WP - More GOP "Outreach" To Black Voters - Truly Surreal And Howlingly Funny

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The event was called “A Republican Salute to Black Music Month” and, according to organizer Raynard Jackson, a black Republican consultant, was to include R&B legend Sam Moore (“Soul Man”), Marlon Jackson of the Jackson 5 and others. The Republican chairman, a Greek-German Wisconsinite, sharing a stage with legends of soul and funk? Pure gold! But somebody missed his cue. Moore, Marlon Jackson and the others showed up. But among the “confirmed participants,” Priebus was the sole man missing. And there was nobody from the RNC to take his place.

“Reince Priebus was scheduled to be here,” Raynard Jackson explained to guests at the posh University Club. The host said Priebus sent regrets because he’d had surgery on Friday and was having difficulty talking. “He’s sore as heck,” Jackson explained. Jackson told me Priebus had confirmed his attendance Friday but wasn’t feeling as well as he’d hoped on Monday — and by then it was too late for the RNC to find a stand-in.

But an RNC official told me that Priebus’s surgery Friday had been scheduled, elective and outpatient and that the chairman was doing fine. The official said Priebus had never formally committed to attend the black-music event. Whatever the cause of the chairman’s absence, it would be unfair to say there was widespread disappointment, because attendance itself was not widespread. The organizers had warned of the “limited number of seats available to the general public,” but half of the 50-odd place settings in the room were unused. Rather than a Republican salute to black music, this was a limp handshake.

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Here’s one problem: The panelists saw fit to praise the contributions of the late Lee Atwater, the Republican operative who made Willie Horton a household name in the racially tinged 1988 campaign. “Lee was defined as a racist, and I almost bought into it,” Moore said. “And the man turned out to be a wonderful person. Now does that mean that he wasn’t [racist]? I have no idea and I don’t care, because he didn’t treat me any different from how he would have treated any white person.” Moore’s wife, Joyce, also on the panel, added her view: “I believe that if Lee hadn’t gotten a brain tumor and died, things would have been very, very different very much sooner with the Republican Party” and minorities.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/another-tortured-effort-by-the-gop-to-help-itself-with-minorities/2015/06/01/2724263e-08ac-11e5-9e39-0db921c47b93_story.html