Billionaire BET founder Robert L. Johnson, who has publicly done little more than make an ass out of himself in public as a supporter of Hillary, continues down the familiar bottom-feeding path of race-baiting, this time by lifting the wisdom of Geraldine Ferraro.
“What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called ‘Jerry Smith’ and he says I’m going to run for president, would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote?” Johnson said. “And the answer is, probably not.”Last time I looked, 90% of the black vote alone won’t elect you President of the United States. And it’s balls to say the Obama campaign has a hair-trigger on “anything racial” (definition, please?) when the Clinton campaign and its surrogates have not hesitated in playing upon the worst fears in people in regards to race, a topic that is rarely engaged on any rational level. Why Bob Johnson himself didn’t mind conjuring up stereotypical imagery himself back during the primary in South Carolina.“Geraldine Ferraro said it right,” Johnson added. “The problem is, Geraldine Ferraro is white. This campaign has such a hair-trigger on anything racial it is almost impossible for anybody to say anything.”
See below the fold.
This is what he said in SC:
At a rally here for Mrs. Clinton at Columbia College, Mr. Johnson was defending recent comments that Mrs. Clinton made regarding Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. She did not mean to take any credit away from him, Mr. Johnson said, when she said that it took President Johnson to sign the civil rights legislation he fought for.Unfortunately his mop-up job sucked big time.“And to me, as an African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood - and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book - when they have been involved.”
My comments today were referring to Barack Obama’s time spent as a community organizer, and nothing else. Any other suggestion is simply irresponsible and incorrect.Rule #1 of non-denial denials, Bob — it’s apparently more in vogue these days to claim phrase confusion, than oh, you know, dropping an A-bomb like that.
Francis L. Holland nails it:
If being Black is such a great advantage in a run for the presidency, then why has the United States had an unbroken string of 43 consecutive white presidents? Why didn’t Al Sharpton win the nomination in 2004 if being Black is the “ticket to ride”?Perhaps Bob Johnson hasn’t seen this NYT article.
Compare Barack Obama to the other Democratic candidates for the presidency this year: How many of them graduated from Harvard Law School? Was any of them editor of the Harvard Law Review? Have any of them written two outstanding New York Times best sellers that actually stand out as great literature instead of just vanity campaign literature? Hillary graduated from Yale Law School, but she wasn’t on Yale’s law review.If you’ve ever wondered if it was possible for a Black man to manifest color-aroused antagonism toward another Black man, well BET Bob Johnson has proven that it is, indeed, possible.
The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990’s. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20’s were jobless - that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20’s were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.Yeah, black men in America really have a leg up.Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990’s and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20’s who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30’s, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.
…With the shift from factory jobs, unskilled workers of all races have lost ground, but none more so than blacks. By 2004, 50 percent of black men in their 20’s who lacked a college education were jobless, as were 72 percent of high school dropouts, according to data compiled by Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton and author of the forthcoming book “Punishment and Inequality in America” (Russell Sage Press). These are more than double the rates for white and Hispanic men.
Related:
* Filing the edges off of racism
* Obama: speaking the unspeakable about race
* The difficult discussions people don’t want to have
* Andrew Cuomo: ‘You Can’t Shuck And Jive’ at a press conf
* Huff Post: Clinton allies investigate forming ‘Anybody-But-Obama’ 527 group
* Talking New Hampshire, race, and gender issues
* Race, gender, the MSM and NH: audio from my segment on Mike Signorile Show
* Obama and race: our country is so confused
27 Responses to “BET’s Bob Johnson regurgitates ‘Obama’s only successful because he’s black’”
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Obama didn’t start out with 90% of the black vote, he had to earn it. Lots of black folks supported other Democratic candidates at the beginning of the primary process; some black party bigwigs and regular voters still do support Clinton.
Another semi-related topic, on the Obamas and race:
http://dailykos.com/story/2008/4/15/03323/3208/417/495873
Michelle Obama has been utterly demonized for a few misplaced comments in the same way that Theresa Heinz-Kerry was (and to a lesser degree, Elizabeth Edwards, Tipper Gore, etc.) I’d at least rather be on the road with them than with the incumbent First Lady.
Meanwhile, Republican Geoff Davis calling Senator Obama “boy” is completely ignored.
I saw this late last night too, and was hoping Aaron Magruder might have something to say in response. He’s not very fond of Johnson or BET, you know.
Well, duh, so is he. I assume that he’s black.
