Posted on 10/31/2002 4:24:27 PM PST by joesnuffy
Thursday, Oct. 31, 2002 12:14 p.m. EST
Dems' Mondale Pick Snubbed Qualified Black Candidate
Democratic Party power brokers in Minnesota picked Walter Mondale as their best hope to retain the late Paul Wellstone's senate seat after passing over a qualified black candidate for racial reasons.
"There was one other possibility [besides Mondale]," reports Robert Novak in his Thursday column. "Alan Page, the 57-year-old former Notre Dame and Minnesota Vikings football star who has been an associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court since 1993."
The Dems went with Mondale instead, says Novak, because "the [Democratic Farmer Labor Party] apparently did not want to risk running the African-American Page in an overwhelmingly Caucasian state."
The racial snub comes amidst reports that Bill Clinton, who, as head of the Democratic Party could have insisted that the black Minnesotan be given a shot, has been advising party chairman Terry McAuliffe to redirect financial resources away from African-American New York gubernatorial hopeful Carl McCall - and instead pour the cash into the bid to defeat Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.
McAuliffe loosened the party purse strings for McCall last week only after Rev. Al Sharpton threatened to urge blacks to reconsider their monolithic support for Democrats. A similar call by Sharpton last year is widely credited with the defeat of New York City mayoral hopeful Mark Green, whose election was considered a sure thing until his campaign alienated the powerful black leader.
News of the race-based snub by Minnesota Democrats can only exacerbate the growing feeling within the black community that their support is being taken for granted.
A survey released Wednesday by the Joint Center for Political and Economic studies showed that the percentage of African-Americans who called themselves Democrats has plunged from 74 percent to 63 percent in just the last two years.
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
DNC
Most of all, tell them that for umpteen years they have voted dEMOCRAT and it has gotten them nowhere!
Pound it into their heads over and over again.
Problem is, there just aren't enough blacks in Minnesota to make a difference.
Now, here in Maryland, there just might be. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend picked a white ex-Republican as her running mate. That must have pissed off at least a dozen blacks.
Would the Republicans really want him? If he has lived as long as he has and seen what the DemocRATs have done, and he hasn't switched yet, what good is he?
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