Running Against An Opponent Who Makes Loyalty to Our First Black President An Issue
That could be fraught with the potential for some old fashioned racial divisiveness, or at the very least things could devolve quickly into an ugly rehash of the 2008 presidential election campaign when accusations flew daily over who was or was not playing the race card. I was doing a lot of political blogging back in 2008. In fact for most of that primary season I was backing Hillary Clinton. I remember well how bitter things became. At the time I thought the accusations made against both Bill and Hillary Clinton for being or behaving racist were way overblown. I felt the same about some counter charges against the Obama campaign over their supposedly playing the race card also. But it was a pretty big deal at the time nonetheless. It still is for some people today, but I have no interest in going back to re-litigate any of that. What's more interesting to me though, is that neither does Bernie Sanders.
With the success of his presidential campaign probably resting on the number of African American voters he can win over from those currently supporting Hillary Clinton, Bernie shows no interest in going there; back to when charges of race baiting hung thick in the political air. Regardless of how well or ill founded those charges ultimately were – they obviously exposed raw feelings at the time and contributed to shifting fortunes during that 2008 contest. A more typical candidate would have had a team of opposition research experts pouring over old transcripts and video tapes from the 2008 campaign, looking for material to exploit to unravel the ties of loyalty many African Americans now feel toward Hillary Clinton. The furthest Bernie Sanders will go however, when his own degree of loyalty to Barack Obama is attacked, is to remind people that he never personally ran against Obama. Bernie never raises doubts over how that race was run, although obviously he could.
So the next time anyone even hints at suggesting that Bernie Sanders has or is going negative against Hillary Clinton, an appropriate response might be to laugh in their face.
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before we can get the money out of politics .
