Sunday, April 27, 2008

McCain taking different approach than Bush to pursue black voters

By Alexander Bolton
Posted: 04/22/08 07:18 PM [ET]

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is making an appeal to black voters this week, but he has taken a different approach than President Bush did during his 2004 reelection campaign.

While Bush highlighted an amendment seeking to ban gay marriage and other social issues to court black voters, McCain is championing education and other populist ideas. Part of McCain’s strategy is to make the case that the Democrats’ tax plan will negatively affect citizens across the economic spectrum.

Rice hits U.S. 'birth defect'

March 28, 2008
By Nicholas Kralev

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States still has trouble dealing with race because of a national "birth defect" that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country's very founding.

"Black Americans were a founding population," she said. "Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That's not a very pretty reality of our founding."

As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, "descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that." "That particular birth defect makes it hard for us to confront it, hard for us to talk about it, and hard for us to realize that it has continuing relevance for who we are today," she said.