"I used to be Snow White . . . but I drifted."
-- Mae West
That saucy lady's words came to mind as I listened to Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, during a meeting with Post editors and reporters at the GOP convention in New York City this week. Truth be told, I had been in search of Gillespie since President Bush's speech to the National Urban League conference in Detroit in July.
That was a remarkable event. Bush went before the nation's second-oldest civil rights organization -- after brushing off the nation's oldest civil rights group, the NAACP -- and asked those in the predominantly black audience for their votes, quickly observing: "I know, I know, I know. The Republican Party has got a lot of work to do. I understand that."
It struck me as quite an admission by the titular leader of the GOP. Where did he think his party had fallen short?
Because my chances of getting Bush on the phone were about as good as winning the D.C. Lottery, the next best thing was to call the person responsible for running the Republican Party. But Gillespie was in Boston at the time, baiting Democrats at their national convention, so his office passed me down the line to lower-ranking staffers. They weren't very helpful at divining presidential thoughts. So I bode my time, and, as all good things come to those who wait, in waltzed Gillespie to The Post's workstation near Madison Square Garden on Tuesday afternoon.
As the interview drew to a close, I put the question to him: When Bush volunteered in Detroit that the GOP has to do much more to earn the support and contributions of African Americans, what did he have in mind?
Gillespie said he couldn't speak for the president. The RNC leader, however, went on to express his own deep devotion to "diversity," without which mankind will suffer and the fruit of life will wither on the vine. Well, actually, Gillespie didn't get into the suffering and withering stuff. But he did offer paeans to the wonderfulness of having various races under the same political tent -- a goal toward which the GOP was striving mightily, he suggested. That was before Gillespie showed up on the convention floor with his arm lovingly around rapper-designer Sean John Combs, aka Puff Daddy, aka P. Diddy.
Back to the interview.
Gillespie launched into a recitation of the historical relationship between the GOP and African Americans, noting early black support for the Republican Party because of Abraham Lincoln's good works. Gillespie also cited the GOP membership of Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, and the role of House and Senate Republicans in passing the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act over the opposition of Southern Democrats. But then Gillespie had a Mae West moment.
He announced with a straight face that somewhere after the triumphs of the 1960s, "we [the GOP and African Americans] went through a period where we drifted." I double-checked my notes; that was his word, honest. "Drifted" -- as in, "wandered off course."
The Republican Party and African Americans did no such thing. If ever there was a deliberate parting of the ways with malice aforethought, it was the GOP's decision to play down African Americans and to bring the Old Confederacy under its tent through a scheme called the Southern Strategy.
You could see it coming in 1964, when the Republican Party turned away from its Northern wing, led by moderate Nelson Rockefeller. The Republican convention gave the presidential nomination to conservative Barry Goldwater, an outspoken opponent of the Civil Rights Act. Five Deep South states and Goldwater's home state of Arizona rewarded him on Election Day. They weren't enough. But the Southern Strategy was just getting underway.
"It's not what I do, but the way I do it. It's not what I say, but the way I say it."
