The junior senator from Illinois and presidential hopeful proves that even election to high office doesn't guarantee that one knows or speaks the truth.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on Friday urged hundreds of blacks not to vote along racial lines next week in Maryland's Senate race.

Obama, the only black U.S. senator, came to the state to rally support for Democratic Rep. Ben Cardin, who is white. Cardin's Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, is the first black candidate ever elected statewide and has been courting black Democrats.

"Listen, I think it's great that the Republican Party has discovered black people," Obama said to laughter from students at the rally at predominantly black Bowie State University. "But here's the thing. ... You don't vote for somebody because of what they look like. You vote for somebody because of what they stand for."

Let's give this man a quick history lesson.

If one goes back to the birth of the GOP, it was a party that had the rights of blacks as its primary issue. Remember, the GOP was the party of abolition -- and that among those who were a part of its founding meeting was Frederick Douglass. At a time when the Democrats believed every black should be a slave, the Republican Party was co-founded by black men like Douglass -- an escaped slave. While they could not vote because they were women, Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman were also active supporters of the Republican Party. The Democrats, on the other hand, fought tooth-and-nail to keep blacks from voting in general elections -- or participating in party primaries, until the Supreme Court told Texas Democrats in Fort Bend County (and, by extension, Democrats in the rest of the country) that such actions violated the guarantees of the Fifteenth Amendment.

When the Civil War came to an end and the black slaves of the solidly Democrat South achieved the freedom guaranteed them by Republican President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Republican Congress' Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, the Republican controlled legislature of Mississippi sent Hiram Rhodes Revels to be the first black United States Senator (filling the seat left vacant by the resignation of Democrat Jefferson Davis -- President of the Confederate States of America. He was later succeeded in the Senate by Blanche Bruce, the first black United States Senator to serve a complete term. At the end of his term, the Democrat-controlled Mississippi legislature replaced him with a former Confederate officer who had helped draft and sign the Mississippi Ordinance of Secession.

Incidentally, the next black man to serve in the US Senate was Edward Brooke of Massachusetts -- another Republican, from 1967-1979, at a time when the Democrat Party was still fighting against civil rights and trying to determine if blacks should have representation at Democrat nominating conventions. On the other hand, should the Democrat Party regain control of the US Senate next week, they will choose a former leader of the KKK, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, to be the president pro tempore of the Senate, placing him third in line for the presidency of the United States.

Republicans were active in their defense of the rights of African-Americans for the next century -- and every significant piece of civil rights legislation passed during that time was the product of GOP authors and/or an overwhelming number of GOP votes in Congress. Democrats, on the other hand, fought against civil rights every step of the way, writing and enforcing Jim Crow policies. It took a Republican Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, to craft a decision to overturn such segregation.

It was a proud Republican who, in 1963, gave a speech at the Lincoln Memorial that clearly enunciated the Republican position on civil rights and racial equality -- of an America in which all people "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Today the GOP continues to stand for the vision of our brother Martin Luther King, Jr., while the Democrats continue to seek to divide and balkanize along racial lines.

So you see, Senator Obama, it is pretty clear that neither party needed to "discover" black people. The problem is that one of them is the party of Ol' Massa, Jim Crow and the Klan, while the other is the party of emancipation, civil rights, and equality. Michale Steele is a part of the latter -- and any African-American should be ashamed to vote for or serve in office as part of the former.

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