Losing the Races

By CHARLES M. BLOW
NYT

The Republicans are sending mixed signals and making missteps on race. While some bemoan the dearth of minorities in the party, others seem bent on ensuring it. At last week’s Young Republican National Convention, Michael Steele joked that he would welcome blacks to the party with “fried chicken and potato salad.” At the same meeting, the group threw racial sensitivity to the wind by electing a woman as its president even though she had a racially offensive exchange on her Facebook page.

Then there was the awkward juxtaposition of Senator Jeff Sessions, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, going after Judge Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, over racial language in her speeches. This is the same Sessions whose own nomination to the federal court was torpedoed after reports emerged that he had called the N.A.A.C.P. “communist-inspired,” but once joked that he had thought the Ku Klux Klan was “O.K.”

Finally, there was the acerbic Pat Buchanan, who suggested this week that Republicans should mount an all-out, reverse-discrimination assault on Sotomayor as part of an effort to win back the G.O.P.’s lost white voters. According to him, she’s “a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males.”

(More here.)