Blogs For Victory

Black Americans. Republicans. South Carolina – and a sign that we GOPers will no longer just write off the votes of oru fellow Americans who are black…we have the better program, and it is high time we helped them off the liberal plantation

Glenn McCall won a milestone intraparty election here during today’s state GOP convention to become South Carolina’s first black Republican National Committee member.

“It’s time for the Republican Party to get out of the foxhole. We need to go on the offense,” McCall said. “We need to come out and build bridges to new people. As a party, demographically, we’re hurting if we don’t.”

McCall, a retired Air Force officer who works for Bank of America in Charlotte and lives in Rock Hill, defeated interim RNC member Drew McKissick, a Columbia public affairs consultant with ties to the party’s Christian conservative wing. McCall is the York County GOP chairman, the state party’s only black county chairman.

Katon Dawson, the state Republican Party chairman, said McCall’s election was a “historic” one for South Carolina Republicans who have enjoyed only modest success in wooing blacks from the Democratic Party which usually gets 95 percent of their votes.

“There has been no leader in our party during my time as chairman who has been more passionate or authentic than Glenn McCall in living out the conservative ideals we hold dear,” Dawson said. “I couldn’t be prouder of his historic election as Republican National Committeeman from South Carolina. I look forward to serving with him.”

When the voting, alphabetically by counties, reached York County, McKissick made a motion that McCall be elected by acclamation and the voice vote followed.

Greenville Chairman Samuel Harms, who seconded McCall’s nomination, said, “It wasn’t even close” when York’s turn came.

In contrast to past outreach efforts that largely flopped, this year, five black Republicans are running in legislative primaries and two others are unopposed for legislative nominations, but face Democratic opposition in the general election.

Democrats have tagged us for years for an alleged “southern strategy” which claims we GOPers were just appealing to racist white Southerners…the reality, of course, is that white Southerners just don’t like pinkos, such as most Democratic leaders are. But we GOPers have failed miserably in our attempts to bring black voters back into the GOP (for 100 years, to be black meant to be Republican, after all), now we are starting to change that. Don’t expect it to happen over night – the left has very effective propaganda on this and they have successfully painted us as a party of racists…but as more and more black Americans rise to prominent positions in the GOP (and as black voters more and more understand they are taken for granted by the Democrats), we’ll have our opportunity to pitch the GOP message..and do a real “southern strategy”, where we take all the votes, black and white.