Ramblings' Journal

Ketchup Boy insists black vote will decide election

John Kerry, continuing his pandering to various minority groups, told the predominantly-black NNPA in an interview that blacks will decide the November election.

“I think the Black vote can decide this election,” Kerry said in an exclusive interview with the NNPA News Service. “Not only [am I] not taking it for granted. I think it’s the most important vote in the election.”

“Compare our records,” Kerry urges. “I have a 35-year record of consistently standing up and fighting for inclusion, for equal opportunity that I began in the 1960s in the Civil Rights Movement, that I fought for when I came back from Vietnam alongside brothers and sisters of color who were mistreated when they came home from Vietnam, who had been met with discrimination.”

He continues. “I fought for minority set-asides, I wrote the historically underutilized business legislation. I fought for empowerment zones. I fought for educational opportunity for after-school programs for Head Start. All of the things that George Bush has cut, all of the things George Bush attacks, I have fought for.”

“He celebrates Martin Luther King’s birthday by sending a challenge to the Michigan case on affirmative action,” Kerry says, referring to Bush. “The next year, he celebrates it by appointing [conservative Judge] Charles Pickering to the court of the United States of America. He is completely insensitive to all of the communities of color in the country. He hasn’t fulfilled his promises with respect to being a uniter, not a divider. And I think it’s important to draw those contrasts and I intend to do it.”

Kerry, nor anyone else in the Democratic National Committee takes the fact that George W. Bush has named more blacks to key positions in his cabinet than any other Administration in history. Many blacks insist that this is mere tokenism, and dismiss Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Education Rod Paige and others as "not really black."

Kerry's comments come in light of comments by black Democrats as well as Republicans that the Democratic party takes the black vote for granted.

So which is it, Ketchup Boy? Do the Dems take the black vote for granted? Or is it an integral part of the November vote? And if it is, then why is there only this passive lip service to campaigning in the black community? We only hear about tacit photo ops at the "black-church-of-the-week"; and even less so, now that the fall campaign is in full swing.

Now comes candidate Kerry with his pandering to blacks. And black America, simply because of the fact that John Kerry is the "not-Bush" candidate, will lap it up. The visceral hatred of George W. Bush among much of black America blinds the masses to rational thought in terms of comparing the candidates.

Black America has become one of the few places that Kerry doesn't meet the forensic challenge to his continued contradictions.

Posted by mhking at September 24, 2004 07:39 AM