Just when I thought we were about to have an honest, 4700 word national monologue on race, class war rears it’s ugly head again:

Fourteen months into a campaign that has the feel of a movement, Sen. Barack Obama has collided with the gritty political traditions of Philadelphia, where ward bosses love their candidates, but also expect them to pay up.

[...]

Flush with payments from well-funded campaigns, the ward leaders and Democratic Party bosses typically spread out the cash in the days before the election, handing $10, $20 and $50 bills to the foot soldiers and loyalists who make up the party’s workforce.

The Donk Party apparatus is apparently unaware of Obamessiah’s legendary stinginess with tithings from His offering plate. But when you give to these so-called “field hands” you can get back so much more. For an extra $50 they’ll slash the tires of your opposition.

Carol Ann Campbell, a ward leader and Democratic superdelegate who supports Obama, estimated that the amount of street money Obama would need to lay out for election day is $400,000 to $500,000.

“This is a machine city, and ward leaders have to pay their committee people,” Campbell said. “Barack Obama’s campaign doesn’t pay workers, and I guarantee you if they don’t put up some money for those street workers, those leaders will most likely take Clinton money.

$400,000 to $500,000 to buy this one slaveowner’s feudal lord’s superdelegate’s votes? Now I’m crestfallen.

A neutral observer, state Rep. Dwight Evans, whose district is in northwest Philadelphia, said there might be a racial subtext to the dispute. Ward leaders, he said, see Obama airing millions of dollars worth of television ads in the city — money that benefits largely white station owners, feeding resentment. People wonder why Obama isn’t sharing the largesse with the largely African American field workers trying to get him elected, Evans said.

“They view it that the white people are getting all the money for TV,” said Evans, an African American and former ward leader. “And they’re the ones who are the foot soldiers on the street. They’re predominantly African Americans, and they’re not the ones who are getting that TV money.”

Damn you, Whitey. Damn you!

Even when a black candidate is running in a black city filled with black voters who want to vote for his blackness, Whitey is still taking money out of their vote buying schemes.

I don’t know if I want to live in a country where my candidate will not pay me to vote for him. Stay strong, Philly.

Just take Hillary’s payoff money and put it towards a downpayment on that White House your Christ always wanted. That you couldn’t figure that out is the fault of bad public schools.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Politics, Race, The Obamessiah. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.