"President" Obongo - The Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Black Candidates
Somewhere In Kenya A Village Is Missing Its Idiot
Candidates
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38049.html
Politico: Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory was supposed to herald
a new era in American politics, one in which the conventional wisdom
that there were limits to how far ambitious African-American
politicians could expect to go — nationally or statewide — had been
demolished.
So much for that theory.
The stunning defeat suffered by Rep. Artur Davis — one of the
brightest stars in a new generation of talented black pols — in
Tuesday’s Alabama Democratic gubernatorial primary marked the latest
setback in an election year that is proving no better, and perhaps
even worse, for African-American candidates who are attempting to
ascend to high office.
Davis, who was crushed by 62 percent to 38 percent, was preceded in
defeat by state Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, who finished a distant
third in Pennsylvania’s May 18 Democratic gubernatorial primary; Ken
Lewis, an attorney who finished third in North Carolina’s May 4
Democratic Senate primary; and Cheryle Jackson, the former president
and CEO of the Chicago Urban League, who also came in third in the
Feb. 2 Illinois Senate primary.
The prospects for most of the remaining statewide black Democratic
candidates for governor or Senate aren’t much better. Georgia Attorney
General Thurbert Baker is currently languishing in third place in the
governor’s primary, trailing the front-runner, former Gov. Roy Barnes,
by close to 60 percentage points, according to the most recent poll.
State Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond, the likely Democratic
nominee in the Georgia Senate race, also trails GOP Sen. Johnny
Isakson by a wide margin, according to the most recent polling.
In Florida, the story is much the same: Rep. Kendrick Meek, the likely
Democratic nominee who gave up a safe House seat to run in the state's
open Senate race, also polls a distant third.
It’s not just those who are seeking to move up who have hit a wall:
Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick is in a reelection
dogfight, leading in the three-way race but still well under 50
percent in the polls. Embattled New York Gov. David Paterson, like
Patrick his state’s first black governor, has already declined to run
for a full term in the fall. The successor to Obama’s Senate seat in
Illinois, Democrat Roland Burris, announced long ago that he also
would not seek a full term given the almost insurmountable odds he
faced as a result of controversy related to his appointment.
What nearly all these Democratic candidates have found is that the new
political landscape looks a lot like the old one. And while the
president’s victory may have served as an inspiration for their
candidacies, it’s also serving as a detriment in some cases.
In Alabama and Georgia, in addition to historic racial voting
patterns, Obama himself is part of the problem. Though his campaign
amped up Georgia minority turnout in 2008 and held John McCain to a
surprisingly close 52 percent to 47 percent victory, his weak approval
ratings there — and in Alabama — are no asset to any Democrat running
statewide in 2010.
In Pennsylvania, where Obama is considerably more popular, historic
hurdles for minority candidates weren’t an overarching issue,
according to Williams, the Pennsylvania state senator. He attributed
his own third-place primary showing to a late entry into the
governor’s race, giving him only 13 weeks to run an abbreviated
statewide campaign.
One of the takeaways from his own experience, Williams said, is that
party insiders in many ways were a harder sell than the primary voters
themselves and that traditional party structures aren’t designed to
accommodate statewide African-American candidates.
“The insiders in the Democratic Party still hold that notion of race.
A lot of people who consider themselves liberals or progressives
didn’t think an African-American could win,” he said. “There is
something to be said about traditional Democratic organization and how
it operates — such as the money part.”
Spartakus
> "President" Obongo - The Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Black
> Candidates
>
> http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38049.html
>
> Politico: Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory was supposed to herald
> a new era in American politics, one in which the conventional wisdom
> that there were limits to how far ambitious African-American
> politicians could expect to go — nationally or statewide — had been
> demolished.
Artur Davis lost because he represented a district where one in five
citizens do not have health insurance, and he voted against the health
care reform bill.
Dänk 666
<PissingOffTheL...@yahoo.com> wrote (quoting article):
> “The insiders in the Democratic Party still hold that notion of race.
> A lot of people who consider themselves liberals or progressives
> didn’t think an African-American could win,” he said. “There is
> something to be said about traditional Democratic organization and how
> it operates — such as the money part.”
The Democrat party has always been an organization dominated by
whites, which has only recently co-opted African-Americans, on the
grounds that it represents their best interests, especially ironic (or
perhaps predictable?) considering that the Party used to represent
slave owners.
While the Party allows African-Americans to serve in lower-ranking
posts, the higher-ranking positions are reserved for whites, who are
able to represent the interests of black people more effectively than
blacks themselves. This is why although there are some African-
American representatives, there is only a single African-American
senator, Roland Burris, who was appointed to Barack Obama's vacated
seat under somewhat dubious circumstances.
As for Barack Obama, he appears to have hijacked the Party's
sophisticated political machine, co-opting it to serve himself rather
than the Party. The Party had actually fingered Hillary as their 2008
presidential nominee, but Obama's cultlike popularity prevented that
from happening. (Normally, the Party Machine selects the candidate in
advance, with the primary 'elections' just for show.)
But in the end, the first 'African-American' presidential candidate
was probably the furthest you could get from the African-American
community, having absolutely nothing in common with the average
American black person other than a similar skin color. Whites and
blacks alike noticed his smug elitism more than his skin color, and at
first he wound up alienating his Southside Chicago constituents, until
he took speaking lessons to teach him how to 'talk black.'
It was lily-white liberals who put Barack Obama in office. While 95%
of African-American voters did vote for Barack Obama in 2008, 90%
voted for Al Gore in 2000, and 89% for John Kerry in 2004, a paltry 5%
increase. So it is hard to say that Obama's race played much of a
factor among blacks, who likely voted for him simply because he was
the Democrat candidate.
White liberals, on the other hand, make up Obama's strongest base of
support, his cult of fanatical Kool-Aid drinking disciples. It is
they who accuse his critics of racism, though in reality they are the
true racists, since they voted for Obama just because he WAS black.
Blacks themselves voted for him because he was a Democrat, even though
he came across as even more smug and elitist and condescending as John
Kerry.
While blacks voted for Gore and Kerry in spite of their elitism,
Obama's elitism actually appealed to white liberals, with his skin
color being an added bonus, allowing them to cloak themselves in an
aura of More-Progressive-Than-Thou righteousness and boast that some
of their favorite politicians are black.
Here is a photo album featuring Castro Street on election night. San
Francisco was the headquarters of the Obama Cult, and as you browse
through the photos please take note of the race of the Kool-Aid
Kultists, and you will notice how they are almost all white:
http://s929.photobucket.com/albums/ad137/turista666/koolaid/
And here are photos of Barack Obama attending a fundraiser in San
Francisco in April 2008 (more white liberals):
http://zombietime.com/obama_visits_billionaires_row/