BET-TV Founder Billionaire Businessman Bob Johnson said Monday that Sen. Barack Obama would not be his party’s leading candidate if he were white

There he said it, just like Geraldine Ferraro did, only this time, a black man said it. In both instances, the speakers were correct: Mr. Johnson made some very good points:

“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… .”

“Geraldine Ferraro said it right. The problem is, Geraldine Ferraro is white. This campaign has such a hair-trigger on anything racial … it is almost impossible for anybody to say anything.”

Mr Johnson went on to say:

Johnson disputed the notion that Obama has built a broad coalition. Most of his support, he said, comes from African Americans and white liberals but not white, working-class Democrats.

“I don’t think he has that common — what I call `I-want-to-go-out-and-have-a-drink-with-you — touch,” Johnson said.

An Observer/WCNC Poll this month found Obama and Clinton splitting the votes of white North Carolinians who say they’ll vote in the May 6 primary. Obama led 59 percent to 7 percent among African Americans.

Johnson said Obama is likely to win the nomination and has had the support of “the liberal media.”

“They sort of dislike Hillary for her vote on the war. They don’t want to see Bill and Hillary in power again,” he said. “So Obama comes in and runs a smart campaign. But that’s not the Second Coming, in my opinion, of John F. Kennedy, FDR or the world’s greatest leaders.”

Mr. Johnson didn’t get where he is without his ability to size up a situation, and in this case, Obama was hand picked because of the color of his skin, and not for his legislative ability.

MM has a great roundup, take the time to read Cracker-quiddick Fallout Continues To Haunt SnObama

(H/T to Memeorandum)

Obama’s Flaws Multiply
“…the fact that his aides tell reporters he is privately bewildered that anybody took offense is even more remarkable.”

Obama Wrong On Analysis As Well As Politics? is a must read and it is noted that George Will puts Obama in historical perspective:

By so speaking, Obama does fulfill liberalism’s transformation since Franklin Roosevelt. What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, “Yes, but I need to win a majority.” When another supporter told Stevenson, “You educated the people through your campaign,” Stevenson replied, “But a lot of people flunked the course.” Michael Barone, in “Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan,” wrote: “It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind.” Barone added: “Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture — the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting.”

H/T to Meme

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