When Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman apologized to the NAACP last year for the GOP's four decade use of racial divisions to win elections, black people were understandably skeptical.

It's not that we're too stuck up to appreciate apologies. Lord knows we'd jump for joy over an apology for slavery, even if it meant we'd have to turn around and apologize to white people for VH-1's "The Flavor of Love."

What made Mehlman's apology suspect was its counter-intuitive logic. Why was the RNC chairman in Milwaukee apologizing to the NAACP's national convention for his party's successful use of racial wedge issues?

After all, by appealing to the worst instincts of white people -- especially in the south -- Republicans had kicked Democratic butt in most elections for nearly 40 years.

Still, we'll never forget Mehlman's apology at the time: "By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out. Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization."

It was a stunning case of political candor, all the more remarkable for its timing. It was July 2005. Hurricane Katrina was a little more than a month in the future. There were no off-year elections to worry about, either.

Though growing concerns about the war had eroded his popularity, President Bush still had the power to dictate the national agenda.

That's why Ken Mehlman's mea culpa drove many of the party faithful nuts. It didn't make sense for a high-ranking Republican to apologize to black people for admitting that the GOP had engaged in blatantly racist electioneering.

Rush Limbaugh, the oxycontin-gobbling talk-radio demagogue, practically called the RNC chairman a "Negro lover" when he announced he was attending what the talk show host called the National Association for the Advancement of Liberal Colored People convention in Milwaukee:

"Know what he's going to do? He's going to go down there and basically apologize for what has come to be known as the Southern Strategy, popularized in the Nixon administration.

"[Mehlman's] going to go down there and apologize for it."

Who else but Rush could cavalierly insult blacks while dismissing their electoral significance with such brutal economy?

For all of his racist bluster, Limbaugh knows which side of the thin white bread of ultra-conservatism his career is buttered on.

Rush understands that former North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms was down 18 to 20 points in his 1984 reelection battle against former Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt before he scared his white constituents with the three-headed hydra of labor unions, gay activists and "black voter registration drives" loose in the south. Helms beat Hunt by four points.

Six years later in another tight Senate race, Helms beat popular former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt, a black man with an infamous TV spot that made even veteran klansmen blush: "You needed that job and you were the best qualified," a voice over muttered as a pair of white hands balled up a rejection letter. "But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota."

Just for that ad, Helms knows that when he dies, he'll be intercepted at the pearly gates by a devil wearing an afro and a Willie Horton mask.

We won't even speculate about what will happen to Karl Rove for starting the whisper campaign in the 2000 South Carolina primary that hinted that Sen. John McCain had a "black child" out of wedlock. That dirty trick won Bush the presidential nomination.

Fast forward to this week. Mehlman's apologies to the NAACP aside, the Republicans are up to their old tricks in the Tennessee senate race between Democratic Representative Harold Ford Jr., and Republican Bob Corker.

In a widely vilified TV spot that was pulled Wednesday after running a week, the specter of interracial sex with a white woman was raised against Ford, a black man, as if he were a mulatto carpetbagger from "Birth of a Nation."

It was so disgusting that even Corker disavowed it once he realized it caused a backlash against his campaign and sympathy for Ford.

Mehlman insists the ad wasn't meant to send insecure white men lunging toward ballot boxes to protect "their" women. It was about "issues."

When the GOP's most progressive voice for racial reconciliation can't see an obvious appeal to racial resentment, it makes you wonder what his less enlightened colleagues will be thinking once things get truly desperate.  

Tony Norman can be reached at: tnorman@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1631

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