He Thinks We're That Stupid… Are We?
By Jayar Jackson
Bob Johnson, founder and seller of BET (Black Entertainment Television) and current owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats, is tossing his opinions about the presidential race back in the news.
“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...”
When Ferraro came out with the assumption in March that Obama was lucky to be Black, she was called everything from racist to close-minded, and everything in between. After this firestorm forced her to resign as a Clinton spokesperson and "advisor", it seems that Johnson has realized the only thing that halted her statement’s effectiveness was her race.
It was at this moment that he looked in the mirror and thought, “maybe it will work if I say it!! Maybe then the large number of Obama supporters will start to believe that his success is simply dumb luck.”
It is this kind of obviously transparent rhetoric that many Americans hear from politicians over and over again that forces so many to be enthralled by the way Obama speaks to the country; like rational adults that can form a coherent thought. Everyone knows that Johnson is a longtime friend of the Clintons and a staunch supporter of Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
Everyone knows that in January he spoke out for the first time against Obama, alluding to his well documented past drug use in a veiled statement, only to deflect and deny critics that pointed out his dirty tricks. Now that he is stepping back into the spotlight in an attempt to rehash the exact same invalid point that didn’t work before, he is blatantly questioning the intelligence of the country.
It seems to upset Johnson that many of Obama’s supporters are Black, assuming that they are too dimwitted to not look further than the color of his skin as a basis for support. Let’s assume that this is the sole reason he has this 90% Black support that Johnson spouted. Does it bother him that Hillary Clinton is the first female candidate with an opportunity to be President of the United States? Does it bother him that Hillary Clinton’s main vein of support that gave her huge leads in polls as primaries approached was due to her 2 to 1 advantage among female voters?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that these facts don’t rub Bob Johnson the wrong way; they don’t make him think that Hillary Clinton is lucky to be a woman in the political spectrum. He won’t say that if her name was Jerry Smith, junior Senator from New York, not the wife of beloved President Bill Clinton, that she wouldn’t have been the assumed frontrunner and runaway winner of the Democratic ticket.
Johnson won’t say that because he is supporting her for president, so this empty rhetoric can only be applied to her competitor, and frontrunner for the nomination. If he simply discusses actual issues, there's nothing wrong with his support for Hillary Clinton, but he must feel that this won't work.
Johnson continued his freight train of invalid points by telling us Senator Obama doesn’t have the “I-want-to-go-out-and-have-a-drink-with-you–touch.” This statement came from the same man that insinuated that Obama’s status as a freshman Senator is reason enough to distrust his decision making. Now he’s talking about having drinks with our President. Sounds like brainless decision making to me.
Am I really going to vote for a person based on whether or not I can have a good time with them over drinks? That’s what I have friends for, so I’ll just look for the President to handle the truckload of problems we’ll inherit from the current President that everyone felt they could have a drink with. Some one should ask Bob what that got us for the past 7 years.
When desperate statements begin firing out of the mouths of a politician’s supporters, it is always easy to spot them coming. They are usually inflammatory, have no relevance to the reality of the situation, and can easily be applied to their own candidate, leaving the argument pointless and without merit.
This doesn’t matter though, Bob Johnson is betting that voters don’t have the capacity to think about the state of the economy, the incredibly adverse effects the Iraq War has on America, or our pathetic educational system we continue to ignore. He wants us to choose a president based on empty knee-jerk emotional reactions and whether or not some began supporting the candidate because he is…God forbid, Black.
I don't think we're that stupid.
Am I wrong?