Dear Shawn, I hope you’re right that Herman Cain will make another presidential run! Reporters everywhere will rejoice, especially since they will no longer have Michele Bachmann around to entertain them. But I think we both agree that Republicans will continue to have immense difficulty attracting minority votes whether their presidential nominee is Cain or almost any other of the likely candidates. I’m going to dodge your question about how to define a moderate, at least for the moment. I’d like to go back to the Republican National Committee post-2012 “autopsy” I mentioned in my previous post. The RNC view is that the Republican Party isn’t winning the votes of minority groups because it hasn’t done a good job of reaching out to them. That’s true, even by the standards of the party’s past performance. The GOP’s outreach efforts to Asian-Americans, for example, were much more extensive and successful during…
In ‘Rule and Ruin’, Geoff Kabaservice, explores the history of the Republican Party, shining light on what some consider now an endangered species: the Republican ‘moderate’. Geoff is an invaluable resource in our understanding of the inner-workings of party politics and the strange calculus that leads a party to appeal to one group at the neglect or even offense of another. Geoff and I have spoken on several occasions about the disconnect between African Americans and the Republican Party, often with an eye on the past. However, in this discussion or ‘diablog’ as I’ll call it we will turn our eye to the future. Geoff begins our discussion. I hope you enjoy. [hr] Dear Shawn, How quickly we forget. I was being interviewed last week and completely blanked on the name of the person associated with the 9-9-9 tax plan. It was my own personal Rick Perry “oops” moment. Once…