Frank Rich's Troubling Column

I stayed out late last night at a small reunion of the people who made the Brazilian Carnaval so successful for almost 20 years. Salonista and Tractionista Joe Costa made a cameo appearance with his wife and friends and can attest that us old folks aren't all fogies!

I slept late this morning. After coffee, I sat down on a sunny couch to read the newspapers. After the N&O's comic section, I always give a quick look at the NY Times front section before going to the Week in Review to read the opinion pages.

Frank Rich's column, Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War, discusses the Clinton-Obama battle for the nomination.

Rich describes a half-hour special that Ms Clinton paid for and finds in it troubling evidence that "... once black voters met Mr. Obama and started to gravitate toward him, Bill Clinton and the campaign’s other surrogates stopped caring about what African-Americans thought."

The result? Black America has largely deserted the Clintons. In her California primary victory, Mrs. Clinton drew only 19 percent of the black vote. The campaign saw this coming and so saw no percentage in bestowing precious minutes of prime-time television on African-American queries.

You should read the column for yourself. It's too upsetting for me to repeat it here.

My personal action item after reading it is that I need to contact my Democratic Party officials and insist that (1) the super delates from NC support the popular vote and (2) that the delegates from Florida and Michigan not be allowed to vote at the convention.

What do my fellow Salonistas think of all this?

-- ge