Ed Rendell: telling it like it is

[jackson_dem]

-snip-

For those ginning up a run for Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell as a Democratic vice presidential candidate, his comments this week are likely to dash cold water on the hot topic.

Rendell likely didn’t win points with either Sens. Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama when he first said that Obama’s race would cause him some problems in the state and then followed it up with another notion that Clinton’s gender could also get in the way.

-snip-

We can’t pretend that gender and race aren’t significant in the 2008 campaign. We’d like to. We’d like to simply run the Associated Press campaign stories without always seeing the lines “first black president” or “first woman president” when the topic comes ’round to Obama or Clinton. But that line almost always appears. It’s out there. The media aren’t ignoring it, and it would be hypocritical for those who aren’t ignoring it to excoriate others who choose to do the same.

-snip-

We’re not taking sides yet in that coming battle. But we will say that it should not, for any voter, come down to a decision between voting for a white man or a white woman or black man. It’s an immaterial question. Pick any of hundreds of other issues-based options on which to cast a vote. We’re 230something years old; time to show some maturity.

http://www.ldnews.com/editorials/ci_8271899

[bemildred]

1. We've come a long way in this country on these issues.

The fact that there are still people that will vote their gender or their race does not diminish that, and it does not mean anybody will lose for that reason. Bush has done an excellent job of discrediting us old white men, too.

[jackson_dem]

2. We'll find it when the time comes

We've never been to this point before. The only precedents that are similar are Al Smith and JFK. Smith got crushed, although it was a time of peace and prosperity so he was unlikely to win anyway, and JFK won by 0.2% when his aides expected him to win comfortably. Of course, that was almost five decades ago. As the Matchbox Twenty song says, let's see how far we've come...

I posted this because Rendell has been attacking unfairly, even accused of being a racist, for speaking the truth. He knows there is bigotry. He is Jewish and has learned it firsthand. He once had to close a campaign office because neo-Nazi's kept threatening his staff there because they were working for a Jewish candidate.

[coco77]

3. This is some more of the politically correct bullshit..

meaning: don't say what everyone is thinking or already knows...

[bemildred]

4. I think there might be some truth in that, but he'd have done better to not bring it up.

Or even to applaud the idea of our first black or female president, whichever it might be.