It's also the case that the negative effectively wipes out the positive. Hence, with Attorney General nominee John Ashcroft, it matters less that he signed the law making Martin Luther King, Jr. day an official state holiday as governor of Missouri, or that he supported the appointment of many black judges to the federal bench as a U.S. senator, or that his wife is on the faculty of the historically black Howard University. What sticks in the memory is his honorary degree from Bob Jones University, his kind words for Confederate leaders in Southern Partisan magazine, and his opposition to Judge Ronnie White's sitting on a federal court. This isn't to say the GOP's disconnect with blacks is simply symbolic. Apart from rebel flags, speeches at Bob Jones University, and missed funerals, Republicans face many fundamental problems in converting blacks to their cause.
Many blacks are socially conservative, and many distrust government.
So too do Republicans, but this doesn't make a happy marriage. Because Republicans tend to distrust the federal government, and exalt local control. Blacks trust the federal government, which, after all, liberated them from slavery, enforced their civil rights during Reconstruction, hired them during the New Deal, and finally got around, in the 1950s and 1960s, to protecting their civil rights against their oppressors, many of whom resided in state and local governments. In an otherwise standard Republican articulation of the majesty of the 10th Amendment, which reserves for the states and the people all the powers not granted to the federal government, Norton waxed nostalgic about a visit to a Civil War graveyard. But we lost too much.