Rantings of a Black Polemicist

The “second black president”?

Wednesday, March 24th, 2004 | Politics, Race | 3 Comments

John Kerry says he “wouldn’t be upset to be named the second [black president]“. Evidently, Bill Clinton was the first.

Kerry would never stoop to pandering.

Did I miss something? Apparently so, according to Toni Morrison, who in her 1998 New Yorker essay wrote that Clinton was:

“Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

To Ms. Morrison, I point out the obvious: possessing the aforementioned characteristics do not make a person black, for crying out loud. What kills me is that many blacks I come across really believe that Clinton was the next best thing to a black being elected into the presidency.

“I have never been to a single strategy meeting that was important with William Jefferson Clinton with a black face in the room,” Dick Morris told radio host Sean Hannity on 1/13/2003. “Yet he got all the black vote.”

Interestingly, two of George W. Bush’s most senior advisers - Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice - are black. But that didn’t seem to matter to the protesters that booed him while visiting Martin Luther King’s memorial last January.

Not surprisingly, when Bush announced that he would support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, the left accused him of pandering to his base. Where are the accusations of pandering when Kerry tells an “urban” audience that he wants to be the next “black” president?

I say to Mr. Kerry: “[Negro], please.”