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A lot of people are pointing to a new set of remarks Michael Steele made about the Republican Party and race, in which Steele acknowledged that the GOP hasn’t given African Americans a reason to support the party.

But I think folks are missing the real news in what Steele said. The RNC chairman also appeared to acknowledge that the GOP has had a race-based “southern strategy” for four decades, which is decidedly not a historical interpretation many Republicans agree with.

Steele made his remarks at DePaul University on Tuesday night. He acknowledged that “we haven’t done a very good job” of giving African Americans a reason to vote Republican. That’s actually unremarkable. But here’s what he also said:

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“We have lost sight of the historic, integral link between the party and African-Americans,” Steele said. “This party was co-founded by blacks, among them Frederick Douglass. The Republican Party had a hand in forming the NAACP, and yet we have mistreated that relationship. People don’t walk away from parties. Their parties walk away from them.

“For the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, ‘Bubba’ went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton.”

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But here you have the chairman of the Republican National Committee saying, in effect, that liberals are right to have argued that Republicans have used race for political gain for the last four decades. Seems significant.

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Conservative Writer: Steele’s “Biggest Gaffe So Far”
I noted below that Republicans were likely to be mighty ticked off at Michael Steele for acknowledging that the GOP has employed a “southern strategy” for upwards of four decades.

Now conservative writer Bruce Bartlett is pushing back hard on Steele’s interpretation of history and claiming it’s his biggest gaffe yet. Bartlett tells Dave Weigel that while the GOP certainly reached out to southern whites, it wasn’t a racial strategy:

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Of course, the national party reached out to them, but the idea that they used racial code words like “law and order” is nonsense. Crime was a legitimate problem. Moreover, Nixon did more to desegregate the schools than any other president.

I think it’s too bad that Steele gave Democrats reason to believe that their distorted vision of how Republicans came to dominate the South is correct. It may be his biggest gaffe so far.

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