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"Why Clinton Is Connecting With Black Voters—and Sanders Isn't"
From today's Atlantic. A very interesting commentary. Here are a few excerpts.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/02/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-south-carolina-black-voters/470646/
The stories, though by now familiar from media accounts and surveillance videos, were freshly horrifying, told in person by the victims’ mothers. Each woman related how her son had been killed, and then how Clinton had reached out to her. They told stories about phone calls, personal letters, and half-hour meetings that stretched on for hours.
“Hillary took it upon herself to listen to me when none of the leaders decided to lay in the street with us, march in the street with us, pour our hearts out and ask for help. Hillary heard my cry,” said Maria Hamilton, whose son Dontre was shot and killed by a Milwaukee police officer in 2014. “When Hillary called me in March, and her staffer told me I didn’t have to rally people in the street to shut her rally down, that she would talk to me, it changed my life.”
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What Barack could do, Bernie can’t so easily pull off. Sanders speaks in generalities and attacks systemic injustices, while Clinton focuses on the pain of individual lives. By befriending women like Hamilton and Carr, she is able to connect her policies to real stories. By convincing them she cares about them, she produces a squadron of surrogates with powerful stories to take into black communities.
“Nobody made—I don’t think they could have made us, I don’t think they could have persuaded any of these mothers to vote for Hillary Clinton against their own will,” Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon Martin’s mother, said in Bennettsville. “This was a conscious decision we made.” (There was evidently some sensitivity about that impression. Geneva Reed-Veal, Sandra Bland’s mother, closed the event with a rousing call to vote, and then added, “I’m with her. All my sisters are with her. And please tell the people we are not being exploited!”)
That might not come through as clearly in debates, but it was warmly appreciated at the South Carolina events. Attendees said over and over that they were supporting Clinton in large because of her long familiarity with the black community. They said they felt she knew them and their people—not just the statistics, but the people. Sanders speaks to racism; Clinton speaks to black people.
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their argument isn’t that Sanders doesn’t care. It’s just that they don’t think he has the hands-on experience. The point is to remind black voters that the Clintons have been there for them for decades. Clinton may not be able to turn out 5,000 voters for a single event, but her deep ties to the black community give her a huge base of surrogates who can go out to small, grassroots events where they can appeal directly to African Americans.
“The president trusted her—our beloved Barack Obama—with one of the most important jobs in her administration,” Murphy said, in case anyone had forgotten that the president is black. And later, he got a hearty, knowing response for what sounded like an implication that Republican opposition to Obama is racist: “I’ve never seen a Congress whose avowed purpose was preventing the president of the United States from achieving his goals.”
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The Clinton White House legacy has also been tarnished, especially among the new generation of criminal-justice reformers, by the tough-on-crime law he signed into law. When one of the two younger men in the audience in Aiken asked about three-strikes laws, Murphy was quick to say that Bill Clinton had asked for forgiveness for the law and Hillary Clinton had said, “Never again.” But several people in the audience were ready to excuse the law as a product of its era. “It was a different time,” they said, pointing to the fear of crime in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
That reflects the one cleavage in the black vote in South Carolina: between young and old. The crowd in Aiken was especially elderly; the crowd in Bennettsville was more evenly distributed, but it leaned older, too. Clinton retains an edge among younger African Americans in the state, but it’s much smaller than her overall lead, as The Wall Street Journal reports. One reason may be that younger black voters don’t have the same memories of the Clinton years, good and bad: There’s none of the rosy recollection of 1990s prosperity, and they don’t have memories of the crack epidemic that help them rationalize or excuse the crime bill.
35 replies
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I think it is shameful how Hillary is using the pain of those mother's for her own personal gain, I'm not a parent and I can't begin to imagine the pain these women have experience, I just wish, they didn't allow Hillary to use them as a photo op.
*These* people right here.... 
If I say more.. he'll alert on me. JHC!
But you have no business assuming you know what's good for me. Just because we don't see eye to on candidates doesn't mean I'm any less knowledgeable than you, or voting against my best interests.
at least 3 appearances on the following chart.
