Skin Deep: When I see a Frank Rich column I KNOW it's got to be good. He never disappoints me and this is no exception. Link below to his NYT article "Fourth of July 1776, 1964, 2010."

The US is a mixed bag. It's one half good and the other half .... well let's say LESS sometimes MUCH LESS than perfect. I am glad Niki Haley, the Indian-American former Sikh overcame the stupid and, it seems, salaciously false attacks on her character to win the S. Carolina gubernatorial primary BUT I do not like her politics. Lipstick on a conservative is still a conservative and the Republican party has become since Nixon ushered in his "southern strategy" and the so called "moral majority" the party which has a few tokens of color to send its message heretofore carried by the white Dixicrat haters.

The message, I believe, is still the same they just dress it up in a skirt, and give her skin a bit of a hue but not much changes. It is still the party of white power using code words like "activist" to mean they are against government giving the little guy, especially if he is black or Hispanic, a helping hand to ensure equality or "smaller government" to mean smaller just where the minority poor are concerned. Big corporate business, though, takes a BIG government helping hand no problem there. Exclusionary race, big corporate money and religious extremism are still the base of the Republican party and most of the old south. All one has to do is look beneath the surface to see the same old politics of exclusion and white Protestant male power!

The old south with its "conservative" politics of race and gender does NOT die an easy death. It's still in good condition and will live to see, I'm afraid, many more days. For the Democratic party it is obvious it is an eternal and vigilant struggle against the forces that dress a candidate up so they look good but are about policies which keep the monied power of mostly white men in the hands of a very few. In many parts of the nation the pretty picture is only skin deep!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04rich.html?hp