There’s another Senate race going on right now, one in Maryland which pits former NAACP president Kweisi Mfume against Rep. Ben Cardin. The winner of the September 12 primary will face Republican Lt. Governor Michael Steele to replace retiring Senator Paul Sarbanes.
From what I have read, Mfume jumped into this race three days after Sarbanes announced his retirement. Even though blacks constitute 40% of the party’s base in MD, the establishment withheld its endorsement of Mfume and instead searched for another candidate to run. Cardin, who is white, entered the race 46 days later and immediately started racking up endorsements as well as campaign contributions. In this article, Washington Post editorial writer Lee Houckstader opines:
But party chieftains are increasingly anxious that if he [Mfume] wins the primary he will lose the general election to Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, a laid-back black Republican personally wooed by President Bush and embraced by the state GOP. In their view, Steele — unthreatening, sociable, a former altar boy — would play better with moderate white swing voters who might be unnerved by Mfume’s youthful history, which includes pistols, switchblades and 13 arrests while he was still a teenager.
That leaves some Democrats feeling damned if they do and damned if they don’t — that is, risking the erosion of a core constituency if Mfume doesn’t win the primary, and, if he does, risking the loss of a Senate seat in one of the nation’s more dependably Democratic states.
I’m not so sure Mfume would lose a race against Steele. He’s an engaging campaigner and would use Steele as a punching-bag proxy for an unpopular Republican president. But the very fact that many senior Democrats see Mfume as a loser may further embitter black Democrats who think the party has taken them for granted for too long.
Let me get this straight: 40% of the Democratic party base in MD is black and the party honchos are worried that Mfume can’t garner enough white vote to win in November so they would rather have a white candidate, who will surely lose a large percentage of that black vote, and thus lose the election? This makes no sense. Why would you risk alienating black voters when they constitute such a large portion of the base and still lose the race? Or are they already feeling alienated?
In some ways the “Kweisi problem,” as some Democrats call it, is a rerun of another painful recent episode for Maryland Democrats. Four years ago Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the Democrat running for governor, chose an elderly white former Republican as her running mate. In so doing she passed over Ike Leggett, a well-liked black politician from Montgomery County. When she lost the race, many Democrats said dissing Leggett was the original sin that doomed her chances (inept campaigning helped).
The Republicans are already siphoning off the black vote from the Democrats. My own sense is that there is no need to aid them in this effort. But if white Democrats don’t see this happening, nominate Cardin and watch blacks hold their noses and vote for Steele – voting against their best interests- just to get even. Or, they’ll just stay at home, which will also guarantee a Steele win.
But there is hope in Maryland. A letter to the editor in Saturday’s paper:
It is telling that among the Democratic strategists who argue that Kweisi Mfume cannot be elected are some of the same insiders whose savvy helped Democrats lose control of the House, Senate and White House. Yes, Rep. Ben Cardin is a thoughtful — if not particularly exciting — candidate, but Mr. Mfume would bring the Senate a perspective it desperately needs to hear.
As a middle-aged, white, male, Jewish homeowner in Bethesda, I hardly fit the pundit’s stereotype of a Kweisi Mfume supporter, but I am. And I am not alone.
JIM GROSSFELD
Bethesda
I guess the voters are smarter than the party “leaders.” We’ll have to wait until September 12 to find out.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
You know, I never really understood why they didn’t back Mfume. I remember he did immediately throw his hat into the ring.
Personally I thought he would make an excellent candidate, unless…there’s something I don’t know.
Is there?!?
You know, the whispers about his management style while president of the NAACP. Was there anything to it?!?
By the bye, tomorrow I hope to post on the GOP sicking the IRS on the NAACP, especially since my Republican congresswoman joined the hall of shame; and then she went on a tour to celebrate June 19.
Hypocrite!!!
It’s sad how much the color of someones skin still affects political races
Mimi – I’ve heard the whispers but I’m not sure there is anything to it.
novamiddleman – when you consider that it has only been about 40 years since blacks were truly given the right to vote (Civil Rights Act of 1965), then it is not really surprising.
I have no idea where i heard this from, but it always made sense to me.
How do we eliminate the lines between the races if people continue to point them out?
To me, that sentiment presupposes that all things are equal. And in a perfect world, all things would be equal so there would be no dividing lines. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world.
Or better yet – how about this? "How do we eliminate the lines between the sexes if people continue to point them out?"
Would you agree that the playing field between the sexes is not yet level and that it is important to keep pointing this out?
Vivian, no things are ever equal. Tiger Woods makes a lot more money than I do. But I notice as I go through this crazy world that many profit by pointing out those lines, claiming to want to eliminate them, but acting to make sure they stay in place, for it is the key to their power.
