The GOP's 'Magic Negro' Debacle

By John Avlon, The Daily Beast. Posted December 31, 2008.

Here's a telling snapshot: of the 43 African Americans in the departing 110th Congress, all are Democrats. Of 30 Hispanics, 24 are Democrats. And of the 89 women serving in Congress, 64 are Democrats. The lone openly gay Republican member of Congress, Arizona's Jim Kolbe, quietly left office in 2006.

The recent election of the first Vietnamese American in Congress, Louisiana Republican Joseph Cao, is a welcome step in the right direction of diversity. But the fact that the first African American senator and the first female senator freely elected to the Senate were both Republicans -- Ed Brooke of Massachusetts (1967) and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine (1949) -- has been reduced to near-rumor, and it’s questionable whether either of them would have felt comfortable in the Republican Party of today.

While George W. Bush ran on a platform of compassionate conservatism that implied increased minority recruitment and appointed our first two African American secretaries of state, the party lost ground not only in terms of elected ethnic but geographic diversity. After the play-to-the-base politics of the Bush-DeLay years, not a single Republican representative is left in all of New England, while the third-way Republican mayors of the 1990s have all but disappeared.

And the Bush administration's hopes to bring Hispanics into the fold faded when the immigration reform backed by Bush and McCain went down in flames in the face of opposition from the Rush Limbaughs, Tom Tancredos and Mitt Romneys of the party.

Against this backdrop, compounded by Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama, it’s no wonder that some Republicans are waking up to the diversity deficit the GOP faces on all fronts. Amid Saltsman's competitors for RNC chairmanship are not one, but two African Americans -- former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele and former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell. (Blackwell has dismissed the CD controversy, saying that it is a matter of "hypersensitivity.") Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal is alone among possible 2012 candidates who can turn the page and give a more diverse face to the GOP at the top of the ticket.

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. The idea of an Urban Republican should no longer sound like an oxymoron or an entry on the Endangered Species list.

Obama won in large part because he appealed to the better angels of our nature, and himself looks like America in the 21st century. Republicans need to respond with something better than cynicism or sarcasm. They need to rediscover their founding ideals, confront the ghosts of their past and present a party that looks like America to regain credibility as the Party of Lincoln.

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John P. Avlon is the author of IIndependent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics.