Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan tonight said that the only reason Barack Obama is close to clinching the nomination of the Democratic party is because he’s black. “If Barack Obama were not African-American, John Edwards would have defeated him. Geraldine Ferraro, while taking a lot of heat, was right in what she said. She spoke the truth.” What is it about Obama being black that people feel has been so key to his success? Is it the fact that he’s received a huge majority of the black vote? Because black people have been voting for white people for years and to say that they would have all gone to someone else is not realistic. And who is ANYONE ANYWHERE EVER to say what or who someone would be if  their races were reversed? We should put Black Like Me on Pat Buchanan’s “to read” list.

Buchanan also rambled about how the media coverage has been unfair to West Virginians, “you’re sitting here calling them poor and uneducated or half-educated…” In fact, in comparison to the rest of the country, WV is last in everything good (literacy rates) and first in everything bad (poverty). It’s funny that Buchanan demands the “truth” be spoken with something as unknowable as who or where Barack Obama would be if he were white, but when it comes to the facts of the state of WV, he demands a level of courtesy that Clinton refuses to extend to states she lost to Obama. I recall her campaign saying things along the lines of “those states that Obama won are small and don’t matter. We’re looking at the big states that matter in the general election.” Maybe they should have run their campaign like they were in a primary and not a general election like Obama did. Sure he won small states that aren’t huge players in the general election, but Clinton’s argument that she won states vital to the Democrats in November and she should be the nominee because she did good in those states is weak and has been weakening since Indiana and North Carolina. But we’re reminded of the same point made before; this is not the general election. More and more people are beginning to see through the parallels that Clinton is trying to draw between what happened in the primaries to what will happen in November.