Steele's 'Southern Strategy' Gaffe Might Be Anything But
ANALYSIS
Paul Wachter
aolnews.com
(April 23) -- Much-maligned Republic National Committee Chairman Michael Steele is facing new abuse from fellow Republicans over a speech he made Tuesday at DePaul University. "For the last 40-plus years, we had a 'Southern Strategy' that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South," he said.
It's a statement that no Democrat would dispute, but one that goes against Republican orthodoxy. Steele committed a Kinsley gaffe, named for journalist Michael Kinsley, who once said, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth."
Steele, the first African-American to helm the RNC, has taken heat for lavish and questionable spending -- including picking up a $2,000 tab for a donors' visit to a West Hollywood topless club -- and for promoting himself more than the party. But some say that if the Republican Party has its own best interests in mind, it would follow Steele's lead on this issue and distance itself from its race-baiting past.
"He is the first black leader of a party that has no African-American members of Congress and that many black Americans, rightly or wrongly, see as indifferent or hostile to their interests," writes Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson. "Steele has to deal with Republican officials who make boneheaded moves that perpetuate the party's estrangement from African-Americans, such as Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell's proclamation that celebrated 'Confederate History Month' without mentioning the tiny, little detail known as slavery until the governor was widely criticized. Say what you want about Chairman Mike, he doesn't have an easy job."
The GOP's "Southern Strategy" is usually traced back to Nixon's courting of the Southern white vote, which had prior to then favored the Democrats. But President Lyndon Johnson's passage of the Civil Rights Act put it up for grabs. In a 1970 interview with The New York Times, Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips outlined the GOP's new strategy: "From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that ... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats."
The strategy was borne out, as the South shifted from a solid Democrat voting block to a Republican stronghold. And in subsequent years, Republican politicians made gestures that would appeal to voters' bias. Ronald Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign in the small town of Philadelphia, Miss., where civil rights workers had been murdered. George W. Bush made a controversial campaign stop at South Carolina's Bob Jones University, which at the time forbade interracial dating.
It's true that such appeals play well with certain types of white voters, just as it's true that some white Southerners were put off by Obama's race, which some analysts offer as the reason Obama did worse than John Kerry with white voters in Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. (The biggest drop came in Alabama, where white voter support for the Democratic candidate fell from 19 percent in 2004 to 10 percent in 2008.)
"Everything else, including the state of the economy," suggests that Obama should have outperformed Kerry," David Bositis, an analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, told AOL News. "Race was clearly the defining factor for this drop-off. While this country has made tremendous progress in terms of race relations, there are still people in the South -- exclusively Republican, now -- who can't get past it."
But even the South is changing, spurred by increasing migration from other parts of the country and evolving racial attitudes. Obama did better than Kerry with white voters in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, and fared about the same in Florida, Georgia, Texas and Tennessee.
And as the South has changed, so too should the GOP, Steele said in his Tuesday speech. "We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans," he said. "This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. 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."
Even with an African-American party leader, it will be difficult to attract black voters to the GOP. But if Steele can pull it off, his tenure could be remembered not for his blunders but for his boldness in at least trying. |
