The campaign that John McCain is now running in the closing days of this year’s presidential campaign is why the Republican Party is unlikely to gain significant support from African-American voters for years, if not decades, to come.

John McCain has clearly decided to ignore the complaints he made about the campaign George W. Bush and Karl Rove ran against him in South Carolina during the 2000 presidential campaign. He is now trying to do the same thing to Barack Obama that was done to him by Bush and Rove in South Carolina. How ironic.

The campaign John McCain is now running is a part of why America is divided and Washington, D.C. is not working for the people and what is in our best interest. Even if John McCain were to win this year’s presidential election at the polls, he has begun to lose the creditability and trust that he would need to lead a united nation in this time of economic crisis and growing foreign policy challenges.

John McCain is starting to morph into George Wallace and Strom Thurmond of the old Dixicrat South. John McCain is demonstrating that he is no Abe Lincoln. He doesn’t even have a secret plan to fix the economy like Richard Nixon claimed he had to end the war in Vietnam, which he did not have.

In this presidential election, there is no Nixon “silent majority� waiting in the wings to save John McCain. McCain’s modern day Southern Strategy of playing on the emotion of 9/11 and the fear of “terrorists� is unlikely to work when our economy is falling apart and the most important color to the majority of Americans is GREEN — our economy, the environment and energy independence from foreign sources of oil.

When this campaign started, John McCain was a public servant of stature, a true American hero like John Kerry and the other men and women who have served our nation in uniform. What McCain is doing now, in the closing days of this campaign, will dishonor the legacy he had built up until now. What John McCain is doing is wrong and he should stop doing it, right now!

This campaign is about more than John McCain and Barack Obama; it’s about how far we have come as a nation since the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education.

*Carroll G. Robinson is an Associate Professor at the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas.