The over the top coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and now Barack Obama's San Francisco gaffe, especially in the conservative media, signals growing GOP concern about the electoral implications of Senator Barack Obama's call for racial healing and reconciliation.

For years, the GOP won elections on a platform that included "moral values" (anti-gay rights, anti-choice), anti-deficit-spending, small government and national security. But with these pillars of its electoral strategy weakened, the GOP is left with only one more weapon that heretofore had been potent and reliable: race. But if American voters suddenly heed Barack Obama's exhortation to elevate the nation's racial discourse, it could spell disaster for Republicans.

In 2008, the efficacy of much of the GOP's strategic juggernaut is in doubt. Thanks to Senators Larry Craig and David Vitter, Representative Mark Foley, and perhaps John McCain himself, the GOP cannot run on "moral values" this time. And since the party of "budgetary discipline" has become the party of profligate spending, an anti-deficit-spending campaign against "tax-and-spend" liberals will strain credulity among taxpayers facing a $9 trillion national debt. After creating the Department of Homeland Security and expanding the national security state "small government" exists only in GOP rhetoric. The Iraq War's obscene costs in lives and money, and its destabilizing effect on the region have effectively undermined the GOP's national security credentials, real or imagined.

One remaining strategic option for the Republican Party then, is the race card. This is where Senator Barack Obama's talk of racial reconciliation becomes important, and why the GOP is very concerned and determined to stop him.

First, some context. In 1980, Governor 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's choice of Philadelphia to launch his campaign signaled solidarity to white southerners, who had expressed their opposition to civil rights under the guise of "states' rights." When he spoke there, Reagan assured his audience, "I believe in states' rights." During his campaigns, Reagan caricatured welfare recipients as lazy, Cadillac-driving black women to promote his agenda of rolling back civil rights, cutting welfare and slashing taxes. 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. His goal: dramatize black criminality and its "liberal apologists." The notorious Willie Horton ads are largely credited with destroying Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign.

With the rest of its strategic arsenal in question, the GOP and its media allies must do everything to keep race alive. Rev. Wright's words, and Obama's clumsily worded but accurate assessment of the source of white resentment present, an opportunity both to keep race as a dominant election theme and undercut Obama's message of racial reconciliation. This time Jeremiah Wright would replace Willie Horton.

At Fox News, coverage of Wright's remarks and Obama's reaction to it reached a fever pitch. Host Chris Wallace took the unusual step of chastising his colleagues on Fox & Friends: "It seems to me that two hours of Obama bashing on this ‘typical white person' remark is somewhat excessive and frankly I think you're somewhat distorting what Obama had to say." For a Fox News host to castigate fellow hosts is extremely unusual and suggests that the network had overreached.