It has been a tragedy of American politics that for more than 40 years black Americans have given the overwhelming majority of their votes to the Democratic Party - this has lead black Americans to being taken for granted by the Democrats, and ignored by the Republicans. No more, says Brendan Miniter over at Opinion Journal:

Call it the Northern Strategy. Last week Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Melhman stepped out in front of a crowd gathered for the NAACP National Convention in Wisconsin and coolly announced the death of the hotly debated and controversial electoral strategy successfully used by Richard Nixon in 1968. The "Southern Strategy," as it has become known, helped Republicans win nearly every state of the former Confederacy in that election by appealing to defecting conservative Democrats.

The GOP's success in what was once the solidly Democratic South came, unfortunately, as some Republicans were "looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization," Mr. Melhman told the group. "I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong."

There is a community of interest which cuts right across ethnic lines in the United States; while race-hustlers assert that a black man must always have different desires than a white man, the plain fact of the matter is that a middle class black man generally wants the same things as a middle class white man. It has been an oddity of politics that even though everyone in the middle class is best served by the GOP, black middle class Americans have still given their votes to a Party which is actually destructive of middle class interests. This has been slowly erroding as the reality of Democratic politics becomes more apparant - noted by Miniter when he points out that while the Democratic Party is opposed to school choice, black Americans largely support the idea; but now Ken Mehlman is leading the charge directly into black America.