Republican leaders commemorate King as they struggle to reach black voters...

[Indi Guy]

Source: McClatchy Washington Bureau

[font size="4"]A[/font]s thousands of people congregate in Washington to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington, Republican Party leaders met to once again take a new step forward engaging black voters.

It’s been decades since the days of overwhelming black support for the party of Abraham Lincoln. Instead, national exit polls showed that 93 percent of black voters cast their vote for President Barack Obama in his 2012 re-election.

“Our party has a rich, proud history of equality, freedom, opportunity,” Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said Monday at a luncheon commemorating the March on Washington. “But we don’t tell our story anymore. We’ve lost the history of this party, because we don’t tell it.”

Priebus was joined at the event by Republican leaders, including Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin, who helped lead the past two reauthorizations of the Voting Rights Act. In his remarks, Sensenbrenner committed to restoring the legislation, which aims to protect minority voters from discrimination in access to the polls, after a pivotal piece was deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in June...

Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/08/26/200438/republican-leaders-commemorate.html#.UhAu2kTfink

[jtuck004]

1. Reince, you tell the story of your party every day. You just think people aren't listening. n/t

[LongTomH]

2. The Republican party hasn't been the party of Lincoln since sometime in the late 19th Century

They've been the party of big money and corporations since then.

[Nanjing to Seoul]

6. They have no been the Party of Lincoln is Theodore Roosevelt.

[Indi Guy]

12. ..Not to mention the home of thinly veiled...

...and overtly racist voters. Tea anyone?

[rurallib]

3. I liked the part in their history called "the Southern Strategy"

Where they threw open the doors of their party to the old racist South who had finally been abandoned by the Democrats.

Lee Atwater pretty much summed up where the repugs went:
You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968 you can’t say “n*****”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”
http://www.thenation.com/article/170841/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy#axzz2d88d0sjw

Every American should be ready to ask any Republican to defend Atwater's statement. He said what he meant.
(and now of course it "Obama is divisive" and " Obama is not an American" and "Obama hates whites" - same shit different wrapper.

[JustAnotherGen]

4. +1

[radicalliberal]

5. Give us a break, Priebus! Do you think we're stupid?

The record of your party -- well, specifically conservative Republicans (not Rockefeller Republicans) -- on the issue of civil rights is absolutely pathetic! The record is so obvious that any intellectually honest person should be able to see it. Face it, liar, your party is the party of Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, Frank Rizzo, Pat Buchanan, etc., etc. -- in other words, white racists. You guys adopted the so-called Southern Strategy. My wife of more than 30 years had been a long-time Republican until last year, when she left the party and became an independent. The reason why was because she was sick and tired of Southern unrepentant segregationists being invited to join her party without changing their racist views. Decades ago when David Duke was elected to the Louisiana state legislature, that beacon of personal morality named Newt Gingrich publicly advised Duke that if he watched what he said for a few years, he'd be welcomed into the Republican Party. (Yeah, Gingrich said nothing about actually changing his views.) So, you guys have only yourselves to blame for losing the support of black voters. You dealt with the devil; so, now live with it!

By the way, Nixon was most definitely a racist. In private conversations he claimed that blacks had just come down out of trees.

[Indi Guy]

8. Well said. When JFK and LBJ embraced the Civil Rights movement...

...the segregationist Dixiecrats felt betrayed and their votes became ripe for the picking for anyone who would pander to them. The radical right wing of "the party of Lincoln" saw the opportunity and seized upon it. Through a number of coded messages such as "law and order," "state's rights," "moral majority," "silent majority" and the like -- the dog whistle went out and called in the votes of the disenfranchised racists. ...And ignorance found a new seat in a Republicanized South.

For the vote-getting potential of the Republican party this worked well for a very long time, on the local and national level. What the party and the RNC in particular failed to realize is that there was a half-life to this boon of support. ...That at some point the ratio of angry white men to open minded voters (including intentionally alienated immigrants) would swing inexorably in favor of the latter. Also, with the callous disregard for women's rights, the tipping point came even sooner.

Now the RNC is trying to do the impossible. The party went to bed with dogs and is now trying to get rid of the fleas, while staying cozy with the dogs. Good luck with that guys. Voters don't need a PhD in political science to pickup the stench of rank hypocrisy.

[Snake Plissken]

7. I'm sure they'll be able to connect with plenty of Black people who also long for the good ole days

of the 1850s

[grilled onions]

9. And That Is The Catch Phrase---Black VOTERS

They do not care about black people,black society,black poverty,black education or black culture. It's what they can get out of them for their own use! Like every other minority or group that holds little power they only see us as cogs to make their wealthy wheel go round.

[Indi Guy]

10. The Republican leadership must be extraordinarily arrogant AND ignorant to think that...

...they can get away with cutting the voting rights of minorities while simultaneously attracting black voters! How can they possibly think that they can pull this off?!

This is tantamount to a public suicide.