When he wasn't defending Karl Rove last week, Republican Chairman Ken Mehlman managed to squeeze in an apology to African-Americans for his party's cynical use of racial divisions and wedge issues like affirmative action, busing and fear of crime to win elections.

If you can imagine Tiger Woods apologizing to Colin Montgomerie and Michael Campbell for winning the British Open by five shots, then it seems reasonable that tears could flow at RNC headquarters even as congressional districts are redrawn to ensure party hegemony for decades to come.

Addressing the NAACP convention in Milwaukee last week, the GOP's most affable hit-man sounded about as sincere as Joe Kennedy apologizing for making a fortune bootlegging moonshine during Prohibition.

"By the '70s and into the '80s and '90s, the Democratic Party solidified its gains in the African-American community, and we Republicans did not effectively reach out," Mehlman said. "Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization."

As Mehlman spoke, black people by the hundreds took turns guessing which turnip truck the Republican chairman had fallen from in his rush to get to the stage. "I am here as Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong," Mehlman said.

Because mea culpas in American politics are so rare, the audience of NAACP stalwarts applauded more out of obligation than enthusiasm, too polite to remind their guest that the annual gathering of the nation's oldest civil rights organization had been snubbed for a fifth time by a president who doesn't appear to be in a hurry to abandon the "Southern Strategy" that has worked wonders for the GOP so far.

I suspect that the good folks meeting in Milwaukee would have applauded Mehlman more vigorously if the Republican-controlled Senate had somehow managed to get 100 co-sponsors for its apology last month for failing to pass legislation outlawing lynching during a century in which thousands of citizens, mostly but not exclusively black, were victims of mob violence.

Response to Mehlman's speech was tepid compared to the rousing reception Democratic Chairman Howard Dean received earlier in the day. Honesty compels anyone looking at this long but complicated relationship to agree with resentful Republicans that the Democratic Party has treated the black vote like a plantation with no Emancipation Proclamation in sight.

If anything, the Democrats have been even more cynical than Republicans in recent years by trying to adapt elements of the GOP's playbook to its own losing campaigns. Dean's promise last week to "never again take another African-American vote for granted" resonated with folks who had been told by Democratic brahmins that the party has to break with the interests of many of its core constituents to win elections.

But in fairness to Mehlman, nothing short of a full apology for slavery by all three branches of government was going to move the NAACP to offer the kind of wild applause that's pro forma at, say, a Heritage Foundation luncheon.

That's why Rush Limbaugh castigated Mehlman on his nationally syndicated radio program in advance last week for even thinking about apologizing to black people. Last week, Media Matters for America transcribed Rush's rant on its indispensable blog:

"Know what he's going to do?" Limbaugh said of Mehlman. "He's going down there and basically apologize for what has come to be known as the Southern Strategy, popularized in the Nixon administration. He's going to go down there and apologize for it. In the midst of all of this, in the midst of all that's going on, once again, Republicans are going to go bend over and grab the ankles."

As if seeking the forgiveness of the "National Association for the Advancement of Liberal Colored People" (as he calls it) wasn't disgusting enough, Rush felt compelled to throw in a gratuitous reference to homosexual behavior: "Bend over and grab the ankles."

Why limit the insult to one group when you can disparage two in one breath? I wonder what our own Sen. Rick Santorum's communications director Robert Traynham thinks of Limbaugh's dig? As an openly gay black man who "fully supports" the senator's agenda, one would hope that even Traynham is still capable of wincing at such bigotry.

Say whatever you want about Rush, at least he understands which side of the bread his brand of intolerant cheese is spread on. He knows that repudiating the Southern Strategy means repudiating Barry Goldwater's historic win in the South despite losing the 1964 election to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide.

Richard Nixon built on Goldwater's legacy by exploiting the xenophobia and racist fears of George Wallace's constituents in the '72 election. Rush is honest enough to acknowledge that without the Southern Strategy, Ronald Reagan never would've launched his run for the White House in Philadelphia, Miss., where lynching was once a local sport.

Without the Southern Strategy, paroled rapist Willie Horton could never have been twisted around the neck of Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis by George Herbert Walker Bush so effectively.

Without racist fears as a backdrop, Arizona Sen. John McCain would've won the South Carolina Republican primary instead of George W. Bush. Had that happened, Mehlman would never have had Bush's re-election campaign to manage. In the hustle and flow of national politics, a heartfelt death wish is even rarer than a mea culpa.