Sen. Barack Obama offers the possibility of racial healing. Some Republican strategists will try not to let that happen. They hope to win in November by playing on racial divisiveness.

It’s one of the only issues they have left.

For years, the GOP won elections on a platform that stressed “moral values,” a balanced budget, small government and national security.

But thanks to sex scandals involving Sens. Larry Craig and David Vitter and Rep. Mark Foley, the GOP cannot run effectively on “moral values” this time.

President Bush, for his part, has turned the party of budgetary discipline into the party of profligate spending. Any campaign against “tax-and-spend liberals” will strain credulity among taxpayers facing a $9 trillion national debt.

What’s more, the Iraq War’s obscene cost in lives and money and our standing in the world has tarnished the GOP’s national security credentials.

With the economy cooling into a recession, with people losing their homes and their jobs, even as the price of gas, food and health care skyrocket, this election year is shaping up to a disaster for Republicans.

One of the few remaining strategic options, then, is the race card. They’ve played it before, and they can play it again.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan launched his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., notorious as the place where three civil rights workers —Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman — were murdered in June 1964. Reagan endorsed “states’ rights” in his campaign speech.

Reagan also caricatured welfare recipients as lazy, Cadillac-driving black women. He told a story of a woman who was arrested for welfare fraud: "She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.” Reagan repeated this story over and over despite evidence that no such woman ever existed.

In 1988, Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush tried to scare white voters by running television commercials about a black inmate convicted of raping a white woman while on furlough. The notorious Willie Horton ads are largely credited with destroying Michael Dukakis’s presidential campaign.

Following this racial script, conservative commentators and GOP strategists this year are doing everything they can to keep race alive. That’s why they play and replay the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That’s why they bring up the name of the Rev. Louis Farrakhan.

Sen. Hillary Clinton has not helped matters any by bringing these issues up herself. At some point, she ought to put the needs of her party and the needs of the country above her personal ambitions.

And Obama must return to the theme he so successfully talked about in his speech about race. His “Not This Time” refrain holds out the hope that we can overcome not only racially tinged campaign commercials but the legacy of 400 years of racism in America.

That’s a tall task. But it is one reason Obama is drawing such large and enthusiastic crowds.

If Republicans choose to run a campaign against hope, the outcome will say a lot about the soul of America.

James Thindwa is executive director of Chicago Jobs with Justice. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.