Bill Berkowitz*

OAKLAND, California, Jul 25 2005 (IPS) — In mid-July, Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, showed up at the annual convention of the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People) – the oldest and one of the largest civil rights organisations in the United States.

Hoping to mend fences with black leaders, Mehlman apologised for the party’s decades-long neglect of black voters.

Standing in for Pres. George W. Bush, who again had a "scheduling conflict" and could not make time for the NAACP, Mehlman told the Milwaukee, Wisconsin gathering that, "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarisation. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

According to USA Today’s Richard Benedetto, "Mehlman’s apology to the NAACP at the group’s convention in Milwaukee marked the first time a top Republican Party leader has denounced the so-called Southern Strategy employed by Richard Nixon and other Republicans to peel away white voters in what was then the heavily Democratic South."

"Beginning in the mid-1960s, Republicans encouraged disaffected Southern white voters to vote Republican by blaming pro-civil rights Democrats for racial unrest and other racial problems," he noted.

Earlier this year, Mehlman conducted a series of meetings with groups of carefully selected black leaders. Those gatherings were part of a new and aggressive strategy by the Republican Party aimed at winning more African American votes in upcoming elections.

"We’re committed to continuing to grow [the black vote] and we recognise that it’s going to require a long investment," Mehlman told the group. "I strongly believe that if we lay out our policies and lay out our vision, that we have a tremendous opportunity."

At the time, Mehlman was pitching the president’s social security privatisation plan, which since has languished in legislative purgatory.

Meanwhile, as is his wont, Pres. Bush chose a friendlier environment to talk about racial matters. Despite infrequent appearances before black audiences, the president made a point of stopping off at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, Indiana, and addressing a crowd of about 3,000 that were attending the Indiana Black Expo.

He brought along his own version of Martin Luther King Jr.’s "I Have a Dream" speech. Trying to make the case that his administration had done much to improve the lives of African Americans, Bush said that he envisioned "an America where every citizen owns a stake in the future of our country and where a growing economy creates jobs and opportunity for everyone."

During his remarks, Bush touted his faith-based initiative along with a litany of achievements that have benefited blacks: He claimed there were more black homeowners than at any other time in history, there were more loans being given to black-owned small businesses, and that there was a narrowing in the gap separating black students from white and Asian students.

But others are less optimistic. "While there may be some marginal improvement in conditions among African Americans, when taken as a whole we are still falling further behind," Tammy Johnson, director of the Race and Public Policy Programme at the Oakland-based Applied Research Centre, told IPS in an interview.

"The achievements the president ticked off in Indiana are smoke and mirrors, as a very small percentage of black people benefit from his programmes," Johnson pointed out. "In fact, as Michael Eric Dyson points out in his recent book, ‘Is Bill Cosby Right?,’ there is a growing divide within the black community and many poor blacks are still being left behind.

"We are still looking at high unemployment rates for black men; health care for the poor is becoming a bigger problem; the AIDS crisis, particularly among African American women, is becoming more problematical; and higher education is becoming more difficult for most people to pay for," Johnson added.

"It’s sad to say this, but one of the president’s main solutions to unemployment within minority communities appears to be to recruit them for the war in Iraq."

Coming on the heels of the civil rights movement and the Civil Rights Act, the Southern Strategy was cynically devised to take the white Southern vote away from the Democratic Party, where it had been ensconced for decades, and shift it to the Republicans.

These days, the Republican Party has been working on a new strategy aimed at African American voters and which in part revolves the president’s faith-based initiative. As the 2004 vote in Florida and Ohio showed, it is not necessary to get a majority of black voters to vote Republican to insure a Republican victory. Moving the number only a few percentage points in its direction could achieve another political realignment that could last for decades.

Over the past two decades, Republican Party strategists were quite comfortable building a solid core of black conservative organisations and developing conservative African American media personalities who would support its agenda via the print media and talk radio.

In late January 2001, when Bush announced his Faith-Based Initiative, it opened the door for conservative black church leaders to be rewarded for getting with the president’s programme.

Being part of the programme means that African American churches were eligible to receive some of the four billion dollars in grants that have been handed out by the government in the form of faith-based grants. Ironically, courting African American academics and media personalities – once a project paid for in large part by conservative foundations – is now being underwritten by the public.

Results from the 2004 presidential election showed that the Republican Party achieved a small but significant up-tick in black votes – from 9 percent to 11 percent, according to exit polling.

However, in such critical swing states as Florida and Ohio, Bush did much better than expected. Bush picked up six percentage points in Florida over 2000, moving to 13 percent of the African American vote, and in Ohio, Bush may have won as much as 16 percent of the black vote.

"The Republican Party has done the math," Tammy Johnson noted. "They recognise that they only need a small percentage of the black vote to achieve a critical mass. And they can very likely get it because the Democratic Party has been mostly missing in action regarding issues that affect African Americans."

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column "Conservative Watch" documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.