I’d like to revisit the matter of why the Republican Party continues to marginalize blacks and generally treats all people of color as second-class citizens. (The ones that are citizens, that is.)
In responses to a post yesterday on the news that only Tom Tancredo of the nine Republican president wannabes appeared at an NAACP candidate forum, a number of commenters, all presumably Republicans, sought to deflect that criticism. Some noted that the NAACP is not exactly a welcoming group (true enough), one nattered that blacks were not worth reaching out to (insulting in the extreme), and there was the inevitable tired canard that the issue is about politics and not race (nice try, but no cigar).
My interest here is less to bash the GOP for its decades’ long indifference to anyone who is not a white Christian with an American flag tattooed on their ass. That’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
No, my interest is in what a political party that has worked assiduously to marginalize itself through electing and blindly supporting a dangerously inept president with a white-bread agenda can try to do to bring back a relic from the party’s proud past called The Big Tent, which has fallen into the Republican Memory Hole along with all those congressional golfing junkets with Jack Abramoff.
Or is that task hopeless? Should the Party of Lincoln continue to automatically concede large chunks of the electorate in major elections?