Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead!
At least, America should hope it's dead. The witch being the vaunted Southern Strategy of the Republican Party, which since 1968 has used racial fears to divide this country politically and reap the results in presidential elections.
Following passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, white Southerners feared the impact of the growing black electorate. So, lifelong Democrats pledged allegiance to the GOP, which promised to protect them from the miscegenating throng.
For 40 years, Republican strategists used code words about black criminals (remember Willie Horton?), welfare cheats, and con artists to suggest that any minority candidate might be susceptible to such behavior, to suggest that no black politician could be trusted.
But the election Tuesday of Barack Obama to be the nation's first African American president should finally move the GOP to a new direction.
Obama plucked Virginia and Florida from the Republican fold, with North Carolina teetering his way. Sure, the rest of Dixie stayed red. But as the demographics of America continue to change, it would be ludicrous for the Republicans to cling to a Richard Nixon-era strategy that poorly served John McCain.
Indeed, the "maverick" is probably kicking himself for having followed the party's traditional program. After all, McCain has taken pride in tearing down fences, not erecting them. The odious Southern Strategy does just the opposite. It plays on people's fears of others, using stereotypes to argue that a candidate would be a disaster if elected.
Give McCain credit, though, for having some scruples. He said nothing about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor, whose fiery sermons stoked the fires of racial animosity. But other groups campaigning for McCain used TV ads to say what he wouldn't.
It's time the GOP recognized that America has changed. Younger Southerners aren't buying into fear messages. Neither are the transplanted Northerners who have followed good jobs to the South. Nor the growing Latino populations everywhere across this country.
In Florida, the Republican-leaning Cuban population is being surpassed by transplanted Puerto Ricans who voted for Obama. Urbane voters in Virginia's Richmond and Washington suburbs wanted to hear about issues - not skin color.
Obama easily carried Pennsylvania, despite predictions that its rural residents, whom some compare to gun-toting, Bible-thumping Alabamians, remained susceptible to the Southern Strategy.
True enough, most of the Pennsylvania counties between the Philadelphia suburbs and Pittsburgh voted for McCain. But moving west, Obama took Elk, Cambria, Erie and Dauphin. And the margins were tight in Mercer, Lawrence, Fayette, Wayne, Pike, Centre and Greene Counties.
Nationally, there appeared to be no reappearance of the so-called Bradley Effect, in which a black candidate gets significantly fewer actual votes than pre-election polls predicted. The phenomenon gets its name from Tom Bradley, the former Los Angeles mayor who lost California's 1982 election for governor.
A Stanford researcher calculated before the election that Obama would poll six points higher were he white. Maybe. But the final results were enough to show that most voters today prefer to judge candidates on their abilities, not their race.