U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham needs to be commended for urging South Carolina Republicans to reach out more to African-Americans and Hispanics.

He also needs a lot of luck to get his party to accept this admirable challenge.

Graham told the state Republican convention that he was greatly disturbed to have received less than 10 percent of the black vote in his 2002 election. That’s about par for the course in the South.

Republicans fare a little better nationally, but President Bush has faced daunting obstacles in his expressed desire for a more inclusive party. It seems that each time his “compassionate conservatism” is unveiled, his fellow Republicans recoil in horror.

Case in point: Bush is trying to make it easier for Mexican laborers to stay in the United States, which will aid the economy of a needy nation and strengthen ties with Mexico’s first progressive administration in more than a half-century. It also would make Republican candidates more attractive to our nation’s fastest-growing ethnic segment.

But after Bush’s intentions were announced, talk radio added near-deafening decibels and multiple layers of conservatism.

It may have been coincidence, of course, but after a few months of these howls of outrage from the right, Bush decided that one of the gravest threats to the nation is same-sex marriage. This priority is as absurd, from the opposite end of the political spectrum, as President Clinton’s making gays in the military his primary issue.

The problem cited by Sen. Graham — and the strength of today’s Republican Party — are rooted in the career of his predecessor.

Strom Thurmond, considered one of the Senate’s staunchest racists in 1964, was among a dozen or so Southern politicians who bolted the Democratic Party, primarily over the civil rights issue.

Four years later, Richard Nixon was in a tricky position in his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. If Nixon were nominated over Ronnie-come-lately, the charismatic Ronald Reagan, the party feared a severe siphoning of Southern votes by third-party candidate Alabama Gov. George Wallace.

Thurmond, who didn’t care for Reagan’s relatively moderate positions, approached Nixon with a “Southern strategy.” If Nixon would soft-pedal civil rights, Thurmond and his fellow conservatives would deliver the "Solid South" nominating ballots and campaign for his presidency.

I was among a dozen or so staffers covering the Miami Beach convention for the Miami Herald. As a native of South Carolina (and former reporter for The State), I observed this historic scenario in amazement.

A formerly cranky and ineffective Democratic senator, Thurmond was transformed into a GOP kingmaker and loved every minute of it. He basked in this newfound recognition by the media and led a graying, drawling delegation of ex-Dixiecrats who strutted into GOP strategy sessions like rich widowers at a senior citizens mixer.

Obviously the “Southern strategy” worked for all parties (except, of course, the Democrats, who later were stuck with hapless nominee Hubert Humphrey lugging around President Johnson’s Vietnam baggage).

Since Thurmond brokered what many liberal and black voters viewed as this Faustian pact in 1968, the Republican Party has never been a haven for minorities. They have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats, many times with questionable wisdom on blind straight-party tickets. And the GOP has seldom indicated it cared.

But perhaps Bush, Graham and other Republicans have become conscience-stricken. Or with increasing numbers of minority citizens likely to become voters, they simply can do the math.

Whatever the motive for greater inclusiveness, the result would be good for the party, for minority citizens, and for our country.

Mr. Bentley, a native of McCormick, is the former editor of six daily newspapers, most recently in Greenwood where he lives.