Barry Goldwater”who integrated his own department store and the Phoenix Air National Guard, in addition to building the modern Republican Party by bringing all those terrible Southern Democrats into the GOP”is not listed as hero. Other Republicans unmentionables include Robert Taft, Teddy Roosevelt, Jesse Helms, and Calvin Coolidge.
What about those five white Males? Lincoln, Eisenhower, and Reagan are all obvious choices, but who is Frank Johnson? He was a liberal Judge who ruled in NAACP vs. Gotthard that Alabama hire one black state trooper for every white they hired until the percentage of black troopers matched the black population of a state. This precedent was used to impose quotas across the country. Though a Republican, Jimmy Carter nominated him as head of the FBI and Bill Clinton gave him a Medal of Freedom.
More insultingly, GOP.com reduces the careers to Dirksen and Eisenhower to their record on civil rights. The only highlights in Dirksen’s career they list are his support of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act”which led to quotas and gerrymandering respectively.
The site does not even mention that Eisenhower commanded the Allied forces in World War II, but merely states, “His administration opposed the Democrats” segregationist policies.
President Eisenhower appointed to the federal bench southern Republicans such as Frank Johnson, John Wisdom, and Elbert Tuttle, who would become civil rights champions. The day after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, President Eisenhower ordered public schools in Washington, D.C. desegregated immediately, not waiting for judges to make “all deliberate speed.” He sent troops to Little Rock to force the Democrat governor in Arkansas to obey a federal court order to racially integrate the public schools.
For some reason it does not say that Eisenhower said that his appointment of liberal justices Warren and Brennan were his “two biggest mistakes.” According to Warren, Eisenhower told him prior to Brown, “These [Southerners] are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit alongside some big overgrown Negroes.”
Opposing activist judges like the ones Eisenhower regrettably nominated continues to elect Republicans to this day. In fact “Courts””unlike immigration or affirmative action”are one of the six defining issues for the Party on GOP.com.
How about Lincoln? Nowhere does GOP.com even mention that he saved the Union and won the Civil War”or for that matter that he believed he had, “no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races.” Instead, his accomplishments are reduced to his support for the abolition of Slavery.
Save Ronald Reagan, the only heroic Republicans are ones who base their career solely on uplifting African Americans.
The new GOP.com also provides an extended timeline of the Republican Party’s greatest accomplishments. Below are every single of one of the Party’s pre-1960 actions:
Republicans Established the Transcontinental Railroad
Republicans Passed the Land-Grant College Act
The Highest Point in Washington, DC [This refers to the addition of the Freedom Statue atop the Capital, however, they somehow made this entry about the Emancipation of Slavery in DC]
The First Hispanic Governor was a Republican Republicans Freed the Slaves
Republicans Passed the 14th Amendment
Republicans Established the Buffalo Soldiers
Republicans Established Howard University
Memorial DayRepublicans Passed the 15th Amendment
Republican Opposition to Plessy v. Ferguson
The First African-American Senator was a Republican
Republicans Outlawed the Ku Klux Klan
Yellowstone National Park
Republicans Passed the 1875 Civil Rights Act
A Republican Wrote the 19th Amendment
A Former Slave Chaired the 1884 Republican National Convention
First Women Mayors in the United States
A Republican President Appointed the First Jewish Cabinet Secretary [Only true, if you exclude Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin]
Republicans Passed the Indian Citizenship Act
The First Hispanic U.S. Senator was a Republican
The First Asian-American U.S. Senator was a Republican
The Republican Party First Called for Ending Racial Segregation in the Military
A Republican Integrated the University of Mississippi
A Republican Wrote the Brown v. Board of Education decision [Again, Earl Warren, the first Judicial Activist]
Republicans Established the Federal Highway System
Republicans Passed the 1957 Civil Rights Act
Republicans Ended Racial Segregation in Little Rock.
So, of the Republicans 28 greatest accomplishments during its first 100 years, only five do not involve helping women or minorities.
Trust Busting? Peaceful resolution of the Korean War? The Taft-Hartley Act”or for that matter, the 1924 Immigration Act? All are deemed unimportant.
Interestingly enough, just as none of the post-1960 Republican heroes are minorities, none of the nine post-1957 accomplishments of the GOP involved uplifting blacks?
What happened? Those evil Southern Democrats, whom the GOP.com derides, started voting for the GOP because they were fed up with the increasingly liberal Democrats. Beginning with the Dixiecrat walk out to support Strom Thurmond”who later became a Republican”in 1948, the South slowly left the Democrats and eventually voted en bloc for Goldwater, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.
In fact, many major Southern Democratic politicians”starting with Thurmond but continuing on through Mills E. Godwin, Jesse Helms, Phil Graham, Richard Shelby, and Virgil Goode”switched parties.
If someone attended the Five Minutes University on postwar electoral politics, the lesson would be: “Southerners voted Democratic. Blacks voted Republican. They switched parties.”
If they spent a few more minutes, they”d learn that because Southerners and then working class ethnic whites who were upset with the left wing racial, feminist, and cultural policies left the Democratic Party, the New Deal Coalition that kept the GOP out of power for nearly forty years collapsed and the Republicans dominated politics from 1968 until the election of Obama.
In the process, the GOP became less attractive to minorities, while the Democrats became the party of Willie Horton and Jeremiah Wright.
It’s doubtful many African-Americans and liberals will react to GOP.com’s shocking revelation that the Democrats used to support segregation by bemoaning how racist their party used to be, nor are they likely to switch parties due to just how enlightened the GOP’s racial policies of 1872 were.
Instead, they’ll respond quite sensibly by pointing out that none of these black and liberal Republicans would be Republicans today. Besides, all of America was evil and racist until it was redeemed by in the 1960s. Why should anyone care if the Democrats were politically incorrect before then?
This whole GOP.com exercise proves nothing except how desperately the GOP is trying to avoid being tagged the White Male Party“that is the party of the people who founded and built this country. Through his sheer incompetence and less-and-less-subtle anti-white agenda, Barack Obama presents the GOP with a chance, mostly likely its last one, to establish itself as the opposition to the multicultural disease that is slowly killing America—instead, GOP.com proves, once again, that the Stupid Party isn’t the cure but just another symptom.
There are a lot more White Southerners and Midwesterner than Blacks in this country, and the electoral re-alignment of the parties that’s been developing over the past four decades might have actually delivered the GOP the “permanent majority” Karl Rove dreamed about. In fact, if the White share of the U.S. population and electorate was not rapidly declining due to the GOP’s failure to do anything about immigration, then Barack Obama wouldn’t be president.
With GOP.com one gets the sense that even if Republicans could add, they wouldn”t care.
