While I like to think that I pay attention to so-called "wedge issues," it appears that I missed one. According to WaPo's Harold Meyerson, John McCain is trying to make "America" itself a wedge issue, by means of identity politics:

McCain's first post-primary ad proclaimed him "the American president Americans have been waiting for." Not the "strong" or "experienced" president, though those are contrasts he could seek to draw with Obama. The "American" president -- because that's the only contrast through which McCain has even a chance of prevailing.

Now, I mean to take nothing away from McCain's Americanness by noting that it's Obama's story that represents a triumph of specifically American identity over racial and religious identity. It was the lure of America, the shining city on a hill, that brought his black Kenyan father here, where he met Obama's white Kansan mother. It is because America is uniquely the land of immigrants and has moved beyond a racial caste system that Obama exists, has thrived and stands a good chance of being our next president.

That's not the America, though, that the Republicans refer to in proclaiming their own Americanness. For them, "American" is a term to be used as a wedge issue, a way to distinguish their more racially and religiously homogeneous party from the historically more polyglot Democrats. Such separation has a long pedigree....

I hate to interrupt nostalgic waxing over the "historically more polyglot Democrats," but I must object to the implications of word "historically." Historically, the Democratic Party was home to the Ku Klux Klan, while the Republican Party was home to black voters in the South. In 2000, Condoleezza Rice spoke from experience:

The first Republican that I knew was my father John Rice. And he is still the Republican that I admire most. My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.

Fugitive slave laws? In 1850, Democrats passed the Fugitive Slave Law. If merely accused of being a slave, even if the person enjoyed freedom all of his or her life (as approximately 11 percent of blacks did just before the Civil War), the person lost the right to representation by an attorney, the right to trial by jury, and the right to habeas corpus.

Emancipation? Republican President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War. In 1865, the 13th Amendment emancipating the slaves was passed with 100 percent of Republicans (88 of 88 in the House, 30 of 30 in the Senate) voting for it. Only 23 percent of Democrats (16 of 66 in the House, 3 of 8 in the Senate) voted for it.

Civil rights laws? In 1868, the 14th Amendment was passed giving the newly emancipated blacks full civil rights and federal guarantee of those rights, superseding any state laws. Every single voting Republican (128 of 134 -- with 6 not voting -- in the House, and 30 of 32 -- with 2 not voting -- in the Senate) voted for the 14th Amendment. Not a single Democrat (zero of 36 in the House, zero of 6 in the Senate) voted for it.

Right to vote? When Southern states balked at implementing the 14th Amendment, Congress came back and passed the 15th Amendment in 1870, guaranteeing blacks the right to vote. Every single Republican voted for it, with every Democrat voting against it.

Ku Klux Klan? In 1872 congressional investigations, Democrats admitted beginning the Klan as an effort to stop the spread of the Republican Party and to re-establish Democratic control in Southern states. As PBS' "American Experience" notes, "In outright defiance of the Republican-led federal government, Southern Democrats formed organizations that violently intimidated blacks and Republicans who tried to win political power. The most prominent of these, the Ku Klux Klan, was formed in Pulaski, Tenn., in 1865." Blacks, who were all Republican at that time, became the primary targets of violence.

Jim Crow laws? Between 1870 and 1875, the Republican Congress passed many pro-black civil rights laws. But in 1876, Democrats took control of the House, and no further race-based civil rights laws passed until 1957. In 1892, Democrats gained control of the House, the Senate and the White House, and repealed all the Republican-passed civil rights laws. That enabled the Southern Democrats to pass the Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and so on, in their individual states.

Civil rights in the '60s? Only 64 percent of Democrats in Congress voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act (153 for, 91 against in the House; and 46 for, 21 against in the Senate). But 80 percent of Republicans (136 for, 35 against in the House; and 27 for, 6 against in the Senate) voted for the 1964 Act.

Anyone who think the Democratic Party's racist history is limited to the distant historical past need look no further than the life story of the much-maligned (by Democrats) Condoleezza Rice:

Condi, as friends call her, was born November 14, 1954, in what his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would call "probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States." During the Civil Rights struggle it came also to be called "Bombingham," with racist explosives killing not only Rice's friend and three other girls but also shattering the home of black civil rights lawyer Arthur Shores and terrifying the African-American community.

