The Gantt Report
United States President Barack Obama spent a considerable amount of time traveling across America trying to drum up votes and support for Democratic candidates seeking victories in the recent 2009 elections.
Obama is given credit for a record-breaking voter turnout in 2008, however his 2009 “coat tails” seemed to be more like a halter top, short and revealing!
It appears as though about 80% of the voters that turned out to support Obama in 2008 stayed at home on election day in 2009.
Was it the President’s fault that voter turnout was low? No, but as the national head of the Democratic Party some of the blame has to be laid at Obama’s feet.
The nation’s Democrats were out worked by their Republican counterparts.
The Democratic candidates once gave out free chicken and beer, sometimes fried mullet fish, to generate votes. Today, many Democratic candidates don’t give the voters anything. All they say is that a candidate is Black, a candidate supports Black people or that a candidate belongs to the same party as the nation’s Black president.
That political strategy is both foul and fowl, a political bird that won’t fly!
It didn’t matter in 2009 elections if the Democratic candidates were Black or white. What mattered was that Blacks put Democrats in power and in the White House and Democrats still couldn’t deliver on many of the promises that they made to the voters of all colors!
Black political activists continue to endorse first and put certain politicians first and those same politicians continue to put Black people last. Blacks are the last to get jobs, the last to get government contracts, the last to get pardons, the last to get funding, the last to get meetings with elected officials, the last to get equal rights and justice and the last to get meaningful health care and other legislation passed by Congress and signed by the President.
I’m no Miss Cleo but I think the 2010 elections are in danger of producing similar Election Day results. If the national, state and local Democratic Parties don’t stop taking Black voters for granted, don’t stop using closet Klansmen and racial opportunists to influence African American voters and Black communities and don’t stop hoarding Black campaign contributions and giving it all to white political consultants, white media outlets, white printers, white mailers, white caterers, white pollsters and other white vendors, then they will lose races again and again and again.
Black people vote for candidates they know. If they don’t know a candidate, they will be best influenced by political professionals that they know and trust.
If a white Mayoral candidate in my Atlanta hometown can get 30% of Black votes cast, then white candidates, with the right African American professional political assistance, can get more than ten percent of Black votes anywhere regardless of what political party the candidate belongs to.
