By Lee A. Daniels

It says something terrible about the GOP, yes. But it also means Black America’s prospects remain uncertain.

Michael Steele

On Friday,  January 30, 2009, the Republican Party, battered by two consecutive national defeats, elected Michael Steele, a former lieutenant governor of Maryland, as their first-ever black chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC).

After the vote, Steele promised his audience at a news conference in Washington, DC an aggressive challenge to President Barack Obama and the rest of the Democratic leadership. “This is the dawn of a new party. There is not one inch of ground we’re going to cede to anybody.”

But Steele’s election can be viewed another way: proof the Republicans must have thought it permissible all these years to adhere to the apocryphal African-American “tradition” of a fashionable tardiness. They must be operating on “C.P. (for colored people’s) time,” because they’re a bit late.

Say, twenty-eight years late. Or, twenty years late. Or, sixteen years. Or, seven years. Or, four years. Or, even twenty-four months.

At any point along that continuum – from the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980; to that of George H.W. Bush in 1988; to that of Democrat Bill Clinton in 1992; to that of George W. Bush in 2000; to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005; to the Party’s shattering defeat in the 2006 Congressional elections – the GOP could have broken new political ground by electing a black chairman.

Now, less than a fortnight after Barack Obama’s inauguration drew millions to the Capitol and a global television audience of millions more, their selection of Michael Steele provokes the questions:

Republicans, what took you so long?

Or, one can put the question in its more dramatic form:

Why isn’t Barack Obama a Republican?

He was supposed to be, wasn’t he?

Wasn’t the GOP supposed to be the party where blacks of the “post civil rights era,”  especially blacks with elite credentials and also “street cred” like Barack and Michelle Obama, were going to flourish?

Weren’t blacks like them, backed by the electoral skill of the GOP and the dominance of conservative ideology, going to inspire the black masses and upper classes alike to abandon the Democratic Party – the party that “takes blacks for granted” – shed the “wallowing in victimhood” encouraged by the old black civil rights leadership, and pledge allegiance to the asserted “color-blind” ideology of Ronald Reagan, the two George Bushes, and their black conservative followers?

Weren’t blacks like them going to make being black irrelevant?

At every point along the thirty-year continuum set out above – when conservative ideology dominated the political discourse – GOP presidents and politicos have made such promises. The media news stories and the opinion columns of conservative and many centrist pundits of those years are saturated with such boasts.

Yet, what have we just witnessed:

Lee A. Daniels

The inauguration of a Democrat – “a black American of mixed heritage,” as he correctly describes himself – the country is depending on to fix the tangled mess created by Republican mis-rule. A Democrat ushered into office by both a huge, multiracial throng and a media in this country and around the globe which insisted on connecting his victory to America’s struggle to redeem its racist past. Black Democrats for the second consecutive election cycle occupy key posts in the Democratic-controlled Congress. And, out beyond the Beltway, only about 50 of the country’s 9,000-plus black elected state and local officials are Republicans. Finally, America’s black electorate, 95 percent of whom voted for Obama, is energized as never before.

The GOP collapse is far broader than this, of course. After the 2004 elections, Republicans held 30 more seats in the House of Representatives and 10 more in the Senate than the Democrats. Now, they’re down 77 seats in the House and at least 18 in the Senate. Included in Barack Obama’s victory totals are nine states that George Bush won in 2004. In November’s election, Obama won every age group but those over 65 , and many of the electorate’s different sub-groups.

That includes Latino-Americans, too. In 2004 Bush had cut the Democratic advantage with Latino-American voters to a 60-40 split. In 2008, however, Obama beat McCain among Latino-Americans by a 67 – 31 margin.

But it is among the black electorate that the results of the cynical politics the GOP has practiced are most sharply seen. Just 4 percent of blacks voted Republican in November, the party’s worst showing ever in a presidential election. And for the third consecutive Congressional term, there will be no black Republican in the House or Senate. Thus, it’s still a political fact of life that in the four decades since the landmark Voting Rights Act was enacted, only three black Republicans have been elected to Congress. (Steele ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006 and lost to Ben Cardin, a white Democrat. Cardin got 75 percent of black Marylanders’ votes.)

By contrast, there are 39 black Democrats in the House and one in the Senate. (In the House, there are three Latino-American, two Asian-American and one Native-American Republican members, compared to 21 Latino-and 4 Asian-American Democrats.)

Set against Barack Obama’s extraordinary rise, those political facts underscore the utter failure of the racial game the GOP and their fellow-travelers have been playing all these years. That alone makes examining his choice of party affiliation and the role the black electorate played in his ultimate triumph important.

But there’s also another reason to do so — one that is far more shaded with complexity. That is that, albeit the present Democratic Party triumph and today’s celebratory mood, the GOP’s refusal to court black voters means that black Americans have had to play the game of politics in a racially-segregated political arena.

