President Bush is scheduled this Saturday to make his second trip in seven weeks to Mississippi. New York City's former mayor Rudolph Giuliani is scheduled to come to the state this week. The former Senate majority leader, Bob Dole; Senator Elizabeth Dole; the former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer; Florida's Governor Jeb Bush; Education Secretary Rod Paige; and former Oklahoma congressman J.C. Watts have all been there.

[Republican candidate for governor Haley] Barbour has blatantly appealed to the most racist elements in Mississippi by defiantly refusing to ask the Council of Conservative Citizens to remove his photograph from its website home page. The photo shows Barbour at a CCC-sponsored barbecue with five other men, including CCC field director Bill Lord.

... When he ran for the Senate in 1982, a New York Times report said:

"The racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be `coons' at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks."

Indeed, Bush is touring there today, and his remarks were interesting:

"I'm proud to stand with this man ... He's proud of this state, and that's the kind of governor you need — somebody who relates to people from all walks of life."

This frankly seems like a coded reference to Barbour's wink-and-nudge refusal to take have his picture removed from the CofCC's Web site.

...

"Identity politics," though it was not called that then, was an invention of 19th-century white supremacists who, along with their acolytes, continued to employ such divisions with abandon through most of the first half of the last century. Their heirs continue to do so, but in less nakedly racial terms.

Now we have attacks on affirmative action, the "welfare state," hate-crimes legislation, and various aspects of civil-rights law, all under the umbrella of combating "identity politics." And consistently, there has been one primary source for this resurgence of white supremacy camouflaged as "normal" politics: the conservative movement generally, and the Republican Party specifically.

Black leaders often criticize the Democratic Party for its abysmal lack of leadership at times like these, pointing to such failures as indicative of the party's tendency to take black voters for granted. Certainly, there's little doubt that Democratic silence on these issues not only empowers the bigots, it also saps the energy from the party's base.

Democrats really need to ask themselves whether they want to be courting the votes of people inspired by the Confederate flag, or the same minorities for whom that flag is a symbol of oppression and intimidation. And if the latter, it is well past time for them to speak up about what is happening in Mississippi.