Why is the Blackwell campaigning with a white supremacist?

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2006/2171

J. Kenneth Blackwell, the man who stole Ohio’s 2004 presidential election, was out campaigning October 4, 2006 with a man widely viewed as one of America’s leading white supremacists. Blackwell is an African-American.

He is also the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio. As Secretary of State, he was the GOP point man for stealing the 2004 presidential vote that gave George W. Bush a second term. As co-chair of the state’s Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Blackwell engineered a complex strategy of confusion, disenfranchisement and theft that mirrored what was done by Katherine Harris in Florida 2000. Harris was rewarded with a safe Congressional seat, and is now the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate. Polls show Blackwell trailing between 12-20 points in his gubernatorial race, but few Ohio insiders doubt his ability to steal the necessary votes, if he can get away with it. Currently, Blackwell operatives are stressing that he’s “only 12 points down” and that they believe the race will tighten significantly by Election Day.

Blackwell toured the state with Larry Pratt, author of ARMED PEOPLE VICTORIOUS, which advocates the creation of militant right-wing militias. Pratt has spoken and shared platforms in the past with Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi Aryan Nation members. He was forced to take a leave of absence from Pat Buchanan’s 1996 presidential campaign over charges of white supremacist and anti-semitic views. Pratt’s 150,000-member Gun Owners of America is proudly to the right of the National Rifle Association.

According to the Columbus Dispatch, Pratt says he couldn’t be a racist because he is campaigning with Blackwell, an African-American. Blackwell is “our kind of guy,” says Pratt, in reference to Blackwell’s support of gun owners’ rights.

Here's what Time Mag wrote in 2001 on Pratt's association with another of the looney wingnuts - John Ashcroft.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,94912,00.html

Nearly three years ago, as Sen. John Ashcroft was considering a run for the presidency, he composed a hand-written thank-you note to a man many politicians would run from. Neatly inscribed on Ashcroft's Senate stationery, the letter went to Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, a firearms lobbying group considered extremist even by many conservatives.

"Thanks to you and GOA," Ashcroft wrote, the senator planned to call for significant changes in a juvenile-justice measure then working its way through Congress. An original cosponsor, Ashcroft ultimately withdrew his support for the bill because of the provision cited by GOA.

There is no evidence of further contact between Ashcroft, George W. Bush's nominee for attorney general, and Pratt, though Ashcroft had put out feelers to GOA activists in New Hampshire while exploring a presidential bid seven months earlier, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Nor is there anything unusual about a senator responding in writing to an interested citizen. But the discovery of the senator's personal note to Pratt is likely to fuel Democratic charges that Ashcroft is insensitive to minorities and civil liberties.

At the time Ashcroft wrote to Pratt, the Virginia-based activist was already branded as a pariah even by those considered to the right of the GOP: Two years earlier, he had been forced to step aside as co-chairman of Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign after news reports of his association with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and militias.

[ck4829]

1. I had a class with Harvey Wasserman as my Professor last winter

He's a great guy.

[hobbit709]

2. Because Blackwell

has a major case of oreo