Posted by
Black Knight on Wednesday, April 09, 2008 7:09:14 PM
Al Gore on C-SPAN in 1992 or 1996 on a walking tour, said, "I'm in search of white male votes."
So it is inflammatory and incindiary to try and pretend that an Obama advance person has said something that has never been said before.
***
Obama advance: 'Get me more white people'
From the account in Carnegie Mellon's paper, the Tartan, of a Michelle Obama event in Pittsburgh:
While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama’s event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama.
The Tartan’s correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, “Get me more white people, we need more white people.” To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, “We’re moving you, sorry. It’s going to look so pretty, though.”
“I didn’t know they would say, ‘We need a white person here,’ ” said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. “I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn’t know it would be so outright.”
I'm not sure there's any real reason for outrage here; every campaign, at least implicitly, includes race in the staging of events like this -- even a campaign whose supporters chant "race doesn't matter." But they don't usually get caught doing it this explicitly.
And (if you didn't pick it up from the bowling) it does give you a sense of the community Obama's trying to reach in Pennsylvania: whitefolks.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0408/Obama_advance_Get_me_more_white_people.html