Hell, the republicans can let up on Obama and keep pouring it on to McCain’s veneer of relevancy and apply a thick covering of turd polish over the many gaffs that McSame is going to be making from now until his coronation as the oldest and perhaps the shortest lived president in American history. The Black people are doing such a bang up job of ripping their fellow candidate to such fine shreds after all…
Intense blind idealism isn’t reserved for just the blight wing party…
“Obama didn’t start out with 90% of the black vote, he had to earn it. Lots of black folks supported other Democratic candidates at the beginning of the primary process”
Yes, you’ve got that right! Bob Johnson’s misrepresentation of the facts is so patently and demonstrably false that it is more than just revisionist history. It’s outright lies. Anyone with broadband can google the polls that show that Barack Obama had less than far less than 30% of the Black people’s support when he first started talking about running for the presidency. The discussion last year, based on the polls, was whether Barack Obama could get 50% of the Black vote, or whether Hillary would get the lion’s share.
Barack Obama constantly impressed us while Hillary constantly insulted us. What did she THINK we would do under those circumstances?!
Let this be a lesson to Hillary and every color-aroused campaigner. I will vote against people who say this kind of crap every single time! And I will write until my fingers drop off to inform and encourage other Black people to do the same!
It absolutely floors me that no one counters that if Hillary’s last name was Johnson she wouldn’t be in the place she is. It astounds me that people think that being the first lady for 8 years qualifies her to be President.
Pam, I am a bit surprised to see you use this tactic.
It’s similar to not listening to women that say they disagree with feminism for one reason or another. “We” know better, so we don’t need to listen to you.
It’s similar to not listening to women that say they were not raped. “We” know better, so we don’t have to listen to you.
It can’t be that Bob Johnson honestly feels this way. It can’t be that many people do not consider Ferraro’s or Johnson’s remarks racist or sexist (or feel Obama’s remarks were elitist.) People that disagree with you can’t be honest, sincere, thoughtful, rational people. You know more than they do.
Perhaps you should just call him an Uncle Tom.
What do you call the statues that stood in the front yards of the plantations to hold the horses reins? I’ve forgotten that over time…
Is that where ‘yard ape’ came from? Just asking…
There’s a hidden problem with the “take a random white guy” theory.
I’m going to say this badly, but the idea is pretty clear in my head. It’s one of those “sucks but true” things. The bar is much lower for the average white guy running for public office.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t great, talented, charismatic young white guys out there. But they blend in, if they even get elected. And the herd… well, this blog frequently documents the quality of the white people we end up with in office.
But black politicians are, for better or worse, under higher scrutiny, and are far more likely to be noticed and remarked upon. So when a genuine standout shows up, who happens to be among the people getting the higher scrutiny anyway, he really stands out.
A white guy, equally talented, would probably have been quietly co-opted by the machine, to “groom him properly” and risen more slowly through the ranks, because the machine knew what to do with him.
It’s pretty clear that the machine has no idea what to do with Obama, and when whatever standard sidelining tricks didn’t work, he launched ahead of the pack.
The “a white guy wouldn’t have managed this” idea can mean two diametrically opposed things. The first is that Obama really isn’t qualified at all, but is just riding along on his skin color. The other is the opposite, that he is fully qualified, and on top of that, has managed to take what are seen by many as handicaps and used them, either personally or politically, to his advantage.
You can make a case that Bill Cosby couldn’t have done what he did if he wasn’t black, either. But that is more a statement about his drive and talent than anything else.
Besides, the ONLY reason to make this point is to claim that Obama is getting where he is due to patronage and behind the scenes support. As though Clinton and McCain have less. As though Bush got where he is on his own merits. Wha?
Sambos
Most of them have been ‘whitewashed’. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a blackfaced one.
You know why that ‘take a random white guy’ thing doesn’t work?
Because of John Edwards. He has exactly Obama’s level of experience, and yeah, when he decided to run for president, people definitely took him seriously. He was taken seriously enough to be chosen as Kerry’s running mate last go-round, and he was seen as a real contender in the run-up to the primary season.
So, yeah, actually, if Barack Obama was a white freshman senator with an ordinary name, actually, the evidence shows that, sure, he definitely would have had a shot at getting where he is now.
Peter, what you is a topic that really rubs me raw when it comes to music and jazz more specifically.
It’s frikkin amazing just how much lower a bar there is for white performers in jazz. No black man or women could get away with the insipid stuff that Kenny G puts out. Not even if it’s of the smooth easy listening jazz variety. For example, I think Regina Carter is pretty good, but I don’t really get how fantastic she really is until I listen to some mediocre jazz instrumentalist. Joss Stone is okay, but she can’t really hold a candle to relatively unknown black soul singers like Shemekia Copeland or Barbara Morrison.
The sad thing is, it isn’t as if there aren’t awesome white jazz singers and players (I love Sheila Jordan and Patricia Barber, for instance) . It’s just that the system tolerates and promotes mediocre talents based on looks, while for blacks and asians, you gotta be out of this world good just to get that foot in the door.
Consider the possibility that being black in US politics could be a disadvantage generally and while still being an advantage to Barack Obama.
