TMR Got Into Race Because That's Where We Should Be

The Week has seen the sweep of history:

For the good of their party and for the good of the republic, Republicans must genuinely reach out to and successfully attract black voters.

The GOP is not off to a good start. In South Carolina, where blacks make up 28 percent of voters, so few blacks voted in the 2012 GOP primary that it was statistically impossible to find among them a preference for any of the party’s candidates.

Rand Paul and other Republicans have made awkward attempts at appealing to African-Americans — so awkward it sometimes seems their intended audience is not the people sitting in front of them. Speeches by white Republicans at historically black schools and in Detroit have had the whiff of slightly smarmy non sequiturs. "Dontcha know? Republicans were abolitionists 150 years ago."

There are some obvious alterations the GOP and the conservative movement must make to attract black voters. Any project that looks like anti-black voter suppression should be first on the list to go. The Randian rhetoric of "takers" must go too. It not only alienates parts of the existing GOP base, but is pungent with contempt for those, like African-Americans, who view themselves as unfairly held outside and below the sphere of social concern.

Perhaps most difficult of all, conservatives need to bring their well-paid yappers to heel, lest they find another case like Trayvon Martin's death and use it to enflame a totally spurious debate about "the real racists." Such arguments make conservatives look like self-involved idiots and aggrieved monsters.

Or so we've been told,...