A great piece at The Daily Beast by Michael Tomasky (with thanks for the shout-out to LGF): GOP Attracting Minorities?

Let’s start with African-Americans. Republicans, whatever they might say publicly, won’t actually try to win more black votes. Why? Because the positions the party would have to embrace to win black votes are abhorrent to the GOP base. Which, you may have noticed, is kind of racist. Now, people like me—pundits of the respectable class—aren’t supposed to talk that way. We’re supposed to cooperate in the fiction that the Republican Party is the party of Lincoln and underneath it all yearns to reawaken the great Jack Kemp tradition.

All that is a bunch of rot, I’m afraid, and the rank and file’s racism is just a plain fact. Ever read some of those Fox News website comment threads on race stories, like this rather fascinating thread when Whitney Houston died, or certain Obama articles? It’s like reading Bull Connor’s diary. No, this doesn’t mean every conservative is a racist. But it does mean that if you find yourself at a table with five conservatives and try to break the ice with a watermelon joke, you’re very likely to get somewhere between two and three laughs.

A party with that kind of base is not going to be changing positions on affirmative action anytime in the next, oh, millennium. No—I really can’t predict a meeting of the minds here in any remotely foreseeable future. Remember, the conservative, Republican-appointed Supreme Court is (presumably) about to undo affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. It’ll be another decade fighting to win those back at least.