GOP Gives up on recruiting blacks in Texas

Gromer Jeffers Jr. reports in today's paper that the Dallas County GOP is giving up recruiting more blacks. The party's African-American Leadership Council is going out of business, according to its leader, Calvin Stephens. Yes, Barack Obama's presidential campaign had a lot to do with the GOP's recruitment difficulties, but there's a lot more to it than that.

The GOP stands for a lot of things that folks in southern Dallas can -- and should -- embrace. I've got no quibble, for example, with people taking a strong stand for personal responsibility. Not everything that's wrong in the lives of blacks or anyone else in poorer areas of the city is the result of rich whites beating them down. Sometimes, people have to own up to their own mistakes. Lots of black preachers are adamantly opposed to abortion. They strongly believe in entrepreneurship and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. William Dwight McKissic, a black Republican, defends many of these values even though he also defends efforts by Obama to speak directly to American kids in hopes of inspiring them to stay in school and make good grades.

But this is where the GOP repeatedly falls down. It seems like the minute anyone speaks positively about Obama or gives credit to Democrats for doing anything right, a hailstorm of derision and mean-spirited venom rains down upon that person -- as McKissic found when he was attacked by conservative columnist Mark Davis in this newspaper. We have a number of conservative "trolls" on this blog, like Rick Atkinson, who seem to have no other mission in life than to blindly criticize using the most confrontational language possible.

And that's the daily Davis modus operandi. He spouted off against McKissic, wrongly assuming he was just another liberal black Democrat, without bothering to check McKissic's background. And when Davis's errors were pointed out to him, did he apologize in the same public forum he used to attack McKissic? No way.

If the GOP wonders where it's gone wrong, it's not in the values of the party. It's in the delivery of the message. Not everything has to be expressed with shrill meanness, nor do you have to defend your own meanness by pointing out all the stupid, nasty things that Democrats have done. That's not a defense, it's red herring. More HERE