Racial politics

During the post-war period, the GOP was pretty much a permanent minority on the national stage. The "integration" of the Dixiecrats into the Republican party in the 1960s changed that.

In telling the story of their fellow South Carolinian, Jack Bass and Marilyn W. Thompson show how the South helped to shape modern America by shaping Thurmond. In 1947, the New York Times had published an editorial entitled "Strom Thurmond, Hope of the South," praising South Carolina's then governor for his progressive programs. But when President Truman committed the United States to civil rights in 1948, Thurmond led the Southern segregationists who walked out of the Democratic Convention and formed the so-called Dixiecrats. Accepting their presidential nomination in July 1948, Thurmond declared that "there's not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to . . . admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches." Before Alabama's George Wallace, Bass and Thompson write, "no one symbolized resistance to civil rights for African Americans more than Thurmond. In the Senate, the former Dixiecrat set a filibuster record when speaking against the 1957 Civil Rights Act." Indeed, Thurmond broke a lot of records; by the time of his death, shortly after having retired from the Senate at the age of 100, he had become both the oldest and the longest-serving senator in U.S. history.

[...]

Thurmond will be remembered, along with Wallace, in connection with the regional realignment that has made Southern and Southwestern conservatives the dominant force in the federal government. Bass and Thompson make a persuasive case that Thurmond was one of the most influential American politicians of the 20th century. "Thurmond's political legacy is found not in the annals of legislative achievement but in his pivotal role in reshaping America's political culture," Bass and Thompson write. By winning the electoral votes of four Deep South states as the Dixiecrats' presidential candidate in 1948 and then becoming a Republican in 1964 to campaign for Barry Goldwater, Thurmond began the process by which white conservatives in the former Confederacy first joined and then took over what had once been the party of Lincoln. Bass and Thompson give Thurmond credit for helping Nixon win in 1968 by "thwarting Alabama Governor George Wallace's third-party drive." Southern conservatism could never be reduced solely to racist attitudes, which in the South, as elsewhere, are declining over time. The enduring legacy of politicians like Thurmond, Wallace and Helms may be a distinctively Southern style of cultural politics, transplanted to national politics as a whole. [emphasis mine]

Sure, southern politics are not defined solely by race, nor is the Republican Party. But race has played an awfully large part -- usually through coded language -- for such a long time in Republican strategies. And it's awfully hard to turn that ship around.

One of Mr. Bush's prominent African-American supporters called the White House to say he was aghast at the images from the president's first trip to the region, on Sept. 2, when Mr. Bush stood next to Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Gov. Bob Riley of Alabama, both white Republicans, and praised them for a job well done. Mr. Bush did not go into the heart of New Orleans to meet with black victims.

"I said, 'Grab some black people who look like they might be preachers,' " said the supporter, who asked not to be named because he did not want to be identified as criticizing the White House.Three days later, on Mr. Bush's next trip to the region, the president appeared in Baton Rouge at the side of T. D. Jakes, the conservative African-American television evangelist and the founder of a 30,000-member megachurch in southwest Dallas.

For all the carefully laid plans of Karl Rove, and the occasional reach around from Ken Mehlman, it never would have occured to Bush to even consider the plight of the poor in New Orleans. They're simply not on his radar, because they're not really on his party's radar, except as a political tactic to force Democrats to spend more resources shoring up its own base.

It's right and proper that Bush should first reach out to Haley Barbour. There is no gooder old boy. It's "boys" like him that are the reason the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government.

UPDATE: Digby is all over this and, as usual, he has much more to say and says it much more eloguently.