By Lee A. Daniels:

Pity the poor Republican Party.

Having been soundly beaten in consecutive national elections, burdened with a president whose final approval ratings have charted record lows, and still bleeding seats in congress, they are now enduring perhaps the ultimate political inanity.

They are saddled with at least one candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee who thinks the best way to present his credentials for leadership lies in pushing a sophomoric, neo-racist ditty insulting Barack Obama.

The Republican politico, Chip Saltsman, who managed former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee’s bid for the GOP presidential nomination, sent out a Christmas campaign package that included a CD containing songs by a conservative political satirist. One song, using the melody of the 1960s Peter, Paul and Mary hit, “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” and in a voice meant to mimic Rev. Al Sharpton, is titled “Barack, the Magic Negro.”
In real life that’s supposed to be President-elect Barack Obama – whose approval ratings now reside in the mid-70s, some twenty points higher than the percentage of the vote he captured eight short weeks ago and who ever since has had to resist the clamoring of the public that he just shove President Bush aside and begin carrying out the duties of the office immediately.

Saltsman quickly received support from another candidate for the RNC post, Ken  Blackwell, the staunchly conservative black former Ohio Secretary of State who lost a bid for the Ohio governorship in 2006. Blackwell declared the controversy inconsequential, the product of the media’s and the Left’s “hypersensitivity” to issues of race and its protectiveness of Obama. Now, however, Saltsman, under heavy criticism from not only progressives but such conservative stalwarts as Newt Gingrich, has backed away from his own campaign maneuver.

Nonetheless, Saltsman’s playing dirty politics remains instructive. After all, what can it mean when a clearly astute politico indulges in such a cheesy tactic at a moment when the Party – now without a national leader — has been thoroughly repudiated at the ballot box for the second time in two years; and when voters, fully aware that the country is facing its greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, are desperately demanding their political leaders pay studious attention to solving America’s myriad problems?

And what can it mean when a highly-placed Republican politico thinks the old Republican neo-white supremacist game still has significant appeal within the Party? Indeed, the “Magic Negro” album, also contains a track, “Star Spanglish Banner,” intended to disparage Latinos. That track has drawn virtually no public comment. But it begs the question of whether the Republican leadership has noticed – or cares – that  Obama won two-thirds of the Latino vote nationwide, and Latino majorities in the nine states with the greatest Latino populations. These include three whose Latino electorate had decisively voted Republican in 2004: Texas, President Bush’s home state; Florida, home of former Florida Governor Jeb Bush; and Arizona, John McCain’s home state.
Chip Saltsman, channeling the late Lee Atwater, one of the architects of the GOP’s anti-black electoral strategy, aimed his neo-racist parody at Barack Obama. But it would be more appropriate to consider it a dirge – a dirge for the Republican Party itself.

Lee A. Daniels is Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline and Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.