Republicans are not "racist" as the left claims them to be.

Even Republicans think Republicans are RacistOne need not go to the democratic side of politics to confirm that the Republican Party is racist. Plenty of confirmation can be found by asking prominent Republicans. They should know, after all.Here is Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, Lawrence Wilkerson, speaking last year just before the presidential election: "My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people -- not all of them, but most of them -- who are still basing their positions on race. Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists, and the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as commander-in-chief and president, and everything to do with the color of his skin, and that's despicable. " [1] Here's Ohio Election Board Republican Doug Preisse: "I guess I really actually feel we shouldn't"t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban " read African-American " voter-turnout machine." [2] Ann Coulter: "There is nothing harder in the world than being a black Republican." [3] and here's RNC Chairman and George H. W. Bush Presidential Campaign manager Lee Atwater: "You start out in 1954 by saying, "n*gger n*gger, n*gger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" " that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me " because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N*gger, n*gger"[4] That last quote represents a particularly damning bit of insight into how the modern Republican Party enlists the racist vote from the American electorate. Lee Atwater served as Ronald Reagan's political director. Reagan made his first public address in the general campaign of the 1980 Presidential election at the county fair in Neshoba County, Mississippi. This would seem a strange choice at first, given that Neshoba County has a small population and that the Mississippi electorate was already a lock for the Republican Party. But this was the site of the famous 1964 murders of 3 young civil right workers, and Reagan came to deliver his "states' rights" speech. One year later, Reagan's own political director breaks it down for us- "states' rights" means "n*gger, n*gger, n*gger." When Reagan made that speech at that particularly site, there can be no doubt that Reagan understood the offer he was making to the South- vote for me and I will keep the black man down. Reagan kept his promise: he vetoed civil rights legislation, [5] fought against Congress' creation of a Martin Luther King Day, [6] and supported Apartheid in South Africa. [7] Reagan did not see himself as a racist, and I would suppose that a black person meeting Reagan in person would not have perceived intolerance in the man. Nevertheless, Reagan actively pursued the "Southern Strategy" of courting the racist vote and, to make the racist electorate happy, Reagan had to pursue a policy of racial intolerance during his tenure. The Southern StrategyReagan wasn't the only one. In truth, Republican power at the federal level has only been maintained over the past 50 years by courting the anti-black vote in the South. After Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he turned to Bill Moyers and said "Democrats have lost the South for a generation." Johnson understood that the Democrats long stranglehold on the segregationist vote in the South was at an end, and that the Republican Party would work hard to gain those voters. Four years later, Nixon's political strategist saw the opening and advised: "From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that...but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.[8] It doesn't get much clearer than that. Rather than reject racism, Republicans saw "negrophobes" as their target clientele. And it payed off. By 1972, the old confederate states, a Democratic stronghold since the Civil War, were solidly Republican and almost every state has voted for the Republican presidential ticket over the last 50 years.Here's another RNC chairman and GW Bush's manager Ken Mehlman in 2005: "Republican candidates often have prospered by ignoring black voters and even by exploiting racial tensions," and, "by the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong." [9] Suppressing Minority VotersIn spite of Mehlman's apology, there is little doubt that the Republican party continues to rely on the racist vote. Worse, Republicans have expanded racist policies during the last couple of election cycles into attempt by acts designed to redefine the electorate and suppress minority voters.Florida Republicans recognized that certain color-blind non-profits like the League of Women Voters were successfully recruiting minority voters and banned them.In Kansas, Alabama, and Tennessee, Republicans passed laws requiring a birth certificate or passport before registration, recognizing that poor minorities and immigrants were significantly less likely to possess these documents.Noting that most blacks in Ohio preferred to do their early voting en masse after church, Republican banned early voting on Sunday.Since minorities are statistically less likely to possess photo ids, 9 states, all with Republican legislatures, passed photo id requirements for voting over the past few years. [10]Republicans consistently mask these efforts as attempts to reduce voter fraud, although voter fraud is quite rare and the measure proposed don't seem to address them.Republican Party of Florida's ex-chairman Jim Greer admits that voter fraud is just a facade: "The Republican Party, the strategists, the consultants, they firmly believe that early voting is bad for Republican Party candidates," Greer told The Post. "It"s done for one reason and one reason only. " "We"ve got to cut down on early voting because early voting is not good for us," " Greer said he was told by those staffers and consultants."They never came in to see me and tell me we had a (voter) fraud issue," Greer said. "It"s all a marketing ploy." [11] ConclusionThere's plenty more discuss. How Republican drug policies are designed to imprison minorities at higher rates than whites. How Republican "dog whistle" campaigns on issues like the confederate flag or English only are designed to reinforce racism. How the Invasion of Iraq was sold to the Republican electorate as racial retaliation for 9/11. The Birther movement and extroverted racism of Tea Party republican in 2010, and how Republicans encouraged both.But I think I have fairly established that the Republican Party has actively recruited the racist vote over the past 50 years and works hard to be seen as the party for racists, without often daring to say so out loud. In exchange for those votes, the Republican party must support anti-minority legislation including voter restrictions, anti-immigration reform, identification requirements, etc. Even prominent Republicans say it is so.In the 2012 Presidential Election, the Republican candidate garnered only 27% of the Hispanic vote, 26% of the Asian vote, and a shocking 6% of the Black vote. This is not an accident by minority voters, nor are minority voters mislead. So long as the Republican party relies on the support of a racist white electorate in the South to win elections, they deserve to be labeled the Party of racists.1.http://www.huffingtonpost.com...2http://www.allvoices.com...3. http://www.youtube.com...4.Lamis, Alexander P. et al. (1990) The Two Party South. New York: Oxford University Press.5. Civil Rights Restoration Act-Veto Override, Bill Number: S 557, Date: 22 March 1988, Sponsor:Bill sponsored by Kennedy6. http://en.wikipedia.org...7. South Africa Reagan's Abrupt Reversal, William E. Smith; Bruce W. Nelan/Johannesburg and Barrett Seaman/Washington Monday, Sep. 16, 19858. Boyd, James (May 17, 1970). "Nixon's Southern strategy: 'It's All in the Charts'" (PDF). The New York Times. 9. http://www.washingtonpost.com...10. http://www.americanprogress.org...11. http://www.palmbeachpost.com...