"Rice's father went to police headquarters to demand an investigation," wrote Dale Russakoff in the Washington Post Magazine. "They didn't investigate," Condoleezza Rice has said. "They never investigated."

The police commissioner in Birmingham who would not investigate was Bull Connor, a Democrat who perfectly embodies everything that political party has always stood for. When civil rights protesters arrived, Connor unleashed his dogs and fire hoses on them.

"John Rice," writes Russakoff, "then did what black fathers all over Birmingham were doing - what Alma Powell remembers her own father doing then, when she happened to be home with her babies during her husband's [Colin Powell's] tour in Vietnam: They got out their shotguns and formed nightly patrols, guarding the streets themselves."

One of the many dirty secrets of the Democratic Party is that its passion for gun control began, and continues to be, from a desire to disarm African-Americans and thereby make them powerless and dependent. Russian expert Michael McFaul, writes Russakoff, "remembers [Condoleezza] Rice telling him she opposed gun control and even gun registration because Bull Connor could have used it to disarm her father and others" in 1963.

Condi Rice remembers many lessons of how her mother and father stood up to segregationists, refusing again and again to accept the inferior place into which the white Democratic bosses of Birmingham tried to push blacks. She remembers learning from her grandfather that "You have control, you're proud, you have integrity, nobody can take those things away from you."

For those who enjoy historical quotes from Democrats, Bruce Bartlett, author of "Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Past," shared some gems from his book in the Wall Street Journal:

"Slavery among the whites was an improvement over independence in Africa. The very progress that the blacks have made, when--and only when--brought into contact with the whites, ought to be a sufficient argument in support of white supremacy--it ought to be sufficient to convince even the blacks themselves."

--William Jennings Bryan, 1923
Presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, 1896, 1900 and 1908
Appointed Secretary of State by Woodrow Wilson in 1913
His statue stands in the U.S. Capitol.

"Anyone who has traveled to the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results. . . . The argument works both ways. I know a great many cultivated, highly educated and delightful Japanese. They have all told me that they would feel the same repugnance and objection to have thousands of Americans settle in Japan and intermarry with the Japanese as I would feel in having large numbers of Japanese coming over here and intermarry with the American population. In this question, then, of Japanese exclusion from the United States it is necessary only to advance the true reason--the undesirability of mixing the blood of the two peoples. . . . The Japanese people and the American people are both opposed to intermarriage of the two races--there can be no quarrel there."

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1925
President, 1933-45

However, while I'm at it I can't resist this vintage snippet from a New York Times editorial:

"It has of late become the custom of the men of the South to speak with entire candor of the settled and deliberate policy of suppressing the negro vote. They have been forced to choose between a policy of manifest injustice toward the blacks and the horrors of negro rule. They chose to disfranchise the negroes. That was manifestly the lesser of two evils. . . . The Republican Party committed a great public crime when it gave the right of suffrage to the blacks. . . . So long as the Fifteenth Amendment stands, the menace of the rule of the blacks will impend, and the safeguards against it must be maintained."

--Editorial, "The Political Future of the South," New York Times, May 10, 1900)

And to his pure way of thinking the word "American" has become ugly code language for white Christian racist bigotry. And callused drowners of cities which probably weren't white enough:

....Their party leader, the incumbent president, let a great American city drown. They are the American party, and McCain the American nominee, that hasn't a clue about how to help America in its (prolonged, I fear) moment of need.

What remains for the GOP is a campaign premised more on issues of national identity, aimed largely at that portion of our population for which "American" is synonymous with "white" and "Christian," than any national campaign has been since the American Party (also known as the Know Nothings) based its 1856 campaign chiefly on Protestant bigotry against Irish and German Catholic immigrants. In Appalachian America (the heart of which went to the polls yesterday in West Virginia), as Mark Schmitt notes in the forthcoming issue of the American Prospect (which I edit), a disproportionate number of people write "American" when answering the census question on ethnic origin. For some, "American" is a race -- white -- no less than a nationality, and it's on this equation that Republican prospects depend.

But speaking of "American" as code language for white, I remember Whoopi Goldberg getting in trouble for describing herself as an American.

"Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African. The Africans know I'm not an African. I'm an American. This is my country. My people helped to build it and we've been here for centuries. Just call me black, if you want to call me anything."

But there's no winning this silly debate.

What's important to remember is that Republicans are bigots, "America" is code language for white racism, and members of minorities who dare call themselves American are "acting white."