Since the Republicans largely boycotted a scheduled event at Morehouse College, there has been some discussion floating around about how the "Party of Lincoln" has "turned its back" on black voters. Schwarzenegger gave a speech to that effect to Republicans in California a week or so ago.

I am here to tell you - it ain't so. The Republicans have leaned heavily on blacks and other minorities because they have based their agenda on the votes of the white backlash ever since the days of the civil rights movement to create the party that they are today. It was the evil genius of George Wallace that took the southern racist reaction to civil rights campaigns and draped it in the white sheets of states' rights, "drown-it-in-the-bathtub" small government, anti-gun control, white evangelical christianism, using racism as the subtext. Wallace's approach was adopted by Barry Goldwater at the 1964 Republican convention. Black delegates were systematically harassed and expelled. Jackie Robinson, a lifelong Republican, said that at that convention, he could understand what it must have been like in Nazi Germany.

You can connect the underlying racist dots from there to Nixon's southern strategy in 1968, Reagan "democrats", the war on drugs (crack gets more punishment than coke), welfare reform ("welfare Cadillac"), and the Willie Horton ad, and the transformation of the word "liberal" into an epithet (Wallace did that.) With changes in generations and demographics, the approach is now being extended to cover the new "others of color" - (Arab) Muslims and (Latino) immigrants.

Republicans have put racists into high judicial position to reinforce these views, including Chief Justice Rehnquist, who was a Goldwater protégé and supporter of his 1964 campaign, and wrote numerous opinions arguing against racial justice, school integration, voting rights, and later worked for Attorney General John Mitchell of Watergate fame.

Chief Justice Roberts was Rehnquist's law clerk. While less overtly racist than his predecessor, Roberts has continued to interpret laws that buttress the white sheet that covers so many Republican policies, generally limiting the reach of Federal power, except when that reach undermines civil liberties that can protect the rights of individuals. It is easy to forget that before the Civil Rights Act and Voting Act, state law was flagrantly used to attack and suppress the civil rights movement. In today's environment, Martin Luther King would probably be in Guantanamo instead of Parchman, and the Constitutional rights that eventually led to Federal intervention to integrate the nation would have been waved aside under charges of terrorism and insurrection. Bull Connor and the southern sheriffs would have supported KKK policies even more freely in Selma, Birmingham, and Oxford, protected by a Supreme Court and Justice Department that defends state's rights against human rights.

So let's not pretend that the Republicans are the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt; those days have been gone since 1964. But they do embrace the objects of their enmity, because they need them to scare the white folks. Without black and brown folks, most of their agenda is empty.