Hillary using Blacks again

Clarence McKee
BlakPac Blogger

Several weeks before it was in the headlines, this blog pointed out that Bernie Sanders was not going to “lay down and concede the black vote” and showed how he was making an effort to break through Hillary Clinton’s so-called “firewall” of black support in South Carolina.

With the primary days away, Sanders and Clinton are playing black voters in South Carolina like a violin. And, it appears that blacks like the music.

Sanders even journeyed to New York to pay homage and kiss the ring of the Democrat establishment’s “Godfather of black America,” the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Clinton is expected to do the same as if the endorsement of the Congressional Black Caucus was not enough. Blacks had better enjoy the attention while they can.

As said previously in this space, the only time blacks have the opportunity to leverage their power in the Democratic Party is during primaries.

So how are Sanders and Clinton going about firming up black support? The old fashion way — racial pandering and playing the race card.

How things have changed.

Long before the millennials, the race card was a successful political strategy used by white Democrats pandering to the racial fears of whites in the South.

When Alabama Gov. George Wallace said during his 1963 inauguration “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” he certainly wasn’t talking to blacks.

He won election in 1962 with more votes than any previous Alabama gubernatorial candidate largely by resisting integration and the growing civil rights movement.

When he sought the presidency in 1968, he knew what racial “code words” to use to get his message across to whites worried about integration in the south and riots in the north: “states’ rights,” “law and order,” and “stand up for America.”

Today the racial code words of Clinton and Democrats are not directed against blacks, but rather are used to get their votes. Clinton knows that black votes and endorsements from black politicians come on the cheap.

All you have to do is throw out a few slogans, point out obvious problems and offer few if any concrete solutions to improve conditions which, after seven years of Democrat Obama, have not improved — and in many cases have worsened for blacks.

What are some of the code words Clinton and Sanders are using to see who can “out black” each other: police reform, racism, high incarceration rates; and more recently even stooping to exploit the water crisis in Flint, Mich.

Don’t be surprised if they commend Beyoncé’s anti-police performance during the Super Bowl Halftime show. Rather than offer solutions to heal racial wounds, they use rhetoric as salt to fester them.

However, when it comes to pandering, Hillary Clinton is among the best. She is counting on black loyalty to Bill Clinton to keep blacks on her plantation. Remember, before Obama, many blacks dubbed him “the first black president.”

Members of the black political elite and the liberal press throw “palms at her feet.” They dare not tell blacks the real facts on the Clinton record regarding blacks.

They, and Sanders, should take a look at a recent article in The Nation by black scholar Michelle Alexander entitled “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.” Alexander asks what the Clintons have done to deserve black’s praise and devotion. The answer — not much.  George Farrell, the Chair of Blakpac.gop, says that Hillary and the Democratic Party uses Blacks like props in a play.

She states that from “the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted — and Hillary Clinton supported — decimated black America.”

For example, Alexander points out that Bill Clinton “presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history” and supported the 100-to-1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine which caused “staggering racial injustice in sentencing.”

As to jobs, she wrote that while unemployment sank to historical lows for whites in the 1990s, “the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who didn’t have a college degree rose to its highest level ever . . . propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate.”

Another fact revealed is that by the end of Clinton’s presidency: “More than half of working-age African-American men in many large urban areas were saddled with criminal records and subjected to legalized discrimination in employment, housing, access to education and basic public benefits — relegated to a permanent second-class status eerily reminiscent of Jim Crow.”

Amen!

One could ask Sanders or Clinton what blacks got from the Clinton — or the Obama administration — that they would replicate?

The answer — the same as they are getting from them today — rhetoric.

Alexander accurately states that for Democrats, doing “something concrete to improve the conditions under which most blacks live is generally not required.”

And, as to Hillary, she hit the nail on the head: “It seems that we — black people — are her winning card, one that Hillary is eager to play. And it seems we’re eager to get played. Again.”

What a charade!

www.blakpac.gop