Letters to the Editor
Rocky57
Published Letters: 211 Editor's Choice: 4
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damnthatXranadu
[Read the article: Ferraro resigns from Clinton campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"...Now, we have a black man running for President where it is obvious that ONE (NOT ALL!) of the major reasons he is winning IS indeed because he is black. Everyone knows it. It's as plain as the nose on each our faces. Finally, someone has the guts to say the truth, to say this telling fact and say out loud exactly what the polling data facts say are so, and they're called a racist. What is worse, the candidate running doesn't have the guts to admit it's true. To admit what even HE KNOWS IS TRUE. And, further, not only does he lie about it but everyone else does...."
How about someone with a vision, warranted or not, who happens to be black, running for president? Or, as many commentators here have mentioned, are you one of those hung up on race?
For a candidate who, early on, exhibited the admirable quality of staying away from race to such an extent that pols and the press wondered if he were "black enough", you can't blame Obama for this current mess. Nor, similarly, can you blame him and his purported use of race for Hillary Clinton's being slumgullioned in states, 27 to 14 and delegate count (150 plus in the hole) and for her being behind in the popular vote. Blame an old-school political candidate with an unwarranted sense of entitlement and a desire for higher office so overweaning that it's led her to betray the very ideals she has claimed to live by and that many of her followers actually still believe in. A desire along with a sense of entitlement that has contributed, in great measure, to one of the worst run primary campaigns in modern presidential history.
Faced with losing, she is willing to fan the flames of racial divide that so many new voters thought were nothing but dying embers, trash the Democratic Party and give the shiv between the shoulder blades to the many, loyal black political leaders and party regulars who were still supporting her even after the S.C. debacle. All of this while encouraging a whisper campaign against her opponent's background and heritage--one she passed on silencing prior to the Ohio vote--and giving full-throated roar to the issue of race through the voiced idiocies of Gerry Ferraro leading up to Pennsylvania.
I used to take the Joe Conason approach to the more wacko screeds re the Clintons I used to hear in and around the Fox News Network, particularly during the Impeachment Crisis, but, Gawd help me, I'm finally beginning to actually wonder if it's true that Bill and Hillary trash, and leave for the worse, everything they come in contact with. If even a fraction of her supporters and/or Democrats, in general, think that, someone who cares for her and the Clinton brand-name has got to let her face the question of whether a repugnant scorched earth policy, its nascent beginnings evident in the Palmetto State, is worth having a loyal constituency turn against her in such numbers that they'd make you think that George Bush's name had replaced hers, on the ballot. And whether attempting to win "ugly" is worth trashing what's left of the Clinton legacy.
But, judging from what you've written, you wouldn't get all that, now would you?
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Sajwan
[Read the article: Ferraro resigns from Clinton campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No problems with your post until this line: "...Obama achieved 90% of the black vote by indeed making race an issue, playing the race card for the first time in national politics to a black person’s advantage...."
If you truly believe that, there's no way a barak Obama is going to be able to reach you or get your vote. One More Time--if you play the race card, or are seen to have played the race card, which Clinton appeared to do with, out of thin air, his equating Obama's campaign with that of Jesse Jackson's, a candidacy almost immediately seen as so polarising and so much a "black candidacy" that it received only 5 and 12 pct of the White vote when Jackson ran in '84 and '88, you run the risk of being seen as attempting to marginalise what is and has been seen, by whites and blacks alike, as a legitimately viable candidacy. Add the drug selling innuendos and outright commentary about Obama's admitted youthful drug use--typical tropes often used when contemplating black men--between New Hampshire and S. Carolina and it would be surprising if blacks hadn't voted overwhelmingly for what they felt was a viable candidacy that had run a superior, well-organised campaign.
Now, we have Hillary's equivocation about Obama's religion, despite having attended Congressional prayer breakfast till-the-cows-came-home with Obama, prior to one of those gritty, old-school ethnic states like Ohio and Gerry Ferraro's fulmination, prior to Pennsylvania [I'm not even counting Eddy Rendell's comments], and you have the scenario you, Hillary and Gerry are decrying.
If she had kept her cool and not panicked after Iowa and New Hampshire [which she won, after all] and during the S.C. primaries, she'd still have, roughly, 30 pct of the black vote--or, about 5 pct more of the white vote that Obama got, in Mississippi.
Too bad the mess she currently finds herself with a constituency that was previously hers is of her own making.
As for you, my suspicion is no matter how many facts come your way it'll be like butting one's head against a brick wall to make you see what you, in all likelihood, don't want to see.