Since black politicians usually climb up from local offices or legislative districts that are primarily black, it is very difficult for them to repackage themselves for majority white electorates. Obama is one of very few prominent black officials who has managed to bypass that obstacle.
Before Obama, the only black leader who was really positioned to do to move to the national scene was Harold Ford Jr, a Tennessee congressman who was the scion of a powerful political family and won his father’s congressional seat at age 26.
Because the family political apparatus was extremely powerful, he was in a position to build a center-right reputation as a legislator without facing serious primary opposition from the left as a result.
He was the keynote speaker at the 2000 Democratic convention, and narrowly lost a 2006 Senate race to Bob Corker who ran racist ads against him.
Ford spent about a decade as a representative using the strength of his political machine to cover for him in his majority black district in Memphis, while he cultivated a reputation he could sell to affluent, conservative whites in Nashville and poor, conservative whites in East Tennessee. He almost made it.
Obama faced much weaker opposition from the Republicans and won his Senate seat. Now he’s drinking Ford’s milkshake. The hard part is getting to the Senate. Ford and Obama each laid their groundwork, and Obama had the better set of circumstances.
Once he got to the Senate, Obama was automatically one of the most prominent black leaders in the country, which makes him one of the most prominent Democrats in the country, and automatically a celebrity, and therefore, immediately on the presidential shortlist.
I think it’s very uncontroversial to say that a white freshman Senator would have had a harder time running for President than Obama has.
Mitchforth, I dunno… Barack Obama was a rockstar in his party in a way that Harold Ford never was. Barack Obama was the Beatles to Harold Ford’s Bing Crosby.
I believe the young white Senator who successfuly ran for president and won was John F. Kennedy (yes, he was re-elected to another senate term before running). But the precedent for the young candidate rushing into a race to strike while the iron is hot is already established.
Look at the republican black politicians. It seems that most have gotten where they are by not playing their race. What I mean by that is that I read an article on Condi Rice that stated that she was very much against racial quotas even though she directly benefited from them in her education.
She was portrayed in the article as having ‘made it’ and being determined to make sure that no one else comes up the same way that she did.
I thought that was interesting. So being black is good to get the favors but once you are out there with your ideology blinders on it’s shit on the black folk. An interesting article. What do you call that? Aunt Tom? Backstabbing bitch? Hypocrite? Republican? They all fit I guess.
So many black politicians seem to be republican because they must really hate themselves and their race. It’s really a shame. A crying shame… But didn’t women, after a time, believe that they had to ‘deny’ that they were women to get ahead in ‘bidness’? I don’t know…
Sambo’s. Yeah.
I remember being a kid in North Carolina and seeing (stop me if you’ve heard this story before) ‘colored only’ signs, and yes, seeing the ‘Sambo’s’ outside of peoples homes. If you got yourself off the beaten trail there was no telling what you would find.
Well, Obama is a guy who has a real talent for being in the right place at the right time.
According to a story in the NYT a couple of weeks ago, when he was at HLS, the school was divided by major arguments over Affirmative Action. Obama abstained from the discussion and aligned himself with a group of conservative law review editors who backed his candidacy for law review president, which allowed them a convenient out for allegations that their position was racist while burnishing Obama’s resume.
Ford was probably better positioned as far as laying the groundwork in advance for a Senate run. Obama lost his attempt to run for the House in 2000, and then announced his senate candidacy in 2003. He got to the Senate through some extraordinary luck. His most serious opponent in the Democratic primary, millionaire Blair Hull, was rocked by allegations that he beat his wife.
Then, the Republican candidate, Jack Ryan, had some tremendously embarrassing stuff aired in his divorce, and he dropped out of the race. Alan Keyes, who doesn’t even live in Illinois, showed up in August 2004 so Obama wouldn’t run unopposed, but it wasn’t a seriously contested election.
Ford ran a fiercely contested election in a very white, southern, conservative state, the Republicans ran a phenomenally dirty campaign and Corker still won by less than three percent.
Obama’s presidential campaign has caught fire because he’s incredible on the stump. But Obama also had the benefit of several tremendously popular viral internet videos which provided a whole lot of name recognition and hipness, at zero cost to the campaign. Barack has star quality, but Obama Girl, will.i.am and especially Oprah are a big factor in what made his candidacy.
Ford is smooth on television, but I can’t say he would have picked up the same magic. Ford is a lot more conservative, and he’s single, which isn’t good in a presidential candidate. I think if Ford had won his Senate election, he’d have held off until 2012 or 2016 before running for president. But if Obama is the Beatles, that’s something that’s happened in the last six months or so.
speaking of Edwards… didn’t Pandagon and half the pro Edwards blogosphere, just 6 months ago say that the reason Edwards was the distant third was because the media decided the black guy versus the woman made for a more interesting narrative?
isn’t that the same thing, plus some more wiggle room maybe, as saying Obama got where he is in this race because he’s black
That’s an excellent point, Onymous.
