On a gray Thursday afternoon last week, in a glass room on the 49th floor of the Georgia-Pacific Building in downtown Atlanta, Reince Priebus sat down with two dozen African-Americans to discuss the pale nature of his Republican Party. And theirs.
Republicans have held these kinds of meetings before. This one — part of the Republican National Committee chairman’s postmortem on the 2012 presidential election — was different in that it involved no state party bigwigs, save for RNC member Randy Evans. The ruling elite at the Capitol had been given no warning that Priebus was coming. They found out just before he arrived.
The invitation list was drawn up by Ashley Bell, 32, a Gainesville lawyer and former Hall County commissioner who had switched to the Republican Party — amid much celebration — in 2010. He was the first African-American elected official in Georgia to do so.
Bell lost his 2012 GOP bid for re-election by 16 percentage points. Not exactly a result to encourage a second African-American elected official to don a Republican cape.
We do not know exactly what was said behind the glass walls on Thursday — reporters were ushered quickly past, into the office of Sam Gude, the chief officer and namesake of a high-powered construction management company.
Minutes later, Priebus and Bell arrived to offer an account of the meeting. Clearly, Kasim Reed was an invisible presence. The Atlanta mayor had recently declared that, because of this state’s changing demographics and the lack of GOP appeal among black voters, “Georgia is on an irreversible path to a Democratic majority.”
Changing that inevitability in Georgia and elsewhere, Priebus admitted, will require the Republican Party to reboot its relationship with African-Americans. Which the RNC chairman said he intends to do, even though the effort is likely to take years.
“We’re not interested in window-dressing. We’re not interested in hiring a couple of people and getting a couple of good stories,” Priebus said. “We want to have a program that could amount to a nationwide effort, with community leaders, both hired and volunteer, everywhere across America.”
He offered a sliver of news. “I think voter registration standards have to be met,” Priebus said.
I asked whether the topic of voter ID laws, passed by states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania, had come up during the afternoon session.
“We didn’t get into that at all,” Priebus said. Which was odd, given that roughly 60 percent of African-Americans participating in a 2012 Washington Post poll declared that voter ID laws — pushed primarily by GOP forces — were more about suppressing their votes than making them more secure.
But in the same breath, at least in a roundabout way, the RNC chairman indicated the topic had been a mainstay of the conversation. But different words were used. “We did talk about registration,” Priebus repeated. “If you don’t show up and make the sale, it’s easy for the caricature to become true.”
Translation: When a party restricts its voter registration efforts to gun shows and Tim McGraw concerts, that in itself is a declaration that a specific kind of voter is being sought.
“We have to make sure Republicans are in the black community registering people to vote. That’s one way to fight this fraudulent allegation of voter suppression,” Bell said. “It begins and ends with dignity. People want to be treated with respect. They want candidates to come in and respect their vote. They want to see you at the churches. They want to see you at the NAACP meeting.”
Another translation: If one registers enough black voters, and comes to understand their concerns and their predilections, perhaps one would be less quick to diagnose African-American success at the polls as the result of cheating.
Bell may well be one of the most unusual political activists in the nation — one of the very few African-Americans who, at least in the past 30 years, have served as a delegate to the national conventions of both major parties.
The GOP gathering in Tampa last year, and its awkward attempts at outreach to minorities, was an eye-opener, Bell said. “That was a wake-up call for me. We have a lot of work to do.”
The tone of some Republicans was a topic at the Georgia-Pacific meeting. “It’s not as a whole, but you have comments taken out of context that are used against us by Democrats,” Bell said. “There was a sense that we need to make sure that our candidates know how to speak and market themselves to all groups of folks.”
My words, not Bell’s — but it is just possible that when you speak of a “food stamp president,” black people interpret the phrase in a way that white people don’t.
Since the days of Gov. Jimmy Carter, Democrats in Georgia have been a party built on a racial coalition. Republicans must persuade themselves to do the same. Quickly, and down to the county level.
“Every candidate in this state is going to have to be a crossover candidate. Whether you’re black, white or Latino, you’re going to have to get folks who don’t look like you, to vote for you,” Bell said. “As soon as every candidate on the Republican side understands that, we’ll do better.”
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