Introducing Robert Johnson

(Via dNa) Jed put Bob Johnson in context.

MSM Following Black Bloggers

I’ve been getting more election-related material from  professional journalists and bloggers (Andrew Sullivan, Kevin Drum, and Mark Halperin all come to mind) than I have from amateurs lately. This weekend, the New Yorker, the Financial Times, the Nation, the Times,  and ABC are among those taking on the subject of race in the campaign. But, as field negro points out, they are building on terrain blazed by Black bloggers:

After all the screaming black folks have been doing by way of blogs and word of mouth, the main stream media has finally caught on to this little story. …I have been reading quite a few African American blogs and the comments on them for the past few days, and I am pretty convinced that if a general election were held today and Lady Hillary was the dumbocratic nominee, she would lose. Why? Because she would need to have African American votes to win swing states like Michigan,Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and the way things have been going lately, that just ain’t gonna happen.

dNa:

If the Clintons wanted to pick a black person with less credibility on the issue of race than Bob Johnson, they would have had to look really hard.

Postbourgie:

Could the outrage by black supporters over these comments ‘racialize’ Obama and sink his necessary support among white voters? Is that what the Clintons are up to? Or are they just making really stupid mistakes?

Intentional or not, they need to find a way to change the subject — and fast.

dNa, again:

One of the biggest myths of the Presidential campaign is that the only people questioning Barack Obama’s negritude, or “blackness” as it is commonly referred to, are also black.…there is little conflict in the black community as to whether Obama is “authentically” black, because most of us are tired of arguing about what that actually means. The real question is whether he represents black interests better than Hillary Clinton or John Edwards, and whether or not as a black candidate, he has a chance of winning.