We have long recognized that our culture runs on trends, fads, cycles, waves, tipping points and is not in general linear. It should be completely non controversial to say that part of what has got Obama to the point he is at, is the luck of being at the right time in the right place.
This is not to denigrate Obama in anyway, it is just to recognize that the rise in “mainstream” popularity of African Americans in sports, tv, movies, music, and the tearing down of walls in schools, colleges, professions, means that right now, being a Black Male could indeed be a very “lucky” place to be in the race, especially when pitted against another classic underdog, the White Female.
But remember, to even mention this as a possibility demonstrates you are a racist.
Condi was born in 1954 in Birmingham, Alabama.
She went to University of Denver in 1970, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa at 19. She had a PhD at 26.
I don’t think academic institutions were practicing affirmative action at that point, but her father taught at U of Denver.
I have no idea whether her race or gender helped the advancement of her academic career in the 80s or not. It probably had something to do with her getting the job of Provost at Stanford. The various Republicans who she advised on policy in the eighties were unlikely to have been practicing affirmative action in their hiring, and Condi was apparently widely recognized as a leading expert in her field.
One of the primary objections to affirmative action by black people who don’t support the practice is the poisonous assumption that any accomplished black person must be a beneficiary of affirmative action policies. I don’t think George W. Bush had a black woman quota to fill when he was picking a National Security Adviser or a Secretary of State.
Edwards is from North Carolina, and the only primary he won was South Carolina. He stayed in the race through Super Tuesday, but it belonged to Kerry after Dean melted down.
I’ll see if I can find that article. I save a lot of articles and probably saved it somewhere.
As I remember it wasn’t from some normal fleabag dis-info-tainment source. I was shocked that someone could potentially turn their back on their own race… Well, but republicans turn their backs on other Americans everyday… Somethings are a mystery to me…
Edwards is from North Carolina, and the only primary he won was South Carolina. He stayed in the race through Super Tuesday, but it belonged to Kerry after Dean melted down.
Your point? I never said he was favored to win, or presented serious competition for Kerry. Simply that his candidacy was taken seriously even though he was a junior senator and almost completely unknown prior to the 2004 primary season. The white equivalent of Obama, if you will.
Compare Edwards’ run in either 2004 or 2008 to the campaigns of Al Sharpton, Carol Mosely-Braun, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Wesley Clark, etc. etc. etc. etc. A lot of people run for president at the outset of each election cycle. Most don’t win a single primary. A great many barely rate a mention in the MSM.
The fact that Edwards ended up towards the top of the heap in 2004 (and was tentatively considered a contender this year) implies that, yeah, a particularly gifted junior senator with no real name recognition does stand a chance.
For that matter, how did being black push Obama to the top of the heap even though quite a few black politicians with about the same level of experience have run before without managing to come nearly this close?
To believe all this “it’s because Obama is black” nonsense, you basically have to be completely ignorant of the last 2 election cycles at least, and relatively uninformed about politics and the history of presidential hopefuls in general. Obama is not the first black person to run for president, guys.
Not to mention, of course, that the general consensus a year ago, from the same sorts of folks who are now saying “it’s because he’s black”, was that America simply isn’t ready to elect a black president, no way nohow is that gonna happen anytime soon. That’s a HUGE ideological leap, no?
Yeah, no one has even mentioned Douglas Wilder who ran in 1992 as the former governor of Virginia. That should have been seen as electoral gold, particularly since, as many have opined here, being black would have been an additional bonus (supposedly).Anyone who saw Obama’s speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 knew that he was being talked about as presidential material from that moment– he even bore mention by name in Neil Young’s “Living With War” album when it came out in 2006. The guy is a rockstar politician in the same way that Kennedy was a rockstar– and no one says, “Oh, Kennedy only got as far as he did because he was Catholic,” even though he had a distinct advantage of being able to get Catholic voters on his side if they might have otherwise supported another candidate.
Was Obama in the right place at the right time? Sure, but that’s because all successful presidential candidates are.
if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called ‘Jerry Smith’ and he says I’m going to run for president . . .
How ’bout taking a freshman senator from North Carolina named John Edwards?
How ’bout a former one-term Congressman and unsuccessful senate candidate from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln?
Being black is such a bonus that there have been only three black Senators since Reconstruction. But Bob Johnson doesn’t realize that he wouldn’t be a billionaire today if he wasn’t black. Face it, who would watch White Entertainment Television?
But further, Bob Johnson wouldn’t be a billionaire if his name wasn’t Johnson. When I was a kid in Chicago, there were exactly three wealthy black men, and they were all named Johnson: George Johnson of Johnson Products, John Johnson of Johnson Publishing, and Al Johnson of Johnson Cadillac. And like Bob, George and John made their fortunes by targeting the black community. (The well-off of all races bought cars from Al Johnson.)