Ruh-roh.
From CNN, earlier today:
Artur Davis, the
former four-term Democratic congressman from Alabama who co-chaired
President Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, introduced the running mate of
Obama's Republican challenger in Virginia Friday.
"Are you ready to meet the next vice president of the United States?"
Davis asked at a rally in Springfield, Virginia. It was Ryan's second
event of the day. He held a rally outside Richmond on Friday morning.
In his introduction, Davis pointed to Ryan's age – he's 42 – as having energized the GOP. Davis is 44.
"Remember a week ago, some of our Democratic friends had the illusion
that we were kind of an older party. That were the party of the last
generation. One week later I'm the oldest man on this stage right now,"
Davis said. "What a difference a week makes."
Davis, who said in May he was switching parties from Democrat to
Republican, said he had only disagreed with Ryan on one subject: the
status of Led Zeppelin as the "#1 band of the modern era."
"I questioned you as you said it. As a Genesis man, I questioned it," Davis said.
He also praised Ryan's willingness to advance a House GOP budget that
included sometimes-unpopular cuts to programs in the name of cutting
the federal debt.
"President Romney is going to have a vice president who believes, in a
town where no one takes responsibility for anything, Washington D.C.,
this man wrote a budget with tough, hard, necessary choices. He put his
name on it," Davis said.
And there's former Virginia Governor Wilder letting loose about Joe Biden...
RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — The nation's first elected black governor,
Virginia's L. Douglas Wilder, lambasted Vice President Joe Biden on
national television Wednesday for his remark to a largely black crowd
about banks keeping people "in chains."
Wilder, a Democrat and a grandson of slaves, echoed indignant
denunciations from Republicans, including presumptive presidential
nominee Mitt Romney, that Biden's comment at a Tuesday rally in
Danville, Va., injected race into the presidential contest.
"Without question, they were appeals to race," Wilder told CNN. "And if
you don't argue with that, then you understand that, then the next
question is: Why? Why do you feel you need to do that? But the more
important thing that I got out of this was Biden separated himself from
what he accused the people of doing. As a matter of fact, what he said
is, they are going to do something to y'all, not to me, not us. So he
was still involved with that separate America. And I'm sick and tired of
being considered something other than an American."
Ouch!!
Both gents, in case it needs to be said, are black. You know, that core group of Obama supporters that would never ever ever ever think about voting for aaaaaannnnyyyone else--ever.
It takes real courage for reach gentleman to speak up--they will have a lot of anger spewed in their direction over the next few weeks.
OS wishes them well, and as the descendant of a Confederate soldier from Mississippi, really truly wishes we could somehow get past the race-baiting, the constant pouring of salt into old wounds, the relentless appeal to our resentments at the expense of our hopes and our sense of logic.
Even George Wallace publicly repented of the practice, for crying out loud. The rest of us would do well to look to his example.