By Lee A. Daniels

Is it congenital?

Is the Republican Party so institutionally infected with anti-black and anti-Latino hostility that it can’t help doing things which make a mockery of its glib rhetoric about appealing to people of color?

Given the GOP’s record of missteps along the political color line over just the past decade, one has to think so. Especially since the pace of missteps seems to have increased since Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele took office last year.

The latest evidence that the GOP remains addicted to its traditional Southern Strategy came Monday when the RNC tried to “step on” President Obama’s announcement that he was nominating Solicitor General Elena Kagan for the U.S. Supreme Court with a blitzkrieg criticism of her.

Incredibly, the RNC did so by, first, denigrating the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom Kagan had clerked twenty years ago; and then, strongly implying that the Constitution’s condoning Negro Slavery at its inception wasn’t a significant wrong.

Moments after the President introduced Kagan as his nominee in a nationally-televised news conference, the RNC released a statement which in part stated that given Kagan’s “support for statements suggesting that the Constitution ‘as originally drafted and conceived, was ‘defective,’” you can expect Senate Republicans to respectfully raise serious and tough questions …”

What the RNC statement omitted was that the reference was drawn from a law review article Kagan had written in 1993 praising Marshall and citing a speech he had given in 1987, the Constitution’s bicentennial year. In that speech, Marshall had declared that he did not find “the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice exhibited by the [members of the Constitutional Convention] particularly profound. To the contrary,” he continued, “the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today.”

Within minutes, a whirlwind of criticism of the RNC’s ploy from progressive and even some conservative bloggers and commentators was rattling the windowpanes of the RNC offices.

RNC officials tried to “clarify” that they actually had made a valid criticism of Kagan’s approval of so-called liberal judicial activism.  But, the explanation only seemed to make matters worse.

The RNC’s lead-footed strategem instantly undermined whatever boost the GOP might have gained from its recent unveiling of 35 black candidates vying for Congressional seats this November. (Actually, it’s now 34; one of the candidates was swamped in a primary battle earlier this month.)

And it instantly underscored the fact that the widespread GOP backing of harsh anti-immigration laws – like the new measure in Arizona – continues to drive Latino voters away from the GOP lists.

These actions continue an extraordinary pattern of institutional hostility toward these two major American ethnic groups – who by dint of their population numbers are leading the racial and ethnic transformation of American society. Whether it was the Bush administration’s opposition to affirmative action in the University of Michigan case that the Supreme Court decided in 2003; or the administration’s dismal performance in getting aid to the Gulf Region and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina struck; or Republican politicians leading the harshest denunciations of illegal Latino immigration, the GOP has repeatedly undermined its oft-asserted declarations of being the party of the “Big Tent.”

So, too, has the GOP’s astonishing record over the past four decades of failing to get its black candidates elected to office. Since the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 the GOP has had only three African Americans in Congress, and none for the last seven years. In stark contrast, the Democrats have elected a total of some 90 blacks to the House and Senate – and now, the Presidency — during those years.

Scholar Michael Fauntroy tabulated that of the sixty-four black Republicans who ran for Congress in the four national elections from 1998 to 2004, years which marked the zenith of the GOP’s political dominance, all but one lost (former Rep. J.C. Watts, of Oklahoma, who first won election in 1994 and left office in 2002), and fifty-two lost by twenty-five percentage points or more. That record expanded in 2006 to include the high-profile losses of J. Kenneth Blackwell and Lynn Swann, for the Governorships of Ohio and Pennsylvania, respectively, and of Steele himself, for U.S. Senator from Maryland. The GOP nadir vis-à-vis the black vote was reached in 2008, when the McCain-Palin ticket got just 4 percent of black votes.

Perhaps it was that dismal record which recently prompted Steele, while giving a speech at DePaul University, to bluntly – or was it unthinkingly? – say in response to a question from the audience that African Americans “really don’t have a reason” to vote Republican because “we haven’t done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True.” It was the second time in five years that an RNC leader has acknowledged the Party’s past deliberate use of coded appeals to racial bigotry.

Can the 35 black Republicans now running for Congress forge a record of black GOP success?

Considered strictly in terms of traditional American politics, that would be a good thing for black Americans and America. A substantial number of black Republican elected officials at the national level could help reduce the obvious disregard for blacks and Latinos that now exists within the party and thereby give it a chance to draw more black voters to support it. That, in turn, would produce the “policy spread” among blacks – in terms of an intra-group split in supporting both progressive and conservative policies – that was the means by which the country’s white-ethnic groups made full use of the two-party system.

Unfortunately, neither the past nor the present signs indicate that will happen.

First, there’s the matter of whether sufficient numbers of white Republicans will vote for black Republican candidates, something which has overwhelmingly not happened in the recent past.

Second, these black Republicans aren’t likely to lure many more black voters than those who voted for McCain-Palin. Their campaign pronouncements show that as a group they fit comfortably in with the Tea Party insurgency. Indeed, several of them proudly declare allegiance to it. Their staking a position on the extreme right of the political spectrum continues the utter failure of both black conservative intellectuals and political operatives to offer black voters any substantive policies and programs that would persuade them to vote Republican.

Contrary to the oft-repeated conventional wisdom, it has been the Republican Party which has taken blacks for granted – by ignoring them altogether. Blacks have had to play the two-party political game within the Democratic Party; and they’ve done so superbly. That’s why a black Democrat, not a black Republican, is the first African-American to be elected President of the United States.

The political platforms of the GOP 35 make it clear that black voters will have to continue playing two-party politics within the Democratic Party – a fact of political life that underscores just how corrosive the GOP’s congenital virus about race and color remains.

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