Bruce Bartlett has discovered something startling. He even wrote a book about it. It seems the Democrats were filled with virulent racists up until they got upset with civil rights legislation and became Republicans. In today's Wall Street Journal Bartlett's lays out the evidence: quotes from Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and even FDR and LBJ. I encourage you to go read his collection because it is educational. But his point is foolish. He's trying to debunk Paul Krugman's thesis that the GOP's racism has been crucial to its recent successes.

In his new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal," New York Times columnist Paul Krugman makes a strong case for his belief that the political success of the Republican Party and the conservative movement over the past 40 years has resulted largely from their co-optation of Southern racists that were the base of the Democratic Party until its embrace of civil rights in the 1960s. A key piece of evidence for Mr. Krugman is that Ronald Reagan gave his first speech after accepting the Republican presidential nomination in 1980 near Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. In the course of this speech, Reagan said he supported "states' rights." Mr. Krugman says this was code declaring his secret sympathy for Southern racism.

Others, including Mr. Krugman's Times colleague David Brooks and Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, have come to Reagan's defense, denying that he was a racist or had any racist intent in his 1980 speech. That's fine but unlikely to change the minds of those like Mr. Krugman who are determined to smear the Republican Party with the charge of racism, and who are adept at finding racist code words like "law and order" by Republicans that are completely convincing to liberals and Democrats in support of this accusation, even though they are invisible to those with no political ax to grind.

However, if a single mention of states' rights 27 years ago is sufficient to damn the Republican Party for racism ever afterwards, what about the 200-year record of prominent Democrats who didn't bother with code words? They were openly and explicitly for slavery before the Civil War, supported lynching and "Jim Crow" laws after the war, and regularly defended segregation and white supremacy throughout most of the 20th century.

Notice Bartlett's gambit. The accusation of racism being leveled at Republicans is not dependent on a single mention of states' rights from 27 years ago. Recent polling shows that Republicans are more concerned with illegal immigration (hordes of brown people) than they are with the war, the economy, abortion, gay rights, the environment, education or any other issue. It's a bigg issue in Iowa and the Republicans know it.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who's moving up in the polls, came to Iowa's immigration center on Thursday to appear at a rally in Marshalltown, the site of a highly publicized round-up of illegal immigrants at a Swift meatpacking plant just over a year ago. Former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee also crossed the state in a six-day bus tour that included stops in Marshalltown and other communities with surging immigrant populations.

They're tapping into the same anxiety white working class Americans always feel when immigrants enter the country. It's what the Democratic Party was responding to in its late 19th and early 20th century platforms:

"We, the delegates of the Democratic party of the United States . . . demand such modification of the treaty with the Chinese Empire, or such legislation within constitutional limitations, as shall prevent further importation or immigration of the Mongolian race."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1876

"No more Chinese immigration, except for travel, education, and foreign commerce, and that even carefully guarded."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1880

"American civilization demands that against the immigration or importation of Mongolians to these shores our gates be closed."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1884

"We favor the continuance and strict enforcement of the Chinese exclusion law, and its application to the same classes of all Asiatic races."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1900

"We are opposed to the admission of Asiatic immigrants who can not be amalgamated with our population, or whose presence among us would raise a race issue and involve us in diplomatic controversies with Oriental powers."

--Platform of the Democratic Party, 1908

It was racism then and it is racism now. It's not that there are no practical reasons for people to resent illegal immigration. I'm talking about the GOP's decision to make it a partisan issue...as if Democrats are primarily responsible for illegal Hispanic immigration. It doesn't matter that the Democrats used to be the party of slavery and Jim Crow. No one I know calls themselves a Democrat today because they think the party is sticking up for the white man. But I know many people that call themselves Republicans for that reason.