Yes. And that’s the way non-white voters want it.
A Democratic presidential campaign field that was once touted as the most diverse in history has been whittled down to six candidates on its debate stage, all of them white.
[Black congresswoman Barbara Lee] says the Democratic National Committee’s rules for determining who can participate in its presidential debates is ‘systematically discriminatory’ against people of color.
(San Francisco Chronicle, January 13, 2020)
In fact, Lee is merely crying the racism which Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Julián Castro blamed for their failed candidacies. But none of them are bothering to cite any credible evidence of discrimination.
Instead, they are pleading for changes in the plainly non-discriminatory nomination rules that would result in affirmative action for minority candidates. In which case, racial pride alone would/should compel any self-respecting black to vote against them.
As it happened, nobody prevented “people of color” from voting for Harris, Booker, or Castro. This, after all, is the same system Obama mastered to win the Democratic nomination in 2008.
Not to mention that polls have consistently shown that black voters prefer one of those white candidates. Black candidates just never impressed this cycle the way Obama did. Indeed, it speaks volumes that black voters clearly prefer Obama’s old white VP, Joe Biden.
That said, the real systemic bias is having Iowa and New Hampshire, two predominantly white states, serve as the qualifying rounds for the Democratic nomination.
Respected media critic Howard Kurtz, host of the CNN program Reliable Sources, summed up this pointless and misleading exercise in a January 2 Daily Beast commentary, ‘Iowa Caucuses Are as Distorted as a Funhouse Mirror’. Specifically, he posed the question every sane political observer poses around this time every four years, namely:
Why, then, does Iowa — a state far whiter and more rural than most of America — get to play such an outsize role?
(“Iowa Caucuses: Much Ado about Nothing,” The iPINIONS Journal, January 4, 2012)
So here’s to a rotating nomination process that gives each state a chance to be the first to hold a presidential caucus or primary.
Farmers though they may be, there’s no reason to saddle the white folks of Iowa with this task of separating wheat from chaff among Democratic presidential candidates. Besides, we all know blacks are more naturally suited for such tasks.
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Iowa caucuses…
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