May 5, 2021

Democrat problems in Texas compound after Democratic county leader called Sen. Tim Scott an 'oreo'

by Monica Showalter
AmericanThinker.com

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina made an unusual splash with his response to Joe Biden's quasi state-of-the-union address, declaring -- with the weight of his life experience in the real Jim Crow era in comparison to today -- that America "is not a racist country."

It was warm, engaging, and strongly argued, prompting pundits to declare him a rising Republican star -- from South Carolina no less, the state whose black voters vaulted the then-faltering Joe Biden into the Democrat nomination spot. South Carolina, eh?

Both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were absolutely forced to respond to that, which is unusual for a supposed president and vice president to have to do in the wake of a state of the union address, as Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn notes here. Ordinarily, people pay attention to the president's speech, not the rebuttal. But Scott's rebuttal is what got the attention.

The left was much viler though, spewing out a slew of racist epithets against Scott for his "heresy." When Scott said America wasn't racist, they sought to prove him wrong -- by hurling every racist epithet they could think of at him, as if to prove him wrong by showing them their own stripes. "Uncle Tim," "Boy," and pictures of Al Jolson in blackface were just some of the disgusting things I saw on Twitter, all of them posted by leftists. I wrote about that here.

In the piece, I noted that white leftists had some nerve claiming to speak for black people, as they did. Which is where Lamar County, Texas's Democrat party leader, Gary O'Connor, comes in. O'Connor, who based on his picture, appears white, put up a post on Facebook calling Scott "an oreo" of all things.

Which was probably the nastiest racist insult directed against Scott of them all. It's a creepy, demeaning term, reducing human beings to a cheap factory cookie label, and done to declare that any black person who succeeds, or maybe marries a white person, or gets good grades in school, is "acting white." Try to be less white, as Coca-Cola's racist critical-race-theory consultant likes to say. Remember when the Smithsonian put out that literature that declared that anyone who shows up on time for a job is acting white? That kind of crap is what leftists "think" and it's prevalent on the left. The term originated with blacks jealous of the success of other blacks, so to hear a white person now using it is especially creepy. Scott's an 'oreo'? What is O'Connor? A different kind of sandwich cookie?

And according to the Daily Mail, and others, it went down very badly with black voters as it rightly should. Oh, hell, it goes down badly with anyone of any color who isn't insane. It's an insult that tells black people that anything good that they do for themselves makes them white-person wannabes, so let's all slide into the mud of underclass values and march in lockstep for Democrats. If you don't, "you ain't black," as another Democrat, Joe Biden, once said.

So Connor was sufficiently hearing from people about it that he took the post down. Then he apologized. Then he offered his resignation as Democrat party chief in Lamar County, Texas. Obviously, something big was happening that was hurting Democrats in Texas. Perhaps someone told him to do it. The latest news is that the Democrats refused to accept the resignation, so the whole thing ended up being symbolic. The Democrats' refusal to accept was in a way, understandable: Lamar County, Texas, nearly 200 miles northeast of Dallas, with its biggest city Paris, Texas, is about as solid a red county as exists in red-state Texas. Across the board, the electoral results of 2020 shows Republicans winning by a 3 to 1 margin. A few GOP candidates won by even higher margins, as these 2020 results show here. Lamar County's Democrats probably couldn't get anyone to lead that county with those odds, because nobody likes to lead a party organization that always loses, especially in a relatively small county by Texas standards, with a population of about 50,000, only 6,300 of whom are black. So on practical grounds, the embattled Democrats of Texas probably wouldn't want to lose O'Connor. Besides, other leftists hurled racist insults, why should this leftist be singled out? They probably all thought the same thing themselves.

The damage was done, though. And make no mistake -- the Scott speech and the leftist reaction -- show all the signs of having an impact in Texas and beyond.

One, Scott is popular, and not exactly in the same wa many others black conservatives who are popular, such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who's style is cerebral, but popular in a popular way, one that reaches out to black voters by speaking optimistically, admitting failures, and showing that he's shared and lived their same experiences. Among Democrats, neither Barack Obama, son of a third-world intellectual, nor Kamala Harris, daughter of communist professor, both with pampered upbringings, could do anything like that. And it's probably notable that Scott has dark skin, not light skin like Obama or Harris, given the associations of privilege based on lighter skin color. Even Angela Davis complained about that in one of her books, after some of the Black Panthers she associated with argued she wasn't "black enough." So to attack Scott on racist, rather than ideological grounds, is amazingly thin ice right there. It ultimately signals to all voters that the left has no arguments, just ad hominem attacks, and it bothers black voters all the more because of Scott's personal story.

Two, Texas Republicans effectively sprang to action. Texas GOP Party Chairman Allen West, who is black, made powerful counter-attacks on the despicable O'Connor "oreo" post along with the first call for him to resign.

In a video posted on Twitter Tuesday shortly before O’Connor announced his intent to resign, West said he was “sick and tired of the duplicitous hypocrisy of the true party of racism.� He said he would be sending a box of Oreos to the Texas Democratic Party.

“Until this guy resigns, I am going to stand up and speak out against the party of systemic racism," West said. "The party of the soft bigotry of low expectations.�

Support for the Democratic presidential candidate reached a new low among Black men this year, according to the NBC News poll of early and Election Day voters.

Eighty percent of Black men supported Joe Biden, down slightly from Hilary Clinton’s 82 percent in 2016 but significantly down from Barack Obama’s level of support among Black men in 2012 and 2008.

Republicans shut out Democrats in Texas’s special election. That’s a bad omen for Team Blue.

President Biden’s success in the suburbs last year has led many Democrats to crow about their chance to create a new version of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition, which dominated U.S. politics for nearly 50 years. Saturday’s special election in Texas’s 6th Congressional District shows how far the party has to go to realize its dreams.

Texas’s 6th is a microcosm of the sort of place Democrats need to capture to establish a dominant majority. The seat is based in the southern suburbs of Fort Worth and moved rapidly to the left in presidential elections during the Trump era. Mitt Romney won it by 16 percent in 2012, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) won it by only three points against Beto O’Rourke in their 2018 Senate race, a showing Donald Trump repeated last year. As a result, Democrats were mildly optimistic that they could gain the seat when it became vacant after Republican Rep. Ron Wright died in February after being diagnosed with covid-19.

The special election’s structure encouraged those hopes. Under Texas law, all candidates are placed on the same ballot, with the top two advancing to a general election regardless of party should no one receive 50 percent of the vote. Saturday’s race had 23 candidates, including 11 Republicans. Most Democrats expected their leading candidate would advance to the runoff, a reasonable expectation given that both Biden and O’Rourke had received 48 percent of the vote.

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