So maybe Republicans ARE white too

Dean got criticized for saying they were the party of white Christians. Don't know why. They consider themselves the "GOP - God's Own Party. (see yesterday's graphic). And now this from a post on AmericaBlog today - from a book review of The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America.

[Author John Sperling] notes that the 99 percent of all Republican legislators across the country and in Congress are white. The national Republican Party, whose base is in the South, the Plains and the Mountain states, looks to white men as its power base and source of leadership. Even when Republican states have significant minority populations, the elected Republican representatives rarely are drawn from those communities.

Of 3,643 Republicans serving in the state legislatures, only 44 are minorities, or 1.2 percent. In the Congress, with 274 of the 535 elected senators and representatives Republican, only five are minorities - three Cuban Americans from Florida, a Mexican American from Texas and a Native American senator originally elected as a Democrat. [NOTE FROM JOHN: That means the GOP has elected ZERO blacks to Congress.]

'President Bush's home state leads the way. Texas, with a minority population of 47 percent, has 106 Republicans in the state legislature, but there are 0 blacks and 0 Hispanics among them,' Sperling writes. 'No major corporation doing business with the government could be so white without being subject to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) action!'