If racism was truly eliminated, a lot of race leaders would be out of a job.
I see value in treating people as people, and not as some federally-designated protected group determined by skin or gender or class. I think that path gets us closer to equality than those who reinforce lines.
I hear what you're saying. But simply speaking the truth does not reinforce the lines. I believe it is by being aware of the inequities that we are able to overcome them. If we don't talk about them, our chances are slim that we make that progress. Have you ever read this?
Yep. Many times, since it’s a decade and a half old. Funny how “women’s studies” isn’t seen as sexist. A course of study explicitly favoring one gender, and it’s not sexist. A course calls “men’s studies” would have Kate Michelman protesting on schoolhouse steps.
Whites are opposers….yeah yeah. Here I am typing on my yacht on the shore of my mansion eating bonbons because since I’m white, I just have that lap of luxury handed to me. In fact, I don’t even open my mortgage bill anymore, since the banks know i’m white, my white privilege gets my mortgage paid off without a dime from me. We have it so easy!
Not quite. That degree I have? It took 10 years to pay the loans for 3 and a half years of college. They didn’t have the “whites-only-qualify” scholarship program. In fact, in my neighborhood, white WAS the minority.
See, Vivian. People who swim in the inequity pool never quite dry off. It becomes self-fullfilling, and it never ends. It’s bad enough when others tell you you are second-class. It’s worse when you repeat it to others.
Speaking the truth is fine, if that’s what you want to do. I’ve never known anyone to move ahead very quickly while continuously looking back.
Insider’s rule – Beware of leaders who profit from your victimization. They aren’t likely to correct it.
Check out the rumors about Mfume’s having many out of welock kids with different mothers. If I were a “party leader”, I’d be worried about that. Yeah, some people don’t care; others do. Sorry, I think the puritans are going to win this one. Mfume is a non-starter and it’s his own fault.
Mfume has also shown that he is horrible at raising cash. The race seems to be a dead heat at this point.
no excuses – the way I understand it, those aren't rumors, they are facts. The original article points out that he fathered 5 children by 4 women by the time he was 22. He was also a gangbanger. Then he grew up and got his act together. He served on Baltimore City Council and in Congress before becoming president of the NAACP.
NGB – which came first, the chicken or the egg? Has his fundraising been lackluster because the party wouldn't support him or did the party not support him because his fundraising was lackluster?
insider -[big sigh] – with all of the work I've done in race relations over the years, you represent the biggest challenge as to why racial problems cannot be solved. The reason is that being a white male from a less-than-privileged background, you have difficulty seeing any advantages. Racial and sexual inequality is real, something that people like me – black and female – deal with daily. It has nothing do with wallowing in it; instead, it is a fact of life. Does it stop me from living my life? No. Does it stop me from trying to achieve all that I am capable of? No. It is simply an extra burden that I carry, the weight of which you can't quite understand.
If I look back, it is to try to make a path for those behind me, those who are not as fortunate as I. And as for the "leaders who profit from my victimazation" – there are none. Because while I recognize the unequalities, I am nobody's victim.
Why any African-American would vote for a republicant is beyond comprehension…they can’t be that SCARED of gay people.
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House Delays Renewal of Voting Rights Act
House Republican leaders today abruptly canceled a planned vote to renew the Voting Rights Act after a rank-and-file rebellion by lawmakers who say the civil rights measure unfairly singles out Southern states and promotes multi-lingual ballots.
The reversal represented a significant embarrassment for the party leadership, which has promised a vote on the landmark anti-discrimination law and hailed its imminent approval in a rare bipartisan press event on the steps of the Capitol last month.
But lawmakers critical of the bill mutinied in a closed meeting of House Republicans this morning just hours before the vote was expected to occur and several said it was uncertain whether a majority of Republicans would back the legislation at this point.
“A lot of it looks as if these are some old boys from the South who are trying to do away with it,” said Representative Lynn A. Westmoreland of Georgia, who said it would be unfair to keep Georgia under the confines of the law when his state has cleaned up its voting rights record. “But these old boys are trying to make it Constitutional enough that it will withstand the scrutiny of the Supreme Court.”
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Wonder if it’s the same “good ole boys” who wouldn’t sign that anti-lynching resolution?
Historically, blacks were Republican – the party of Lincoln. I read somewhere that MLK Sr was a Republican. It was the Democratic party, however, that supported the Civil Rights movement. So that is how blacks became Democrats. And, a lot of the Southern Democrats became Republican at about the same time.