He's wrong in more than one respect. The word has not changed. It's just as offensive today as it was in 1920 to refer to Mexican migrant laborers being welcomed into Texas by business leaders and as it was in 1954 when a mass deportation of those Mexican migrants was officially dubbed Operation Wetback. What has changed is the country and the acceptability of casual racism and the GOP has struggled to show it understands how much things have changed. An ex-RNC field staffer told BuzzFeed's McKay Coppins that "whenever they were notified of a new Republican outreach effort, they would pass around a Beanie Baby — which they had dubbed the 'pander bear' — and make fun of the 'tokenism.'" It's not that they were racist or something, the ex-staffer said, they just didn't see the point.

Any why should they? These sorts of political initiatives have come and gone before. Here's just a sampling.

2004: Minorities will love Republicans' social values.

Republicans tried to appeal to blacks and Latinos based on "family values" -- like opposition to abortion and gay marriage. George W. Bush's reelection campaign pushed for an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment in Ohio to turn out voters, and Bush got 16 percent of black voters in 2004 -- more than double the 7 percent got in 2000. Bush's faith-based initiatives office held supposedly non-partisan conferences with religious leaders to talk about poverty in their communities, and black religious clergy were specifically targeted.

But Republicans can't duplicate that today -- and probably wouldn't want to. After President Obama endorsed gay marriage, black voters' support for it climbed to 59 percent. And, as the RNC's autopsy noted, young voters support gay marriage even more. Even if Republicans could still lure minorities by opposing gay rights, it would cost them with young people.

2005: Black people should support privatizing Social Security because they'll die sooner.

Yes, in 2005, Bush's White House thought telling black people they would die sooner than white people would be a really good way to sell conservative fiscal policy -- instead of, say, make black people wonder what Republicans were suggesting to fix that problem. The Los Angeles Times reported in March 2005:

The most provocative element of the GOP message to African Americans: Their shorter life expectancy means Social Security is not a favorable deal for them, a point contested by Bush's critics. The president's plan for private accounts, Republicans say, would particularly benefit African Americans by allowing them to build wealth more rapidly and pass a portion of their Social Security contributions to their heirs.

That story noted a persistant problem for Republicans, which you can see in black voters' growing support for gay marriage after Obama's endorsement: when black voters find out they like a policy supported by Republicans, they don't like the party more, they like the policy less. In polling on Social Security privatization, the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Support for the concept plummets when the survey questions link private accounts to Bush or another Republican."