GOP elects first black party chief. Coincidence or calculated ploy?

Puhlease!! When they passed up a perfectly good conservative from SC? I don’t think it’s as calculated that he’s black, but that he’s from Maryland (not the South (SE or SW)).

I hate to be cynical as well, but part of me does think it is calculated and they’re just trying to say “hey, we know how to live in the 21st century, too!!”

The less cynical part of me says that they are actually trying to realize that the part has to change. It’s just too bad they didn’t figure that out 9 years ago.

I’m not sure why it matters? If it was a calculated ploy why does that bother you?

@critter1982 We wouldn’t want to think a political party might do something political would we? ~

I would think that every action taken by any political party is calculated. As cynical as that might be.

@critter1982 I can’t say it would bother me at all, really. More amusing than anything else.

I think it’s some of both. Minorities have been growing in prominence in the Republican Party, and the choice of a black Chairman “looks good.” Hooray for progress.

Bush appointed two black Secretaries of State, the first black Secretary of Education, and the first latino Attorney General. Michael Steele isn’t the first black Republican.

The republican party is in shambles right now. They need to be making calculated political moves.

Coincidence. He was in line to take over for Mehlman for a while, and then for Duncan. Maybe it gave him a bit of a boost…but I don’t think it was entirely calculated.

It took them six votes to get him elected to the position, so it certainty wasn’t an accident. I liked Mike Duncan’s comments, though I’m not sure how related to this particular question they are, ”Obviously the winds of change are blowing.”

My initial reaction was completely cynical. I am hopeful that I am wrong.

I heard he is pretty sharp. And if there’s anything Republicans need, it’s a sharp politician, who knows what it’s really like. Who knows, they may be being smart enough to do themselves some good this time.

My thought was with the number of people who have to vod the number of votes teh person has to get (and the number of voting rounds they had to have), it indicated the big rift in the party. For many years, Republicans had a big enough tent to get the true fiscal conservatives, the religious/social conservatives, the libertarian small government folks, the agresssive military posturing conservatives, and people who had some combination of those philosophies, along with the fools and morons who can be swayed by fear and racism. But the fact that our society has become far more liberal on social issues of the last decade or two, contrasted against the train wreck that was Sarah Palin basically showed intelligent conservatives who weren’t betrothed to the evangelical Christian crowd just how antiquated that rhetoric seems in this day and age. At the same time, the true fiscal conservatives who are intelligent also saw what the forces of the small government, never raise taxes, never spend on domestic issues (basically libertarians) had wrought on our economy, and they began to rethink trickle down economics. They also saw what the aggressive military posturing folks had done to our foreign standing in the world and the debacle that is Iraq. And they saw divisive nature of the politics of fear and personal destruction when McCain’s campaign was contrasted against Obama’s.

And essentially, the party which used to make up about half the voting public was suddenly 5 groups of about 10 percent of the voting public with a LOT less spill over than in years past So you had one guy running for party chair who was actually distributing CDs with “Barack the Magic Negro” on them for Christmas, and various other candidates representing some combination of Republicanism which 4 to 8 years ago might have seemed to go hand in hand, but which now seem to have little to do with each other.

What Republicans needed to do was to find someone who held enough of each of the main philosophies so as not ot alienate any of the folks already in the Republican tent, but also someone who would perhaps bring new members to the party. Now this guy does seem intelligent, but he is very much conservative. He is in favor of stem cell research that DOES NOT destroy embryos…this is no different than the Bush policy, and would sit wall with the evangelicals. He says he wants to get out of Iraq when THEY want us out, but does not favor a timetable, that fits with the militaristic branch of the Republicans. He’s a fiscal conservative, against too much governmental spending, so he appeals to the true fiscal conservatives AND the libertarians. But he also brings an element of social progress with him….now in some ways this will alienate the racist redneck wing of the party, but when you get right down to it, are they going to be intelligent enough to know, much less care who the RNC chair is? I say as long as they don’t nominate a black Presidential candidate, this won’t lsoe them any of their ignoratnt racist members. But it might bring some socially progressive fiscal conservatives back to the party.

So, no, I don’t see it as a calculated move, I see it as a natural outcropping of how the election process works. There simply weren’t enough people to vote in someone who held one of the splinter points of view…in other words, a radical anti-abortion person ideogogue who had little concern for any other policies was not goin to cut it…nowr was someone whose main focus was to expand American imperialism through aggressive foreign policy. Now, what logically HAD to happen was that the candidate with the biggest bona fides for one area of Republican thought was going to get most of the about 20% who were of that mindset on the first ballot…in other words, the person who held all of those positions but was not radical about any one of them was maybe going to apeal to the moderates no matter what, and was going to stay in the race, but one by one the radicals were going to be sent packing, and they were goin to end up with someone like this…the fact that he’s black is just a bonus for them. Not premeditated…if it were, he would have won on the first ballot.