redblueamerica.com

I meant to get to this yesterday, but it's still worth noting the Politico story about how the GOP is trying to figure out how to run against Barack Obama without looking racist, or to run against Hillary Clinton without appearing sexist.

Republicans will be told to “be sensitive to tone and stick to the substance of the discussion” and that “the key is that you have to be sensitive to the fact that you are running against historic firsts,” the strategist explained.

GOP officials are certain their words will be scrutinized ever more aggressively. They anticipate a regular media barrage of accusations of intolerance – or much worse.

Now, you'd think this would be easy. The easiest way not to appear racist, for example, is to not act like a racist. We've had a couple of generations of Americans grow into political maturity since Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination -- overt racism has been pretty much verboten during most of the last half-century.

But of course, it's not that easy.

After all, the Republican Party spent quite a chunk of those years using the "Southern strategy" of appealing for the votes of those people who weren't thrilled about the political landscape in post-Civil Rights America.

This isn't some dark conspiracy fashioned in the fevered minds of Democrats angry about being shut out of the presidency during much of the last 40 years. This has been admitted to -- and apologized for -- by the Republicans themselves.

Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to one of the nation's largest black civil rights groups Thursday, saying Republicans had not done enough to court blacks in the past and had exploited racial strife to court white voters, particularly in the South.

"Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," Mehlman said at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

Mehlman's apology to the NAACP at the group's convention in Milwaukee marked the first time a top Republican Party leader has denounced the so-called Southern Strategy employed by Richard Nixon and other Republicans to peel away white voters in what was then the heavily Democratic South. Beginning in the mid-1960s, Republicans encouraged disaffected Southern white voters to vote Republican by blaming pro-civil rights Democrats for racial unrest and other racial problems.

Mehlman made that apology in 2005. He and the modern GOP should be applauded for making that apology -- despite Kanye West's post-Katrina anger, I think George W. Bush and modern Republicans recognize that much of the African-American community shares a social conservatism that would seem to have a natural home in the Republican Party.

And we now know that racist appeals turn off many of the white voters who were once the prime target of those appeals. Racism doesn't work so well anymore -- because there aren't as many racists anymore, inside or outside the Republican Party.

But the GOP's recent history also makes it hard for the party to get the benefit of the doubt when it comes to race issues. And given that history, maybe it's not such a bad thing if the party has to tread a bit more cautiously to earn the benefit back.