A commenter took issue with yesterday's post.
Were one to run for US Congress in the DFL, one would interact daily with racially integrated, diverse groups of people. Even in CD3. You'd become aware that your success as a candidate is critically linked to your ability to establish rapport with historically-excluded minority participants.
If you're seeking the Republican nod for US Congress in CD3, you're going to encounter far fewer minority participants--and those you do encounter are going to be vastly less representative, ideologically, of their communities. Your outreach to minority communities will simply not make or break your candidacy. (Within the Republican CD3 culture, releasing a video like this will not seem bizarre.)
On the campaign trail last year, I twice ran into the mustachioed Republican kingmaker pictured above. At the Medina event one year ago (within earshot of Erik Paulsen) he repeatedly referred to then-Senator Barack Obama as Yo Mama--and repeated the clever witticism for anyone caring to chat. The anecdote illustrates a major cultural distinction between largely integrated DFL political meetings and largely non-integrated Republican ones.
A Republican Party seriously committed to winning over minority voters would require a top-to-bottom rethink. Such a transformation would require a cultural revolution within the GOP. But I had somewhat hoped such a revolution might be put on the table, in response to the recent election. And I'm not thinking of a more-enthusiastically-reactionary Republican Party, but one that somehow figures out how to welcome the minority population as they are. Perhaps I'm just indulging in an imaginative exercise, momentarily conjuring a no-longer anti-irony Republican Party...a no-longer stupider-than-thou GOP.
