They said if I voted for Barack Obama, racism would prevail.<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>And they were right:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cDown in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later,\u201d he begins, \u201cthere\u2019s a law, federal law \u2014 when you get reconstruction money from the federal government \u2014 called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when you get federal money, you gotta give a ten percent match. The local government\u2019s gotta come up with ten percent. Every ten dollars the federal government comes up with, local government\u2019s gotta give a dollar.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNow here\u2019s the thing,\u201d Obama continues, \u201cwhen 9-11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act \u2014 said, \u2018This is too serious a problem. We can\u2019t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you gotta put in. Well, here\u2019s ten dollars.\u2019 And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, \u2018Look at this devastation. We don\u2019t expect you to come up with y\u2019own money, here. Here\u2019s the money to rebuild. We\u2019re not gonna wait for you to scratch it together \u2014 because you\u2019re part of the American family.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s not, Obama says, what is happening in majority-black New Orleans. \u201cWhat\u2019s happening down in New Orleans? Where\u2019s your dollar? Where\u2019s your Stafford Act money?\u201d Obama shouts, angry now. \u201cMakes no sense! Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don\u2019t care about as much!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a remarkable moment, and not just for its resemblance to Kayne West\u2019s famous claim that \u201cGeorge Bush doesn\u2019t care about black people,\u201d but also because of its basic dishonesty. By January of 2007, six months before Obama\u2019s Hampton speech, the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina. Compare this to the mere $20 billion that the Bush administration pledged to New York City after Sept. 11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Even if you\u00a0<em>are\u00a0<\/em>a low information voter, this has got to be sinking in, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They said if I voted for Barack Obama, racism would prevail. And they were right: \u201cDown in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later,\u201d he begins, \u201cthere\u2019s a law, federal law \u2014 when you get reconstruction money from the federal government \u2014 called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-12","category-president-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30876"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30879,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30876\/revisions\/30879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}