'Iowa’s Black Caucusgoers' [View all]

[Number23]

'Iowa’s Black Caucusgoers'
Charles M. Blow
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/01/opinion/iowas-black-caucusgoers.html?_r=0

As Wayne Ford, co-founder and co-chairman of the Iowa Brown and Black Forum, told me Sunday, the level of excitement in the black community is “nowhere near where it was 2008” when Barack Obama was a candidate.

Also, the preference for Clinton over Bernie Sanders was a two-pronged assessment; it was a sophisticated weighing of comfort and of policy without an absolutism of good vs. bad, but rather a matter of degrees better or worse, more real or more fantasy.

... For Sanders’s part, he seemed to be judged too unfamiliar and too absent, particularly down the homestretch. This feels to me like a terrible tactical error. No matter how much his positions and policies may benefit black voters, they are no more interested than any other group of voters in a long-distance love affair. You have to show up. You have to put in the time.

Money Quote:

On the policy front, many simply found Sanders’s policies unrealistically ambitious, an over-promising of giveaways. As one woman put it, “He sounds like Oprah: ‘You get a car! And you get a car! And you get a car!’ How is he going to pay for all that?

Not one. Damn. Word. in this piece will be of any surprise to any of the regulars in this forum.

The piece pretty much concludes two things: that Black folks even in freaking Iowa went overwhelmingly for Hillary and nobody black is even half as excited about this election as we were when Obama's name was on the ticket. Again, these are two things that everyone here already knew.

Not that it will do anything to diminish the "black folks just don't know who Sanders is yet" garbage that despite months of being told how ignorant and offensive this is, still floods this web site. And always seems to be inevitably followed by an embarrassingly idiotic "Black folks are feeeeeeling the BERRRRNNN!!!!11one" video that is as divorced from reality as it is quality production skills. This piece does nothing but corroborate what black members of this forum have been saying for MONTHS and we all know that it will once again be dismissed by the willfully clueless who are determined to see the world only as they want it to be and not as it is.