I’ll say this much for the Republicans. One way or another, they’ll try to find a way to make the fear card work for them.

Even if it means flipping through the script on what foreign terrorists like Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda might do to Americans over to the page on what a black man like Harold Ford Jr. might do to white women if he ever got emboldened by a whiff of senatorial power.

By now, most of us know about the controversial anti-Ford ad -- which was finally pulled off the air last week. In a desperate attempt to siphon votes from Ford, a Democratic Tennessee congressman who is within striking distance of becoming the first black senator from the South since the end of Reconstruction, the Republican National Committee had been airing an ad that features a young, bare-shouldered blonde woman gushing about meeting Ford at a Playboy party.

It ends with the bimbo winking and asking Ford to call her.

The RNC ad, which apparently is a reference to Ford’s attendance at Playboy’s Super Bowl party here in Jacksonville last year, was an attempt to play to bigotry about interracial relationships. This would be the same RNC whose chairman, Ken Mehlman, apologized to the NAACP last year for the GOP’s exploitation of race as a way to capture the Southern vote.

But now, Mehlman has gone from apologizing to defending. Said he just writes the checks to independent individuals, who then go to various states and put the ads together.

That’s crap of course. The ads boldly claimed that the RNC was responsible.

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Mehlman’s defense of the RNC’s disgraceful ad should speak volumes -- especially to black Republicans and any other black people considering the GOP. The main thing it ought to say is that as much as Republicans claim they want to bring more of us into the fold, they’ll throw us to the wolves if it means keeping fearful, bigoted whites from wandering away.

And that’s exactly what they do whenever they resort to tactics like the anti-Ford ad -- the kind that revive racial fears that once led to countless numbers of black men being lynched or unjustly imprisoned.

This kind of stuff isn’t new, of course. After the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights, the GOP crafted its “Southern Strategy” to pander to white southerners who just couldn’t then -- and still cannot now -- bring themselves to get into the spirit of the civil rights successes.

Shades of that strategy emerged in 1980, when then-candidate Ronald Reagan proclaimed his support for “states’ rights” at a fair outside of Philadelphia, Miss. The town is where civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were murdered in 1964 -- for helping blacks to register to vote in a state that believed it was its right to stop them from doing so.

It continued in 1988 when, during the candidacy of George H.W. Bush, GOP operatives used the face of Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer who stabbed a man and raped his fiancee while on a weekend furlough, to hobble the campaign of Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. At the time, then-RNC chairman Lee Atwater, who died in 1991, bragged that by the time the race was over, Willie Horton would be a household name.

I’m sure that more GOP operatives were counting on Horton’s skin color to inspire more fear in voters than his name or his deeds.

Then, there’s the newer stuff. Like in 2000, when voters in South Carolina were asked, by way of a push poll, if they would be more likely or less likely to vote for Sen. John McCain for president if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child.

Push polls are mass marketing attempts to sway people’s views by disguising rumors and loaded questions as polls. In this case, however, this question was loaded with a lie -- McCain and his wife, Cindy, adopted a Bangladeshi girl. She’s dark, but she’s not black.

Yet Richard Davis, McCain’s campaign manager at the time, told the Boston Globe he believes the poll may have cost them the South Carolina primary that year. And again, it’s interesting how the GOP throws race on the table whenever it decides to play dirty pool.

There’s a reason for this, of course. The Repubs are running scared. The war in Iraq is going badly. People are now worried about saving young people from getting killed in this disastrous misadventure, and not about saving the profits of Halliburton. The terrorism fear card that got Dubya a second term no longer frightens.

So now, with the anti-Ford ad, the GOP is playing an old card earmarked to conjure an old fear: Race.

As I said, this ought to bug the hell out of black GOPers. Because while Democrats may take the black vote for granted, unlike Republicans, they rarely, if ever, stoop to exploit racial prejudices to get votes when the going gets tough.

And I don’t see how any of us can find a place in a party that, when times get desperate, goes out of its way to inflame racists who want to keep us in ours.