Adam Clymer, Republican Party's 40 Years of Juggling on Race nytimes.com
[ also on the current events beat, this backgrounder. I remain bemused by the conservative breast beating on this one. The Republican Party would never, ever dream of playing the race card. Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, and Lott were constantly being disavowed by the national party during their long careers, and Karl Rove wrapping W in the Confederate flag in SC in 2000 just didn't happen. Snort. The byline on this story is somewhat relevant, see archive.salon.com for example. ]
President Bush's repudiation of Senator Trent Lott today, as an apostate to the "founding ideals" of the Republican Party, underlined the juggling act the party has maintained on race for nearly four decades.
Ever since the Republican Party in the South was reborn by hostility to the civil rights legislation of the 1960's, the national party has increasingly depended on Southern votes while insisting to Northern moderates that it is still the party of Lincoln.
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One of the sharpest examples of how Republicans have successfully balanced those two interests occurred in 1980, when Ronald Reagan opened his campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., and set off an outcry when he used the code words "states' rights" to appeal to whites.
To repair the damage, Mr. Reagan traveled to Detroit in October and sought to reassure suburban whites that he was no racist, by obtaining the endorsement of two black civil rights leaders, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy and the Rev. Hosea Williams. That was not to seek black votes, but as his pollster, Richard Wirthlin, said after the election, to soothe whites who generally support Republican policies but do not think of themselves as supporting racism.
Those balancing efforts usually work. But occasionally they blow up in the party's face, as seemed to occur this week.
Mr. Bush himself was embarrassed in the 2000 primaries after courting Southerners at Bob Jones University, leaving him to say, "I don't like being called a bigot."
This week, the juggling has been less than nimble. For six days after Mr. Lott approvingly recalled Strom Thurmond's segregationist Dixiecrat campaign for president in 1948, Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, brushed off the episode as completed by Mr. Lott's apologies. But the controversy did not subside.
And the political reality, Mr. Wirthlin said today, is that "Republicans cannot afford to alienate the South, but to alienate the suburbs on a racist charge would even be more damaging." . . .
Over the years, the race issue has helped Republicans more than it has hurt them. The Senate Republican leader Everett S. Dirksen of Illinois played a crucial role in breaking the Southern filibuster against the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But it was the Democrats who paid the price for the law that banned discrimination in public accommodations and employment, allowing the federal government to stop aid to programs that discriminated and giving Washington the power to sue to desegregate schools.
As President Lyndon B. Johnson predicted to Bill Moyers on the evening he signed the bill, "Bill, I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come." |
