“Pete has a black problem. I don’t know of one black person out of Indiana that supports him.”
— Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), quoted by the Daily Beast, on Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
“Pete has a black problem. I don’t know of one black person out of Indiana that supports him.”
— Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), quoted by the Daily Beast, on Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
The Atlantic: “From the beginning of his career in public life, Joe Biden’s instinct has been to recoil from those he considers the hard-charging activists in his party, and to find ways to understand those he knows his own allies would detest.”
“Biden thinks that’s his special insight into politics, that he’s a bridge builder—but it’s meant building bridges to people others think don’t deserve any kind of bridge. He seems to think that approach is especially useful over issues of race. There are archives full of comments, in newspaper accounts and videos, of Biden trying to explain his thinking on the matter. But given how much the conversation over race has changed in the last 50 years, that’s left him with a lot of remarks and relationships that can look out of sync in 2019, even as the 76-year-old former vice president says he’s still the same guy he always was. The comments reinforce a vulnerability—one his opponents have already jumped on.”
Jared Kushner wouldn’t answer Jonathan Swan directly when asked if he disapproves of President Trump’s promotion of birtherism:
SWAN: Have you ever seen him say or do anything that you would describe as racist or bigoted?
KUSHNER: So, the answer is un — uh, no. Absolutely not. You can’t not be a racist for 69 years, then run for president and be a racist. What I’ll say is that, when a lot of the Democrats call the president a racist, I think they’re doing a disservice to people who suffer because of real racism in this country.
SWAN: Was birtherism racist?
KUSHNER: Um, look I wasn’t really involved in that.
SWAN: I know you weren’t. Was it racist?
KUSHNER: Like I said, I wasn’t involved in that.
SWAN: I know you weren’t. Was it racist?
KUSHNER: I know who the president is, and I have not seen anything in him that is racist. So, again, I was not involved in that.
SWAN: Did you wish he didn’t do that?
KUSHNER: Like I said, I was not involved in that. That was a long time ago.
Aaron Blake: “So for Kushner to dismiss it as trivial is to bury his own head in the sand. Kushner may not be a senior White House adviser without it. But of course, he didn’t really dismiss it; he actively sought to distance himself from it — which pretty much says it all.”
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“Today the state of Alabama marks the birthday of Jefferson Davis, who served as president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865. A state holiday, state offices are closed throughout Alabama. Davis, who at one point owned more than 100 slaves, led a government resting on the principle of white supremacy.”
In response, the Montgomery Advertiser published “the testimonies of nine African Americans held in human bondage, all interviewed in Alabama in 1937.”
Agence France-Presse: “President Alexander Van der Bellen said he was ‘deeply worried’ over the assaults. The attack overnight Sunday was the third since the show by Italian-German photographer Luigi Toscano was installed in early May.”
“Faces were cut out of around 80 portraits… Over the past two weeks, others have been daubed with swastikas or slashed with knives.”
“The German government’s top official against anti-Semitism says he wouldn’t advise Jews to wear skullcaps in parts of the country,” the AP reports.
“The mayor of Hoschton, a nearly all-white community 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, allegedly withheld a job candidate from consideration for city administrator because he was black,” the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
Mayor Theresa Kenerly told a member of the City Council she pulled the resume of Keith Henry from a packet of four finalists “because he is black, and the city isn’t ready for this.”
Councilman Jim Cleveland defended the mayor: “I have black friends, I hired black people. But when it comes to all this stuff you see on TV, when you see blacks and whites together, it makes my blood boil because that’s just not the way a Christian is supposed to live.”
“More than half of U.S. eligible voters cast a ballot in 2018, the highest turnout rate for a midterm election in recent history, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau. The increased turnout was particularly pronounced among Hispanics and Asians, making last year’s midterm voters the most racially and ethnically diverse ever.”
“This was a stark reversal from the previous midterm year, when turnout had decreased – from 45.5% in 2010 to 41.9% in 2014.”
“Research on Iowa counties that swung from Obama to Trump indicates that GOP success was driven far more by sexism and racism than by economic anxiety,” the Pacific Standard reports.
From the study: “Economic distress is not a significant factor in explaining the shift in Iowa voters from Democrat to Republican between 2008 and 2016. The election outcomes do not signify [a revolt] among working-class voters left behind by globalization.”
Rather, in 2016, “the nativist narrative about ‘taking back America’ and anti-immigrant sentiment became stronger forces than economic issues.”
New York Times: “Three historically black churches have burned in less than two weeks in one south Louisiana parish, where officials said they had found ‘suspicious elements’ in each case. The officials have not ruled out the possibility of arson, or the possibility that the fires are related.”
A new Pew Research poll finds a 56% majority says President Trump has done too little to distance himself from white nationalist groups, while 29% say he has done about the right amount to distance himself from such groups and 7% say he has done too much.
These views are virtually unchanged since December 2016, shortly before Trump took office.
A new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds that just 19% of Americans say they believe that President Trump personally opposes white nationalism.
Thirty-nine percent said he supports white nationalism, while 20% said he doesn’t have a strong opinion on the movement either way. The rest said they weren’t sure.
“We have a little bit of a problem in this state, and I’m just going to say it out right. This is a racist state.”
— Tennessee Democratic party chair Martha Mancini, quoted by the Tennessean.
“The President is not a white supremacist.”
— Acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, on Fox News Sunday.
When asked if white nationalism was a rising threat in the wake of the attacks on mosques in New Zealand that left 49 people dead, the Washington Post reports President Trump on Friday said: “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
Trump called the incident “a terrible thing” and said he had not seen a manifesto, purportedly from one of the attackers, that named him as an inspiration for white identity ideology.
Referring to the recent anti-semitism controversies with Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Axios reports that President Trump told RNC donors over the weekend: “The Democrats hate Jewish people.”
“Trump said he didn’t understand how any Jew could vote for a Democrat these days. Trump talked about how much he’d done for Israel, noting his historic decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.”
“Trump said if he could run to be prime minister of Israel, he’d be at 98% in the polls.”
The Washington Post unearths this quote from former Vice President Joe Biden in 1975:
I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the black man for 300 years and the white man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers. In order to even the score, we must now give the black man a head start, or even hold the white man back, to even the race.’ I don’t buy that.
First Read: “Joe Biden’s greatest strength is that he’s been in the mainstream of American politics for the last 50 years. And that’s his greatest weakness, too.”
“It raises the question: Can the Democratic Party we saw nearly melt down this week over Ilhan Omar handle Biden’s past – whether it’s busing, race or Anita Hill?”
Playbook: “23 House Republicans voted against a resolution Thursday evening that condemned hate against many groups, including Jews and Muslims, in the wake of Rep. Ilhan Omar’s comments that suggested supporters of Israel might have dual loyalty — remarks that were widely viewed as anti-Semitic. Every Democrat voted yes.”
“There is serious, serious anger — seething, it’s fair to say — at the top levels of the House GOP that Republicans muddled their message with a split on this vote. All week, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s leadership team managed to keep his troops in line, allowing Democrats to spend days upon days tripping all over themselves. Now, they have taken a bit of the spotlight off Democrats for reasons that are clear to no one.”
“There were two options when it came to this vote, according to top lawmakers and aides: Either every single Republican had to be for the resolution, or everyone needed to be against it. Now that nearly two dozen Republicans voted no, the party is in the mushy middle, unable to define where it stood.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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