Clyde called early Thursday morning.
“Mornin’ Bunkie. Don’t make coffee. Come on down, I’m buying.”
I finished shaving, took my meds, and headed on down.
“What’s up this morning Clyde,” I said as I came through the door.
“ The Kaine campaign is stinking to high heaven. While Allen is offering real solutions, or at least real ideas on energy and jobs, all Kaine and his minions want to do is re-hash really old stuff about how Allen’s a racist.” Clyde replied as he poured my coffee.
“He would rather be off galavanting with Obama than run a real campaign.
“Now, the only Democrat president I can remember who wasn’t a racist himself was John Kennedy, and he might have been, ’cause back then the press didn’t report stuff like that.
“Even Jimmy Carter, who’s a decent man I suppose, insisted we were too ignorant to get by without a government boost. Bill Clinton, who boasted that he was the first black president, I suppose ’cause he could blow a sax, joked with Teddy Kennedy that ‘A few years ago Barack would be serving us coffee.’
“Let’s not even get into Johnson, who once said to a couple of governors, ‘I’ll have those niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years,’ the most blatantly racist president since Andy Jackson. But the sad thing is, he might have been right.”
Clyde got up to pour two more coffees. When he came back he picked up right where he left off.
“After we really did have a first black president I hoped this stuff had finally come to an end. But no. An argument could be made that Obama is more racist than Johnson and Jackson combined.”
“That about sizes it up Clyde. Playing the race card will get worse as the Kaine and Obama teams dig into the cross-tabs of all the polls, become more desperate, and begin to realize that’s all they got. I imagine they are more scared of their own internal polling. My friend Norm recently wrote about how scared they really are.”
“I hope you’re right about the polls, but I just know an Obama loss will be blamed on racism.
“I gotta open the door now, want some breakfast?”
“Sure,” I said. “Fix me my favorite.”
I got up and poured another cup.
In just a few minutes I was diggin’ into Clyde’s famous boneless, skinless chicken breakfast. With bacon and taters.
NOTE: This is NOT satire. I’m sure you know that Clyde is a fictional character. However, Clyde is very closely based on a real life neighbor of mine, a former Democrat, African-American of roughly my age. This conversation is a pretty accurate version of one we had yesterday over coffee on my porch. The rough draft of our conversation was cleared by “Clyde.”
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