This is really too easy. Imagine the hue and cry in the press and elsewhere, which to be clear would be quite appropriate, if an accurate story about a special congressional election to replace a white congressperson began as follows: "White leaders are growing increasingly worried that a black candidate might seize the seat of former Rep. ____ in the upcoming special election."
Well, a story by Alex Isenstadt at Politico with a truth-obscuring headline ("Blacks fret free-for-all for Jesse Jackson Jr. seat"; the headline should be "Blacks fear a white person will win 'their' seat") clearly shows that Chicagoland's black establishment thinks it has first dibs on IL-02, and apparently believes that "Jackson's seat" (as if he ever owned it) can't be appropriately represented by a white person, even though the early frontrunner is clearly liberal on most issues (bolds are mine):
Black leaders are growing increasingly worried that a white candidate might seize the seat of former Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson in the upcoming Illinois special election.
With a host of black candidates announcing their intention to seek the seat, the concern is that they could split the African-American vote and provide a plurality to a white contender. The worries escalated this week after former Rep. Debbie Halvorson, a white Democrat and veteran of suburban Chicago politics, threw her hat into the ring.
Losing Jackson’s seat would be a blow to the black establishment. Chicago, long a center of black cultural and political power – it’s the home of the nation’s first black president, Barack Obama, and the first black member of Congress, Oscar De Priest * - would see its delegation in the Congressional Black Caucus diminish from three seats to two. And there’s Jackson background as the son of iconic civil rights leader Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Jackson’s district, which he was elected to in 1995, contains a small majority of black voters.
... “The battle we have is that we can’t afford to lose a black voice in Congress,” she (Delmarrie Cobb, a longtime Democratic political consultant in Chicago who formerly worked for Jackson Jr.) added. “It would be a terrible loss in many ways.”
Jackson Jr., who has been undergoing treatment for mental health issues, announced his resignation last week. Gov. Pat Quinn has set the primary election for Feb. 26, and a general election is expected on April 9. The winner of the Democratic primary is all but certain to take the seat given the district’s heavy Democratic registration.
Halvorson, black leaders say, presents a particular threat.
* - The assertion about De Priest is such an outrageous falsehood that I will be doing a separate post on the topic.
Ms. Cobb apparently is more troubled by the possibility that IL-02 might be represented by a white woman than that fact that the district's voters haven't had any representation in Congress for well over four months.
As for Halvorson herself -- some "threat." If what leftist, spend-happy black Democrats want is someone who wants to expand the entitlement state and the size and scope of the federal government, Debbie Halvorson is pretty much their gal. Her 2010 Club for Growth rating was 12%; lifetime before she left Congress, it was 13%. Ontheissues.org shows that she supported the President's stimulus plan, supported spending $40 billion on "green" public schools, voted for "four weeks of paid parental leave for federal employees," and opposes privatization of Social Security as well as raising its retirement age. The only major "blemish" from their perspective might be that she is supposedly "Ardent supporter of the Second Amendment" (the NRA endorsed her in 2010). Halvorson voted for ObamaCare on March 21, 2010.
Heck, in September 2010, anti-conservative protesters accusing those holding such views as Nazis were found to have used Halvorson's congressional office as thei operational base. That should really please black liberals, all too many of whom liken Tea Party sympathizers to "the modern-day version of the KKK."
But if the only thing Chicagoland's black Democratic establishment will accept is "one of our own" representing them, well then, I guess that's a problem. Really, how obviously racist can you get? Ms. Halvorson may just learn the answer to that question in the next 13 weeks.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
