If Republicans expect to seriously compete for minority votes in next year's presidential election, it will require showing up at occasional candidates' forums sponsored by groups who don't necessarily look like the folks at the country club.

Pleading scheduling conflicts and fund-raising obligations, the four leading Republican presidential candidates skipped Thursday evening's televised debate at historically black Morgan State University in Baltimore.

Republican heavyweights Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, John McCain and Fred Thompson were represented by empty lecterns, but their absence became a point of criticism and humorous jabs by the candidates who did show.

Without the big four around sucking up the attention, Sen. Sam Brownback, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former U.N. Ambassador Alan Keyes, and Reps. Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo and Ron Paul had what was the liveliest Republican debate to date.

It was an illuminating evening for potential voters and a chance for the Republicans to assuage suspicions that minority votes aren't coveted by the GOP. But the absence of the frontrunners suggested their commitment to black and Hispanic concerns was only partial, too.

"[The missing candidates] told every black request and every brown request, there's a scheduling issue here," PBS moderator Tavis Smiley told an interviewer. "Is it really scheduling or is it a pattern?"

It looks like a pattern when debates and forums sponsored by the National Urban League, Logo (the gay cable network), Univision (a Spanish-language network) and the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials are factored in. Coincidence or contempt for vast voter constituencies?

Republicans from President Bush and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to former vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp and former Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman have decried the snubbing as self-defeating for the eventual party nominee. They know there will be a high price to pay for it later.

Assuming the Democratic presidential nominee is someone already popular with minority voters, an eventual Republican nominee who has already refused several invitations to minority-sponsored forums will have to make up for a lot of lost ground in the general election. By then, those audiences won't care much about what they have to say.