{"id":2598,"date":"2007-09-27T13:44:47","date_gmt":"2007-09-27T20:44:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/09\/27\/clinton-said-something-a-little-odd\/"},"modified":"2007-09-27T16:42:26","modified_gmt":"2007-09-27T23:42:26","slug":"clinton-said-something-a-little-odd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/09\/27\/clinton-said-something-a-little-odd\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Clinton said something a little odd"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former President Bill Clinton has sharply <\/a>criticized the Republican presidential frontrunners for snubbing an African-American voter forum this week.<\/em><\/p>\n

“This says more about the evolution of the Republican party than anything,” Clinton told Tavis Smiley on his Public Radio International show, which will air this Friday. “Keep in mind that Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president and Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House. And after Theodore Roosevelt, the parties began to switch places.”<\/em><\/p>\n

It is interesting to look back and see how black Americans and civil rights figured into the two political parties through the ages, and here we ask the question of how we have come to the post-Civil War point where the vast majority of black Americans, or those who were\u00c2\u00a0not disenfranchised via Jim Crowe,\u00c2\u00a0voted for the Republican party to the point where the vast majority vote for the Democratic Party.\u00c2\u00a0 I am tempted to list the diverging point, on the national level — aka the election of presidents–\u00c2\u00a0as the 1924<\/a> election<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The problem with Bill Clinton’s statement on “parties began to switch places” is that rolling into the 1912 election, various black leaders (W E B DuBois) getting a little angry at the diminishing level of return in supporting the Republicans — and DuBois generally\u00c2\u00a0thinking that Booker T Washington was making himself a patronage king within that party and not advancing anything– gambled by endorsing Woodrow Wilson.\u00c2\u00a0 Woodrow Wilson’s presidency\u00c2\u00a0was probably the low point in terms of civil rights in the post-Civil War.\u00c2\u00a0 Rolling into the 1920 election, the Democratic candidate — desparate– degenerated into a lot of race-baiting.\u00c2\u00a0 So, on that score, we can count out a 12 year\u00c2\u00a0interugum between Theodore Roosevelt and 1924’s John Davis (and a strange convention debate over the KKK) as the shaking of the two parties in terms of the black vote — where the interests of the black vote collided with the interests of the traditional democratic admittedly machine-controlled urban immigrant (Catholic) vote.\u00c2\u00a0 Followed by another intergum of 40 years, up to 1964 and the Voting Rights Act and Barry Goldwater — within which the Democrats slid forward and backward in advancing civil rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former President Bill Clinton has sharply criticized the Republican presidential frontrunners for snubbing an African-American voter forum this week. “This says more about the evolution of the Republican party than anything,” Clinton told Tavis Smiley on his Public Radio International show, which will air this Friday. “Keep in mind that Abraham Lincoln was the first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-regurgitates-forward"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}