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Paterson: Obama Defeat Would Be Victory For Racism
 | This is about the clearest delivery of the message to date, though I have confidence that the Donks can wield an even-bigger sledgehammer in the days ahead ... |
Governor Paterson, delivering a speech today at the NAACP's 99th annual convention at Cincinnati, suggested that the defeat of Senator Obama in the presidential election would be a victory for racism in America.
Mr. Paterson, a former lieutenant governor whose sudden rise to power following the resignation of Eliot Spitzer has led the press to dub him the "accidental governor," said he is offended by the label and suggested that it was motivated by racism.
| As opposed to being an inept career pol ... |
Mr. Paterson, who supported Senator Clinton throughout her campaign and was a Clinton super-delegate before endorsing Mr. Obama after Mrs. Clinton conceded, cast the presidential race in stark racial terms, saying its outcome would decide whether the nation could finally move beyond its legacy of slavery and segregation.
"Can America reject the crucible of race that has dictated and pervaded all of our history to embrace an African American man who has the right polices for the next decade in this country? Can America overlook its past practices that were so grave that in 1820 the great Scottish Whig, Sydney Smith, writing in the Edinburgh Review, said of America: 'How can they protest the tyrannies of Europe when they torture and brutalize one-sixth of its population?' How can America get past this and elect an African-American president of the United States?" Mr. Paterson said.
He continued on and on and on and on: "Can America go past the crippling way that we've shot ourselves in the foot over and over, denying opportunity to people who are bright, to people who are qualified, to people who are able because they didn't look like us, or they didn't come from where we came from, or they are from a different gender, or they are from the African continent? Can America push that away and find new leadership? We'll find out in the next few months what America can do."
Mr. Paterson, who is New York's first black governor, ...
| ... which sort of suggests that the problem isn't as big as he paints it ... |
... also turned the focus on himself, strongly suggesting that people have belittled his governorship not because of the unusual way in which he took office but because of his race.
"I am known as New York's accidental governor. I would like to point out a couple of facts: The two adjoining states to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, have had three government changes in the last five years," he said. "None of those people were called the accidental governor."
| Because they were elected ... |
"... Nobody called Malcolm Wison, who became governor of New York in 1974 when Governor Rockefeller became vice president, he was referred to Google his name in any article as an accidental governor. Nobody called Teddy Roosevelt an accidental president. Nobody called Truman an accidental president. And nobody called LBJ an accidental anything. So why was this non-illustrious title held all of these years for me? I will leave the answer to all of you and the Freudians in the audience because I haven't had the chance to think about it," he said.
| No, of course not, no sirree ... |
Mr. Paterson, while praising a speech to the NAACP delivered yesterday by the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Senator McCain, echoed Mr. Obama's primary attack strategy by linking the senator to Bush administration policies.
"He wants to support policies of an administration that has seen jobs go overseas and the national savings cut in half, thousands of companies out of business and going out of business, state budgets wildly out of balance, more children going without food and without shelter than any time in the last 10 years, entire regions struggling for survival, people denied the opportunity of work and now others thrown out of work, and people who rather than living in prosperity as we were promised are more divided than ever, region against region, class against class, the halves and against the have-nots," Mr. Paterson said.
Posted by: Steve White 2008-07-18 |