The positive in that is that blacks have played the political hand they were dealt superbly. There is, after all, a direct line of descent to Barack Obama from the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 to the immediate explosion of black voters in the South, to the presidential-nomination campaigns of Shirley Chisholm in the early 1970s and Jesse Jackson in the mid- and late-1980s, to the 1980s elections of Harold Washington and David Dinkins as Mayors of Chicago and New York, respectively, and Doug Wilder as Governor of Virginia.

Perhaps the most important prism through which to view Steele’s selection and his future performance as RNC leader is the example of the late Ron Brown, Clinton’s first Secretary of Commerce who died in a plane crash in Croatia in April 1996.

Brown, a former top official of the National Urban League, became a consummate Washington lawyer/power broker in the 1980s. In 1988 he supervised the maneuvering of Jesse Jackson’s forces at the Democratic National Convention. Of course, Jackson has long been defined as the ultimate political outsider and thorn in the side of the Democratic Party establishment. Yet, six months later, in January 1989, Brown was unanimously elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee – the first black to hold such a post. (Steele, by contrast, last week won election by just 12 votes.) From there he played a significant role in stage-managing Bill Clinton’s run for the White House.

In other words, the black political activism within the Democratic Party of the past four decades generated a signal growth in the number of black elected officials, stoked the black electorate’s appetite for greater political success, and greatly expanded the corps of blacks learned in the skills and culture of mainstream political electioneering and governing. Now, it has helped install America’s first black president.

The looming questions Michael Steele now has to answer by doing are: Can you top this? Can you come within the range of respectability? Will you try?

One doesn’t have to favor the Democrats to be skeptical of his prospects. The few political facts cited above – and many more could be cited – indicate the GOP is in terrible political shape.
And there’s the matter of Republican outreach to Asian-Americans, and Latino-Americans, alienated by the GOP’s hard-right stance on immigration reform, and blacks, alienated by a seemingly never-ending skein of GOP racial insults.

The latest is the “Magic Negro” CD which parody Chip Saltsman, a veteran GOP operative running for the RNC post, sent to supporters during the holiday season, ultimately forcing him off the ballot. On one level, of course, it was an utterly stupid stunt for a veteran politico to pull. How could Saltsman not have foreseen the political backlash that would immediately rise among mainstream conservative Republicans? Posing that question leads to one conclusion only. Saltsman’s behavior is more than sophomoric. It’s also further evidence of an entrenched vein of racist pathology in today’s Republican Party.

If Steele is serious about pushing the Party to substantively appeal to blacks, and other Americans of color, that conclusion means he has his work cut out for him.

But, is he sincere? His first post-election comments don’t sound promising at all.

Friday he said in the aftermath of victory he would dispel public perceptions that the GOP is “a party unconcerned about minorities, a party that’s unconcerned about the lives and dreams of average Americans. For so long we’ve allowed the Democrats to define us. We’ve allowed the media to define us. And so it’s important for us to be able to establish with clarity what we believe.”  And he continued that line of response – all assertion, no substance — through an interview on the “Fox News Sunday” program.

So, Steele thinks the Republicans’ troubles stem from their “allowing” the Democrats and the media to define them. In other words: it’s an image problem.

Contrast those words with comments made the day before by two GOP stalwarts.

Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, said, “The results of the two recent elections are real, and so are the obstacles we face as a party. And my concern is unless we do something to adapt, our status as a minority party may become too pronounced for an easy recovery.”

Mark McKinnon, a former Bush adviser who worked on John McCain’s 2008 primary campaign, was more blunt. “The GOP got drunk with power, and it’s time for an intervention. We need to be reminded what America looks like and better reflect its diversity and values.”

But recent polls of the Republican base have made clear the majority of them want the Party to move further to the right. If the GOP platform in its current iteration has no appeal to black voters, what support will a shift further rightward bring?  Perhaps Steele will meet the fate of Mel Martinez, the Florida Latino Republican, whom the Bush-Rove team fastened on after the 2006 mid-term elections to lead their initiative to separate Latinos from the Democratic Party. But as the controversy over illegal Latino immigration exploded, with Republican conservatives leading a furious opposition to Congressional reform proposals, Martinez’s political utility to the Party evaporated. In October 2007 Martinez stepped down as RNC chairman, and shortly after Obama’s victory, Martinez announced he wouldn’t seek re-election to the Senate in 2010.

Oh, well, the 4 percent BLACK vote the GOP got this time around may just be an irreducible minimum. As my mother used to say, you can fool some of the people all of the time.

There’s no question that blacks (and the progressive movement in general) should take a moment to savor what the political patience and sophistication of Black America has helped bring about. There’s no question, given the profiles of the two parties, black Americans as a group stand a better chance now of advancing under a Democratic regime than a Republican one.

But blacks’ ability to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ear of political segregation ought not to blind us to the fact that blacks continue to face the same political predicament they’ve endured since their emancipation from slavery. Unlike every other group of Americans, their vote for most of the last one hundred and fifty years has been sought by only one of the major parties at a time. It was true before the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, and it’s true today. If Michael Steele can change that dynamic, then he will have performed a signal service not just for the Republican Party and for black America, but the nation as a whole.

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