Republicans and race

Two nuggets from John Avlon's column on race and the Republican party and my thoughts upon reading them:

1. "the McCain-Palin ticket increased its vote totals only in a narrow band of districts stretching from Appalachia to Oklahoma, and demographically winning decisively only voters over age 60 and towns with populations under 50,000. The costs of preaching to a shrinking base of what Palin characterized as "real Americans" will only become more apparent in the future."

The preceding argument chronicled the forty years of dividends the southern strategy paid to the Republican party; Avlon's following argument implies that the same strategy is bankrupt with prospects progressively barren by the year. I agree. If Republicans stick with their schtick for the next two election cycles, their southern strategy bubble burst and its cleanup will take at least half as long as the period from Goldwater to Bush 43. And that's if Bobby Jindal and the ideas-women and men of their party do an exceptional job cleaning up and redefining. (Note: That doesn't mean that Jindal and company won't rise to prominence before then--it just means that there will be a tough and probably still well-funded old guard fighting their rise every step of the way. That means that instead of having the fall-into-rank primaries of old, where a candidate was anointed and subsequently confirmed within a few primaries, Republican nomination contests will start looking a lot more like Democratic ones. Get ready for David Brooks, Christopher Buckley and Bobby Jindal versus Fred Barnes, Bill Kristol and Sarah Palin. Let's hope Team 1 wins, expediting the ushering out of the last remaining bigots. **Note on a Note: Avlon seems to agree. He writes, "But such Hail Mary passes can't be expected to undo decades of damage overnight. The GOP must deploy its own version of the 50-state strategy and consistently recruit minority candidates." Indeed, there's a long hard fight ahead.)

2. "Conservatives who take good ol' boy pride in being politically incorrect are either unaware or don't care that they come off as being somewhere between indifferent and hostile to the full diversity of American life."

Let me tell you something. I know quite a few good ol' boys. I went to high school with some of them. And while they might be otherwise nice people, there is no question that the vast majority of their willfull anti-PCness is half-veiled (and sometimes not veiled at all) racism. The RNC members in question might have more money and come from different parts of the country than them, but I'd be happy to bet as large a sum that a college kid could that they are just as racist. And those people have no business having as much as a finger, let alone an entire hand, in the dialogue of a party which already has a troubled recent past when it comes to race. I hope there's not any disagreement on that. We have a lot further to go than I thought if there is.