Letters to the Editor
Rocky57
Published Letters: 219 Editor's Choice: 4
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@ sesanders
[Read the article: How Hillary Clinton botched the black vote]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"... I do not believe that Bill Clinton had racist intentions at all but the Obama campaign was sure to jump on any slightest opportunity to make him appear so...."
Please. Bill Clinton, like many Southeastern politicians, is a master at cozying up to black voters just enough to not piss off poor/working class whites and, to top it all off, showing the latter that they shouldn't worry about his view of the ultimate scheme of things [ie., whites still calling the shots, albeit on an enlightened political playing field].
Clinton's genius was transferring that approach to the national stage, in '92, with his conspicuous "law n order" photo ops in front of hordes of prison-stripped black convicts; his use of Sister Souljah as a device to ensure middle of the road/conservative whites that his would be a presidency they wouldn't have to fear and his take-down of Jesse Jackson [maybe, as an explanation for Jesse's shrugging off Bill's recent South Carolina slur, the former's become inured to contemptuous backhands] during that year's primary campaign and at the NY convention.
Once he got the Presidency, he had no problem caving to the GOP on welfare reform and throwing the black Justice Dept nominee, Lani Guinier [she's technically mixed race but, really, let's face it, this is America and any one of Salon's correspondents who try-disingenuously, in my eyes--to take a different tack on this is blowing smoke, as Obama has found out, to his dismay] under the bus when that same GOP slimed her as a "Quota Queen."
While he should be given credit for a more diverse cabinet than his Republican predecessors, Clinton's main attribute, in the racial understanding dept, is that he talks a good game. Regaling in lockerroom banter with the likes of a Vernon Jordan doesn't exactly qualify Bill Clinton as a paragon of racial understanding and unity. He's a politician. And, no matter how modern, a Southern one.
(neither the Obama campaign, or the African-American electorate had fallen off the turnip truck, the night before the Clintons subtly started playing the race card. The fact that they obliquely referred to narcotics skullduggery on Obama's part or that they used black surrogates like Bob Johnson and Charley Rangel, as well as Bill, to try to "blacken up" Obama doesn't blunt that reality. I suspect that AA's, having survived in a hostile environment for as long as they have, were as keen enough to have recognised the Penn/Clinton tactics for what they were as they have in being one of the few demographics to have seen George Bush for what he was, in both 2000 and 2004)
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Nonsense
[Read the article: How Hillary Clinton botched the black vote]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"...It does not, would not ever matter what Hillary does or does not do, one way or the other. Black Americans will vote for Barack."
Nonsense, as Schaller's point is that they would not be voting for Obama in such overwhelming numbers had Clinton been more adroit in handling her campaign and, specifically, the way she regarded and handled the AA electorate.
Had this campaign not taken the low road, as it started to do in New Hampshire, in the wake of the panic inducing results of Iowa, she may well have had, at a minimum, that 20 to 30 pct of the black vote she needed to be in a stronger position vis a vis the Super Delegates.
She blew it and the reason why is she really didn't understand--or respect--the constituency she so long had taken for granted.
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Addendum
[Read the article: A pivotal day for the Democrats?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"...due to those motivated new voters who survey the current economic and geo-political landscape and see the GOP for what it is--a Party for, in the immortal words of Michael Moore, the "Haves and Have Mores...."
Of course, I mean't "the immortal words of George Bush" as memorably reported by Michael Moore in his classic, "Fahrenheit 911"
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@Evista
[Read the article: How Hillary Clinton botched the black vote]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"...Black people are racists and with a choice of a black man and a white person they will not think twice about who to vote for...."
Sure, that's why they voted, in S.C., for Al Sharpton over Kerry and Edwards, in a past presidential primary
Oh, wait...that's right, Sharpton got smoked in that contest.
Guess you'll have to come up with another noxious theory rather than accept the fact that Clinton's Mark Penn and her surrogates started sliming the political waters in New Hampshire, as soon as the Iowa results set in. Or do we have another Limbaughnista stirring up Dem discord with a bogus issue?
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@ Byron
[Read the article: How Hillary Clinton botched the black vote]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"...They have instead counterclaimed that (a) Obama and his operatives have nefariously play his own race card, effectively branding the Clintons as racists despite their previous closeness withe the AA community; or (b) they have decided to attack the AA community itself claiming that we are either too stupid, too racist, or too gullible to appreciate our own interests and have been lead towards the darkness that is Obama's candidacy...."
As I've always maintained, in these pages and elsewhere, the African American electorate has probably seen every trick in the book: from the overt racism of deep south pre-sixties precincts to the less noxious but no less malign wink/wink of Southeastern state politics to the contemptuous, five dollar a vote ethos of mid-twentieth century ethnic northern machines [like the O'Connell apparatus my mother and other Republican Progressives battled against in upstate NY, albany county]. Add that experience plus voting their interests [unlike many other "traditional democratic constituencies"] over the last 7 presidential cycles and what you get, as you astutely point out, isn't "racism" but an electorate sharp enough to see through bs that has shown itself to be as baffling to some other electorates as quantum mechanics.
Clinton's Mark Penn knew what she and he were up to when they trotted out the Shaheens, Bob Johnson and Charley Rangel to lay the spade work for trying to bury Obama. And, the black electorate, from S.C. to Pennsylvania, it can be credibly argued, knows, as well.
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Twi-light Double-header
[Read the article: A pivotal day for the Democrats?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Obama takes N.C., big...too close to call in Indiana