So reads the excellent headline on Stanley Crouch's excellent column in today's Daily News.

My favorite sentences, here pulled out separately from the whole:

What stands before the Republican Party, however, is something much deeper than the Day-Glo red in Brother Lott's neck.

We have to remember that white Southerners were Democrats because the party of Lincoln had won the Civil War (which Lott has referred to as "the war of Northern aggression").

After Johnson's burst of civil rights legislation, the old-time religion of racism lost its power in Democratic Party circles, and reluctant ex-segregationists began to join up with the Republicans, who made them feel at home.

If the Republicans are not what white racists think they are, they need to raise their elephant bottoms up off the dime and get to work.

Long before his name was even mentioned as a presidential candidate, Bush told me in Texas that if the Republican Party did not expand itself beyond its white base, it would die. Though I doubt it, let us hope he was right.