Ed Rendell lemme Holla @ you for a minute

You just couldn’t wait your turn, could you?

It is February 12. The Pennsylvania Primary is scheduled for April 22.

You are 10 weeks away. You have all kinds of time to get shine for your candidate.

But this?

THIS RIGHT HERE?

Gov. Ed “Don’t Call Me ‘Fast Eddie’ ” Rendell met with the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week to talk about his latest budget. But before turning the meeting over to his number-crunchers, our voluble governor weighed in on the primary fight between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and what the Illinois senator could expect from the good people of Pennsylvania at the polls:

“You’ve got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate,” he said bluntly. Our eyes only met briefly, perhaps because the governor wanted to spare the only black guy in the room from feeling self-conscious for backing an obvious loser. “I believe, looking at the returns in my election, that had Lynn Swann [2006 Republican gubernatorial candidate] been the identical candidate that he was –well-spoken [note: Mr. Rendell did not call the brother "articulate"], charismatic, good-looking — but white instead of black, instead of winning by 22 points, I would have won by 17 or so.”

I know I have a habit of sometimes zoning out in these meetings, but it sounded to me like Mr. Rendell had unilaterally declared Pennsylvania to be Alabama circa 1963. Was he suggesting that Pennsylvanians are uniquely racist in ways that folks in the states Mr. Obama has won so far aren’t? By the way, Mr. Obama won Alabama on Super Tuesday, thank you very much!

What accounts for Mr. Rendell’s overweening confidence that, no matter what, he’ll always find a way to overcome the odds by at least 17 points even in a racist commonwealth, but that Mr. Obama can’t?

If Mr. Rendell, a Clinton backer, is right about Pennsylvania’s racial attitudes, maybe we should get a new state slogan. How about: “You’ve got a friend with a pointy white hood in Pennsylvania”?

I have lived a few places, and I have learned a few things about some other places.  But if there is one place I DO know, it’s Pennsylvania.

It has once been described as Pittsburgh on one side, Philadelphia on the other side, and Alabama in the Middle.  It is a great one-liner, but the truth is much more complicated.

Is it true that you are just as likely to roll up on a Klan rally in Central Pennsylvania as you are a We Love Black People sign?  Sure.

Is Penn State universally known as one of the whitest places on earth?  Yep.

But to Suggest that the State of Iowa is somehow more ready for a Black man than the state of Pennsylvania?

And THEN….to somehow support your opinion, you want to compare a sitting United States Senator to a former football player?

Ed, Ed, Ed.

Dumb, Dumb, Dumb.

Ohhhhhh Ed.  You did it now.

Twelveth Day of Black History Month: Lincoln Logs Off

On today, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday I figured that I would entertain you all with a lil bit on whether or not Lincoln freed the slaves.

 

There was a time when every schoolboy learned that Abraham Lincoln was the “Great Emancipator” who freed the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation, they also learned, was a critically important step in achieving that goal.

Many historians have called this old conventional wisdom into question, arguing that Lincoln was not really motivated by commitment to end slavery. The proof, they claim, is his famous letter to Horace Greeley in which he wrote that “my paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and it is not either to save or destroy slavery, If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Many of Lincoln’s critics, especially African-Americans, go so far as to claim that he was no friend of blacks and did not want to risk the political fallout that would surely result from emancipation, but was eventually forced by circumstances to do so. In the words of Julius Lester, “Blacks have no reason to feel grateful to Abraham Lincoln. How come it took him two whole years to free the slaves? His pen was sitting on his desk the entire time.”