Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Presidentidal candidates make trip to Aventura
2020 hopefuls blast racism and Trump as they woo black voters
Three top Democratic presidential candidates — Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders — decried racism as a critical issue facing America, when they visited South Florida on Thursday as part of their efforts to reach black voters nationwide.
All faulted President Donald Trump, with Buttigieg taking him on most directly. Asked during his appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Aventura if Trump is a white supremacist, Buttigieg said, “I do.”
“The president represents a tremendous challenge and we must call out his racism and his demagoguery,” he said.
Buttigieg said it was too “polite” — and wrong — to say the country is in a “racially charged” moment. It is much more, he said, calling systemic racism “one of the most destructive forces in America.” He said, “To be black in America right now is still to be in a different country.”
Booker continued a theme he began the day before, when he spoke at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, S.C., where a white gunman killed nine black worshipers in 2015. Booker used that speech to describe and decry white supremacy in America.
He said it isn’t a new phenomenon. “The truth is white supremacy has always been a part of the American story. Do not let the Disney version of our history be the one that is paramount,” he said, adding that the “racist violence that we saw this past week has always been the part of the American story.”
When Booker brought up race, he didn’t refer to Trump by name, instead condemning “the obvious hatred and bigotry that we see everywhere, including the Oval Of
fice.”
Sanders focused less on race than Booker and Buttigieg.
He ran though a long list of what he sees as Trump characteristics: “Lies and his hatred and his racism and his sexism and his homophobia and his xenophobia and his religious bigotry. Other than that I think he’s doing a pretty good job.”
Sanders devoted most of his time to his standard campaign pitch about the evils he believes stem from economic inequality, “which to my mind is a very, very, very serious issue facing this country.”
He said it’s intertwined with many other issues, such as a government-run health care system, free tuition at public colleges and university, wiping out student debt, and ending mass incarceration. He said dealing with those issues would be especially beneficial for African-Americans.
The candidates’ appearances come as the country has been consumed by news of mass shootings, including one in El Paso in which the gunman targeted Hispanics, and by issues of race, with Americans debating whether Trump is racist and is fanning flames of racial discord with tweets and other statements about minorities and immigrants.
African-Americans are an important Democratic Party voting bloc, possibly the single most important constituency on the road to the presidential nomination.
Booker and Buttigieg are struggling to gain traction among black voters; multiple public opinion polls show black voters favor overwhelmingly former Vice President Joe Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination.
A nationwide Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday found 47% of black Democrats support Biden for the nomination. Sanders has 16%, Buttigieg 1% and Booker less than 1%.
Among all Democrats, Biden is the choice of 32%;
Sanders 14%; Buttigieg 5%; and Booker 2%.
Buttigieg was pressed about why he’s doing so well at raising money — and so badly at attracting support
from black voters. He attributed it to many people still not knowing who he is, and noted only three candidates are getting more than single digits. “So for the other
20-some of us, there’s a lot of work to do.”
Buttigieg, the major of South Bend, Ind., has dealt with racial difficulties in his city after one of his city’s white police officers killed a black resident in June.
Booker, a U.S. senator from New Jersey and former mayor of Newark, is African-American. He said polls so long before an election aren’t good predictors of the outcome. “I’m not running for the polls. I’m running because I have something to say,” he said.
Though Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, is doing a bit better with black voters than Booker and Buttigieg, he failed to attract support from black voters during his 2016 presidential campaign, a pattern that’s repeating in 2020. His previous 2016 campaign operation was criticized for a lack of diversity, something that’s changed in his current campaign.
If other Democrats can’t gain traction and diminish Biden’s lead among black voters, it would be next-to-impossible for anyone else to win the party’s nomination. An early 2020 test will be South Carolina. It’s the fourth state holding a primary or caucus and three out of five Democrats in the state are black.
The candidates appearing before the black journalists’ association on Thursday have a tricky path to navigate. They need to boost themselves, while at the same time bringing down Biden.
At the same time, they want to avoid the criticism from many analysts and Democratic activists who faulted candidates for spending so much time during the second round of debates last month attacking each other and former President Barack Obama rather than concentrating their fire on Trump.
The president is deeply unpopular among black voters. The Morning Consult/ Politico national tracking poll from Aug. 5-7 showed 40% of registered voters approved of Trump’s performance as president and 56% disapproved. Among African American voters, 11% approved and 83% disapproved.
Also appearing before the black journalists’ association was Bill Weld, a littleknown former governor of Massachusetts who is running a long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
“President Trump is seeming more unhinged almost by the week,” Weld said.
Speaking to reporters after he left the stage, Weld said he has no doubt the president is a racist. “Completely. He’s a fervent, very obvious racist.”
Weld said Trump has “got almost blood on his hands from recent events and I think very reprehensible, and so it’s time for us to say to him what he has said to others, which is we wish you would go back to where you came from.” That’s a reference to Trump telling four minority congresswomen to “go back” to the countries they came from.
On Thursday, the candidates also did what candidates always do — dish up praise for the audience, which in this case was journalists, a profession that has been denigrated by Trump.
“The press is never the enemy of the people. You are the defenders of the people, the chroniclers of the people, and the watchdogs of the people,” Buttigieg said.
Sanders said the president “is a demagogue and who is a pathological liar and doing something that demagogues have historically done, and that is to undermine a free press in this country.”
“President Trump is seeming more unhinged almost by the week.”
Bill Weld, former governor of Massachusetts running a long-shot campaign for the Republican presidential nomination