It’s not Herman Cain’s comment that many African Americans are “brainwashed” against conservatism or his declaration that he “won’t stay on the Democrat plantation” that really infuriates liberals. It’s the presidential candidate’s very existence. Blacks aren’t supposed to be conservative.
And Herman Cain certainly isn’t supposed to be sitting atop the field of Republican presidential aspirants. But that’s where a new CBS News poll places the former pizza king, garnering, along with former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the support of 17 percent of Republican primary voters. Cain’s gain is not sitting well among those with race on the brain.
“Herman Cain is probably well liked by some of the Republicans because it hides the racist elements of the Republican Party,” quipped comedienne Janeane Garofalo. “Herman Cain provides this great opportunity so you can say ‘Look, this is not a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-female, anti-gay movement. Look we have a black man.’” CNN’s Cornell Belcher actually called the African American presidential candidate “racist” and “bigoted.” Jesse Jackson described the former Godfather’s Pizza chief executive officer’s characterization of the relationship between African Americans and the Democratic Party “demeaning and insulting” to black voters.
The talking head really losing his head over Herman Cain is Roland Martin. The CNN pundit writes, “You would think that a black man born and raised in Georgia, who was a teenager during the civil rights movement, would understand the transition of African-Americans from voting overwhelmingly Republican to strongly supporting the Democratic Party.”
Why?
During the civil rights movement, every member of the Georgia congressional delegation was a Democrat and every member of the Georgia congressional delegation save one voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The only African Americans elected to Congress from Georgia prior to the civil rights movement were Republicans. When Republican Fletcher Thompson helped break the Democratic stranglehold on the state’s Washington delegation in 1966, he gave an African American a job in his local office. However pedestrian this sounds today, this had never happened in that district. Even as seemingly benign a symbol of the New South as Jimmy Carter won election as governor after his campaign peddled a photo of his opponent with black basketball players to rallying Klansmen and as governor visited the Confederados—descendants of American Southerners who emigrated to Brazil following the Civil War—in 1972.
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