I regularly invoke my status as a former GOP activist because I know it irritates my erstwhile colleagues. Indeed, they rue the day that Pat Harrison, the then-co-chair of the Republican National Committee, appointed me a national vice chairman of the New Majority Council.
As one who’s been there, done that – and have the letters of commendation – I bring a unique perspective to the issue of blacks and the Republican Party. So, I get a kick out of reading other writers kick GOP illusionists when they’re down.
Case in point: Columnist Tonyaa Weathersbee debunks the GOP talking point about black voters leaving the "Democratic plantation:”
In a way, I can understand why some black people have gone GOP. Within all of us is this belief that being a free person means that we ought to not do things that limit that freedom. Being tethered to one political party is a limitation. It reveals that we still aren’t as free as we’d like to be.
But the key to breaking that tether doesn’t lie in gravitating to a party that, in many ways, rebuilt its base by pandering to the Jesse Helms and the Strom Thurmonds – the people who became Republicans because they thought the Democratic Party was doing too much for black people and whose influence continues to resonate in the party. Nor is the answer to force us to deny our economic and social realities to get caught up in wedge issues that have little bearing on our lives.
The answer – and the challenge – for black Republicans to draw more black people is to help shape it into a party that begins to substantively deal with the issues that have made most of us reliable Democratic voters. Without that, joining the GOP won’t make any of us happier or unique or courageous.
Just more invisible.
Yesterday's resurrection (and here) of the archetypical “Senator Macaca,” Trent Lott, has made the challenge facing the GOP’s invisible men that much harder.
