And Wednesday, Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson addressed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, not only making a case for the GOP, but also reminding the civil rights group that the Democrats were the ones in charge during all those tough years.

News coverage focused on "how 'unusual' it was for Republicans to address the NAACP," Nicholson said. "Actually, I think it's the Democrats -- not Republicans -- who should be reluctant to come before this, the nation's leading organization for the advancement of civil rights.

"After all," the RNC chairman went on, "it was Democrats, not Republicans, who for 40 years controlled both houses of Congress, and the city councils and school boards in most of America's largest cities for at least that long.

"Two generations ago, it was Democrats like Lester Maddox and George Wallace" -- governors of Georgia and Alabama -- "who blocked the schoolhouse doors, saying 'Black students can't get in,'" Nicholson said.

Nicholson then argued that education was the "new civil right," heralding Bush on the subject of school vouchers and quality education. Attempting to tie the segregationists of the past to the Democratic Party of the present, Nicholson said that "today, nearly 50 years later, it's still Democrats standing in the schoolhouse doors. Only this time, they're saying 'Black students can't get out' -- can't get out of public schools that are failing them ... are unsafe ... where learning isn't taking place."

This broadside stands as just the latest in a GOP strategy of invoking Democrats like Maddox -- and Republicans like Rockefeller. These history lessons may remind the public of the GOP's forgotten legacy of tolerance, but they also strike a contrast with the party's less impressive recent history.

On a July 10 episode of CNN's "Crossfire," Rep. J.C. Watts, R-Okla., the only black Republican of all 535 members of the House and Senate, had the unique distinction of defending Bush's tacit support of the Confederate flag's flying over the South Carolina state capitol. Watts defended Bush by reminding host Bill Press of who was governor of South Carolina in 1962, when the flag was first raised.

"It was a Democratic governor by the name of Ernest Hollings" -- now a Democratic senator -- "that raised the Confederate flag," Watts said. "I cry for consistency. If you mention George Bush, you surely have to mention Ernest Hollings ... We wouldn't even be talking about this issue if Ernest Hollings wouldn't have raised the Confederate flag to start with."

When Press mentioned Bush's now infamous Feb. 2 appearance at Bob Jones University, where interracial dating was banned, Watts replied, "you've had Republicans and Democrats both that have spoken at Bob Jones, and again, it only becomes an issue if a Republican speaks at Bob Jones."

Cherylyn Harley, deputy press secretary of the RNC and an African-American, says that these points are "important." Harley -- who penned Nicholson's NAACP speech -- says she's eager to "remind people of their history. The Republican Party was founded on the issue of equal opportunity, specifically the issue of slavery and the need to eradicate it from American life."

Sure, but that was almost 150 years ago. That Republicans still trot out Abraham Lincoln as their standard-bearer on racial issues is embarrassing; when Bush invoked the 138-year-old Homestead Act in his NAACP speech last week, it was an easy target.

Harley, however, is quick to point out that it was a Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who sent the National Guard to Little Rock in 1957 to ensure the peaceful, landmark integration of Central High School.

And there's more. Historian Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center and professor of history at the University of New Orleans, also points out that it was white Democratic Southerners who were responsible for implementing Jim Crow laws. However, Brinkley notes, Eisenhower appointed the liberal Republican judges in the South who implemented Brown vs. Board of Education -- the Supreme Court decision that ended the notion of "separate but equal" and outlawed Jim Crow.

Brinkley, author of a new biography of Rosa Parks, points in particular to Ike judicial appointee Frank Johnson, an Alabama Republican, and hero of New York Times editorial page editor Howell Raines, as well as the subject of a biography written by Bobby Kennedy Jr. Johnson's role supporting Brown and his later desegregation rulings earned him the title "the most hated man in Alabama" by the Ku Klux Klan.

This was the Republican Party of the 1950s. Eisenhower got 60 percent of the black vote in the election of 1956. And it was a Republican senator, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, who broke the longest filibuster in the U.S. Senate "conducted by the Democrats over the 1957 Civil Rights Act," Harley goes on.

Harley argues that it didn't end there. "It was Republicans who voted overwhelmingly for the Civil Rights Act of 1964" as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, she says. "That kind of thing is easily researchable."

She's right: According to Congressional Quarterly, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed the House 290-130, and Republican support for the bill was much stronger than Democratic: 61 percent (152-96) of the Democrats supported the legislation while 80 percent (138-34) of the Republicans backed it. These numbers were similar in the Senate -- 69 percent of Democrats (46-21), backed the bill along with 82 percent of Republicans (27-6).

Gore's father, Sen. Al Gore Sr., D-Tenn., was one of the 21 Democrats who voted against it. So was Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., himself a former member of the Ku Klux Klan -- as former RNC Chair Haley Barbour was quick to mention, two times, Thursday on "Crossfire."

It was pretty much the same for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the House, 82 percent of the Republicans backed the bill; in the Senate, 94 percent of the Republicans backed it. Gore Sr. voted for the bill this time, but 17 other Southern Democrats voted against it -- including Sen. J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, a mentor to President Bill Clinton.

Further, Harley goes on, "it was [President Richard] Nixon who created the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, believe it or not."

But in their efforts to paint the GOP as warm and inclusive, these GOP amateur historians' memories can also seem a tad shaky. While accurately heralding Dirksen's actions to end the 1957 filibuster, for instance, Harley neglects to mention that the South Carolina senator conducting the filibuster was Strom Thurmond -- who within seven years would find a new home on the Republican side of the aisle.

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