Rethug Rebranding, Southern Strategy Edition

Jelani Cobb has an article in the New York Times looking at Rethuglican / New Confederate Party attempts to peel off African American votes from the Dems.  Here's his conclusion:

"An honest appeal to African-Americans would start with the admission that Republicans didn’t lose the black vote but forfeited it. The Republican Party now faces the same dilemma as the mid-20th-century Democratic Party: whether its interest in black voters might ever outweigh its investment in the reactionary politics of race."

The "Southern Strategy" pursued by Nixon and his GOP successors starting in the 1970s effectively ceded the black vote in exchange for Southern white /"Dixiecrat" votes.  Recall that in 1980, St. Ronnie of Hollywood opened his campaign for the White House in Philadelphia, Mississippi, not far from where 3 young civil rights workers were killed by the KKK, and spoke approvingly of "states' rights" -- code for segregation in the South.  Nearly 35 years later, his party has grown, if anything, more exclusionary in its policies that ignore minorities and women and bitterly hostile to the first black President.  It looks like they're sticking with "the reactionary politics of race."