It’s September 27, the day of Tavis Smiley’s All-American Presidential Forum for Republicans, at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Do you know where your GOP frontrunners are?

Let’s see, what are some better things to do than talk to African-American voters?

Mitt Romney will be eating his way across California, with a fundraising lunch in Sacramento and a dinner in San Diego (and perhaps a nightcap in Tijuana?). Let’s hope he doesn’t ruin everything by filling up on pancakes during his very important visit to “the IHOP on Advantage Lane” this morning.

Rudy Giuliani will also be living it up in the Golden State, doing the cafe scene in Santa Barbara, and hitting the midway at the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds in Lancaster. He’ll also be making a stop in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, but he might not have time to see the pier, as he’ll be busy getting endorsed by ex-California governor Pete Wilson. Yes, that’s the same Pete Wilson who ran the state GOP into the ground by gambling everything on the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 back in 1994. So Rudy will be skipping Smiley’s debate to spend the day with an icon of the Republican Party’s suicide-by-racism. And they say irony is dead.

John McCain will be here in New York, speaking to a friendly crowd at the conservative Hudson Institute (between Hudson, the Manhattan Institute, and the National Review, I think conservative house intellectuals make up about half the Republican population in NYC). He’ll also use the opportunity to grandstand some more about Columbia and Ahmadinejad. This evening it appears he’ll be fundraising somewhere in town. His campaign has an event scheduled for the New York Athletic Club at 6:00 pm, but it’s unclear whether he himself will be there. To be fair, he’s a little old for the gym these days.

Speaking of old, Fred Thompson will be back in his home state today, campaigning across middle Tennessee. Breakfast with Fred in Clarksville: $250 a plate. Lunch in Murfreesboro and dinner in Franklin: $500 each. Chance to reach out to African-American voters: priceless. Or, if you’re Thompson, apparently worthless.

All the frontrunners cited “scheduling conflicts” when they turned down Smiley’s invitation. So, judging by the schedules above, can we get a sense of what the Republican candidates value more than talking to minority voters? As the New York Times reports, even some on the right are unimpressed:

The decision to skip the forum tonight was criticized in an editorial in The Washington Times, a conservative-leaning newspaper, that said, “It is striking that the Republican front-runners believe that some run-of-the mill fund-raiser is more important than building up their relationships with black and Hispanic voters, groups who flock to the Democratic Party in droves.”

The National Review’s Jim Geraghty takes on the unenviable task of trying to defend the frontrunners’ decisions. He suggests that Republicans are tired of debates in general and of Democratic-leaning moderators specifically — though he concedes that Smiley is a good host who “would attempt to be fair” to the GOP candidates. And he argues that the Republicans need to spend these last few days of the quarter fundraising — though, again, he admits that the Democrats managed to find time to have a debate yesterday. And anyway, could the Republicans not find anywhere to raise money within proximity of Baltimore today?

Despite Geraghty’s excuses, the obvious conclusion is that the candidates’ cold shoulder to Smiley is part of a clear pattern of Republican contempt for non-white Americans. Bob Herbert was right: this is “the ugly side of the GOP” (well, it’s one of the ugly sides, but perhaps the ugliest):

They won’t be there. They can’t be bothered debating issues that might be of interest to black Americans. After all, they’re Republicans.

This is the party of the Southern strategy — the party that ran, like panting dogs, after the votes of segregationist whites who were repelled by the very idea of giving equal treatment to blacks. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. (Willie Horton) Bush, George W. (Compassionate Conservative) Bush — they all ran with that lousy pack.

Herbert quotes Lee Atwater — the scumbag strategist Karl Rove has always tried to be — explaining it:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’ ” said Atwater. “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.”

Perhaps the current Republican field isn’t honest enough to go around saying “nigger, nigger, nigger.” But maybe we should count our blessings: apparently they’re honest enough not to pretend that they care about minority voters.

Posted by Paul Curtis
Thursday, September 27, 2007 at 8:42 am

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