Is the Ford model of Republicanism extinct?

Is the Ford model of Republicanism extinct?
By CHUCK RAASCH, Gannett News ServiceJanuary 04. 2007 2:18PM

WASHINGTON - It was telling that, in his eulogy of Gerald Ford, President Bush highlighted the late president's vote for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a measure of Ford's mettle and soul.

Many current Americans may not know this, but that seminal act - which made racial discrimination in public places and the workplace illegal - would not have been possible without the overwhelming support of northern Republicans such as Ford. But such Republicans are a dwindling breed, testament to the shifting demographics of American politics and to how the late President Ford ran contrary to the Republican Party's image and ideology in recent years.

Unlike many GOP leaders today, Ford, was personally opposed to abortion but against a constitutional ban, preferring to leave it up to states. He was for equal rights for gays, "period," he told Detroit News columnist Deb Price in 2001. Ford led a futile fight for the Equal Rights Amendment, a gender-equality amendment loathed by conservatives. And he favored the University of Michigan's affirmative action enrollment policies, which Bush has fought, in part because of another episode that Bush referred to in his eulogy.

The episode came in Ford's senior year at the University of Michigan when Georgia Tech refused to play Ford's Wolverine football team, where he was an All-American, if a black teammate named Willis Ward played. Ward voluntarily did not play, and the game went on, but Ford later would write how Ward's "sacrifice led me to question how educational administrators could capitulate to raw prejudice."

Ford later would call the University of Michigan's plan to consider race as one factor of admission an "eminently reasonable approach." In his eulogy at the National Cathedral, Bush said the Ward episode showed Ford's "character and leadership." But Bush came to a different conclusion on Michigan's affirmative action plan, labeling it a "fundamentally flawed" attempt to perpetuate a "quota system" that, itself, was prejudiced.

That both men could use the Willis Ward story to address the GOP commitment to equal rights, but from very different directions, speaks to the complex and fundamental shift on racial politics within the Republican Party over the last 40 years.

There was a time when GOP presidential candidates got significant percentages of the black vote. And the civil rights legislation that rolled through Congress in the mid-1960s, when Ford was a rising GOP leader in the House, could not have passed without the Republicans. Southern Democrats in the House opposed the measure 87-7 and in the Senate, 20-1. All 10 Southern Republicans in the House voted against it. But 138 House Republicans from the North, Midwest and West joined 145 Democrats from those regions to pass the measure. In the Senate, 21 of the 27 votes against the measure came from Democrats.

Today, the Republicans have 26 more members of the House than they did in 1964, but the center of gravity has shifted overwhelmingly away from the Northern base of Ford's time. Now, 77 of the 202 Republicans in the House are from 11 Southern states. In 1964, only 10 of 176 Republicans in the House were Southerners.

Fast forward, through Richard Nixon's appeal to some voters along subtle and not-so-subtle racial lines; through the Reagan years, when many conservative Democrats switched parties and the GOP became firmly entrenched in the anti-affirmative action position. Since the 1960s, Republicans have struggled to appeal to black voters. Outgoing Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman gave a speech apologizing for the party of Lincoln's inability to bring blacks into its big tent.

If they'd have kept the Ford model from Michigan, perhaps this long struggle might not have been so difficult.

Contact GNS Political Writer Chuck Raasch at craasch@gns.gannett.com.

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