It's My party and I'll Cry if I Want to

Sophia Nelson writes in the Sunday edition of the Washington Post...'It's my party, but I don't feel part of it'...and goes on to say how she pretty much had to hold her nose in order to vote for then Senator Barack Obama, and seems to suggest that the only reason the Senator won the election was because of the disaffection felt by Black and Latino voters to the Republican Party.

The Republican Party she describes existed for only a short period, a period of less than a hundred years, when it began to align itself with the most extreme elements in the American political landscape. The modern Republican Party, at least since the late 1940's has been the party of exclusion, isolationism, and xenophobia. There seems to be this tendency among Republicans that their party has been the party of progressive growth with a commitment to diversity. Where is the justification for this delusion?

Let's call this hallucination for what it is; at no time in modern history has the Republican Party made any real effort to reach out to the so-called minority community. Those who did come to the Republican Party, in my view, were practicing what I call ' political Darwinism', or rather, they become big fish in a small pond. They are held up as useful tools in order to appeal to some sort of 'pull yourself up by your boot-straps' fable. The role of class cannot be underestimated in this discussion of the Republican Party. Let's not forget that the so-called 'progressive' wing of the party is the 'country club' or Rockefeller wing of the party.

Yes, I said "class", that elephant in the room that no one seems to notice even though that elephant has been at the center of racial and class strife since at least the Goldwater years. The revisionist view of the GOP would have you forget Joe McCarthy, Goldwater's' eagerness to bomb the hell out the Vietnamese and his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and let's not forget the Birchers, the KKK in Indiana during the twenties, and on and on. Sophia Nelson would have us believe that Lee Atwater and Karl Rove really had the interests of African-American and for that matter the interests of Latino\as at the forefront of their ugly political machinations.

Now, the Sophia Nelsons' and Michael Steeles' of this world would have you believe that the Republican Party of the 1850's is the party we should be remembering, and not the more modern iteration; the Jesse Helms wing, or the not so subtle appeals for 'law-n-order' during the Nixon campaigns. that finally exposed the Democratic Party of the south for the racists that they were.

Sophia Nelson notices that out of the more than 2000 delegates, only thirty-six or so were African-American, and I would imagine that the number of Latino\a delegates could not have been much more. Voting against one's own self-interest has always fascinated me, I don't understand the disconnect that must occur in order to continually identify with a group that has made no secret of its' disdain for the African-American and Latino community.

Will President Obama be able to salvage a successful first term with all that needs to be done, i have no clue. However, looking to the Republican Party for solutions in the twenty-first century is a little like fixing your toilet by installing an outhouse in the back yard.