The GOP rebranding
continues to have issues.
A county Republican Party chairman in central Illinois called a black female congressional candidate the “love child” of the Democratic party; a “street walker” whose “pimps” are party leaders; and suggested that after the election, she will be “working for some law firm that needs to meet their quota for minority hires.”
And it's a Republican candidate he's talking about.
In specific, he was talking about former Miss America and Harvard-educated lawyer Erika Harold, who is a Republican but
not, apparently, a true enough Republican to challenge current Rep. Rodney Davis. Montgomery County Chair Jim Allen fired off an email in response to a mere website column in support of Harold:
“Rodney Davis will win and the love child of the D.N.C. will be back in S---cago [Expletive deleted] by May of 2014 working for some law firm that needs to meet their quota for minority hires,” Allen wrote in the email. “ . . . Miss queen is being used like a street walker and her pimps are the DEMOCRAT PARTY and RINO REPUBLICANS.”
Yowza. And this, my Republican friends, is why many people consider the Republican Party to be a barrel of the thickest racist, sexist sludge that can be dredged from the countryside. The only proper party response to this is "oh, you are so damn fired," but the only way the Republican Party will ever gain the wider support of any group of Americans that are not lily-white males is to go for some modest stretch of time without these things happening. There's no damn way that this was the first racist or sexist utterance this guy ever said; you don't fire off an email like that unless you've said things like that before, and unless it's something that, in at least some contexts, you have found it acceptable to say. This County chair clearly runs in a crowd that says, well, things like that.
Allen resigned earlier today. That doesn't, however, answer the larger question of why people like this keep getting into positions of party power in the first place. Every group of people is bound to have some racist crackpots in it, that's just a sad corollary of often-depressing human nature. What the Republican Party needs to do is stop putting them in charge of things. That requires action not just by the higher-ups of the party but by the base itself, and there's nothing in the current incarnations of the base that suggests they're tired of their racist crackpots. This stuff is endemic.