When Barack won Iowa and South Carolina I was frankly floored. I thought wow maybe this country has come further on racial issues then I thought. Then about a week before the Ohio primary, I sat in the barber shop and heard words expressed very similar to those of the two brothers. My heart sunk.

I learned back in 1980 when going door to door for Carter about the level of ignorance of many. The reasons and the absolute false facts some believed and were basing their vote on discourgaged me a great deal.

The information age hasn’t helped. Those people don’t read blogs, nor do they spend much time actually listening to the candidates. They are susceptable to sound bites and following the lead of certain commentators and radio hosts that I won’t name cause Jill hates that. (chuckles) I know this because those are the things I hear repeated in the barber shop and at the lunch counter over and over again.

The good news is a lot of them don’t vote. The bad news is,too many do.

But, when I arrived at work in Sandusky, Ohio, (my birthplace) to work for Ford Motor Company as a new member of the UAW (where my dad had worked during his whole career), my eyes were popped wide open! My ears couldn’t believe all the expressions of racist, sexist sentiments. And I thought to myself, “This just boggles my mind that these (UAW members) are the staunchest of Democrats. That just blows the lid off the notion that Democrats are tolerant of diversity and that Republicans are, in stark contrast to the Democrats, racist and sexist bigots.”

And even though I ran for state rep in 2002 as a UAW member, my own union refused to endorse me because I was a Republican.

I got another eye-opener when I lived in Oberlin and helped an African-American woman circulate petitions for school board. Retired Oberlin College professors, assuming that I was circulating petitions for someone who was white, said that they were pleased that another white was running in a race that already had blacks who had announced their candidacy. The sentiments they shared with me indicated that they blamed the black community for anything that went wrong in Oberlin, particularly issues of crime and student achievement.

I am amazed that more African-Americans aren’t Republicans, given the fact that their voting bloc, in my opinion, is taken totally for granted by the Democrat Party.

Though, for years, many have pointed fingers at the Republicans for their intolerant attitudes towards women and people of color (and I acknowledge that there are problems in our party, the party of Lincoln, that have, sadly, contributed to that perception, especially in the Northwest–like Washington, Oregon, and Idaho–and in the South), I, personally, (and this is just my humble opinion) believe that there is a HUGE problem of bigotry in the Democrat Party–right here in Northern Ohio–that has been a quietly kept secret, largely ignored until now.

There are 20 percent of Americans who believe that Saddam Hussein masterminded the attack on 11 September and that we captured extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico.

Ignorance is ignorance. Most can be educated, some can’t.

B’shalom,

Jeff

A perfect example of that was the Ward 6 Cleveland City Council race that was held yesterday. Only 892 votes were cast in a ward that has 17,000 registered voters.