BEFORE THE ELECTION:
(most comments here attributed to other bloggers are verbatim)
DOMINIC CARTER: Welcome to another edition of New York Eight’s Blogger’s Corner. Tonight, in advance of Tuesday’s election, we will be discussing what my colleague Gatemouth has dubbed “the Angry Black Man Primary Race” between the Freedom Party’s Councilman Charles Barron and The Rent is Too Damn High Party’s Jimmy McMillan.
So Gatey, what are your thoughts? Who won the debate? Will Jimmy McMillan win his own ballot line?
GATEMOUTH: …as nauseating as that prospect is, I will admit to being amused by the fact that McMillan’s showing may take the wind out of Charles Barron’s far more sophisticated effort at empowering another Statewide hate group (because McMillan and the Newman-Fulani faction of the Independence Party do not by themselves represent the full spectrum of political Anti-Semitism).
For once in his life, Barron was too subtle, communicating by dog whistles, and snide asides, he sounded too much like an insider to connect (and the most slippery of the insiders to boot–even Cuomo didn't dodge the same sex marriage question the way Barron did), while McMillan roused the rabble.
Charles Barron may be an ex-Panther, but compared to McMillan, he’s a de-clawed pussycat. Did Charles Barron ever spend a campaign traveling the state on foot, and getting himself expelled from the state Democratic Convention after he heckled Mario Cuomo? Was Barron ever found during a campaign at the side of the Belt Parkway tied to a tree, blindfolded, and doused with gasoline? Did Barron ever climb a cable on the Brooklyn
Bridge, until he was finally coaxed down by police, and then hospitalized?
No, Barron the Panther is pretty much pusillanimous compared to McMillan, an untamed Lion, a wild man with a wild mane.
Chuck had better hang up his Nehru, because 1968 is truly over
BOULDIN: it's with great pleasure, if not outright glee, that I find myself in agreement with my esteemed colleague, on the subject of the Beard that Would Be King.
We all saw the gubernatorial debate. Everyone expected, I think, that the show would be about some demented ramble by anti-everything-of-goodness-and-value teabag afficionado Carl 'Horse Porn' Paladino. Instead, all the buzz – at least here in hipsterville – was about 'dude, the guy with the beard! Awesome!'.
And that's fine. For the tattoo tribes of Williamsburg, style definitely precedes substance.
But when you dig a bit deeper, it's not so glamorous. First off, the Beard has a Jew problem. For me, that's a deal-breaker right there. Then, the Beard has some really whacked ideas about 9/11, which come down to another variant of aforementioned Jew problem.
But lastly and most egregiously, the Beard has a poetry problem. The problem being that he writes it. And that, frankly, is unforgivable.
HACKSHAW: Today, in a post-debate conversation with Charles Barron, he simply refuses to believe that Jimmy Macmillan's fifteen minutes of media-glory is going make it much harder for the Freedom Party to get the requisite fifty thousand votes needed to attain ballot-status for the next four years. Barron seemed quite happy with his debate-performance….I don't think JM will get 50 thousand votes to qualify for ballot status; my suspicion is there aren't that many idiots out there. However, I feel he will cost Barron whatever little chance he had of getting to 50K.
GATEMOUTH: You know the turf far better than I, but:
1) I saw Barron's strategy in City Hall News the other day, and it seems plausible and his base seems largely impervious to McMillan. Though Chuck probably cost himself about 1000 stupid white leftist votes with his position on same-sex.
2) I think McMillan get his votes mostly from white dilletantes, and 50,000 of them is possible now that Paladino has faded as a scary threat…
OY VEY: you need to do more outreach to media outlets so they're aware of and use your McMillan research. People of good will (including reporters you know) were not aware of McMillan's background. Given the noise/static in the race, and the pop culture mentality of how McMillan is being perceived, your research would go far in pushing McMillan from happy weird guy to lunatic dangerous fringe. No one seems willing to push the envelope, likely because they haven't done their homework. You have, so go do your presentation and email/write to them. The beauty of email is easy access to these folks.
GATEMOUTH: You gotta have perspective here. I'm not looking to drive votes to Barron
OY VEY: Understood about Barron, but you still need better PR. Not everyone remembers all the pieces from your oeuvre…In any event, getting this out there will help bring McMillan down to below 50,000 votes. Barron is bad but has small positive points, and shouldn't get 50,000 votes either, but this guy is worse.
FAT MAN: I'd rather that he NOT be exposed. He gives the angry Black voter a better place to vote than Barron. IT would be SWEET if Barron fell short of 50,000 by the McMillan vote.
GATEMOUTH: Sadly, I don't think anything I write effects angry black voters, and if you read my "Jimmy Mcmillan for Landlord" piece, you will find I am delighted that he is fucking Barron (who is a gutless wonder, of all things, on the question of marriage)
But, I think Jimmy Mac is going to get something Barron won't:
a lot of white votes;
and that I would like to stop.
LITTLEFIELD: This is all a sideshow; why is no one talking about Generation Greed?
FREEDOM PARTY: The ballot is 2 damn full: Rent buster Jimmy McMillan shouldn't even be an election choice…"The paper of record" has gone hunting for Jimmy McMillan's head the minute the debate ended. LMAO! They are very afraid of this clown even though the coronation of their candidate seems imminent. The New York Daily News headline looks like something out of the Hayek-von Mises Austrian school, which started when a bunch of rent gouging Viennese landlords wanted to abolish rent control and hired some scribblers to prove that "the market" was always infallible and government is always the enemy. Hayek got his big shot under the reactionary old battle axe Margaret Thatcher, who brought back scurvy, rickets, and pellagra for the English working class. The dumbed-down US version of the same doctrine is Milton Friedman and his Rockefeller-funded Chicago School, which got its big beta test under the fascist regime of Pinochet in Chile….
…I know everyone may be self interested and may not want to deal with the bafoonery (McMillan), but I'm just throwing the idea in the air of a reconciliation, forgiveness, and the setting up of a coalition to protect the people against savage cuts meant to impoverish, asset strip, and increase the power/profits of the elite, and reduce the middle class to the kind of peasantry, slave labor, eugenics, and genocide like they had in the old south. Social darwinism is in full effect.
It may be an idiotic idea, I'm just throwing it in the air to see what people think.
HACKSHAW: Jimmy McMillan is a nut job. He made the ballot because no one challenged his petitions (since he has no real chance of winning).JM has been using this party (RITDH) for years. It's a hustle more than a serious attempt at really changing things. He is going to cost Barron many votes and this is unfortunate. Charles doesn't want to believe this but he now has a bigger problem in his attempt to attain 50 thousand votes to qualify for ballot status for the next 4 years. I am still leaning towards voting FP but I will be really quite surprised if they do make ballot status after the election…. Lots of people have been asking me to make predictions on today's outcomes; so I will accommodate them: but only slightly. I don't expect much to change in New York's politics (in neither state nor city/local corridors of power)….If Jimmy Macmillan gets more votes than “Chucky-Bee” (Charles Barron), then you can put a “certifiably crazy” stamp on the foreheads of many black voters
FREEDOM PARTY: Black People Will not break for Jimmy Mcmillan. That kind of thought could never even cross my mind. The people who will vote for McMillan will be young whites who think he's cool dude.
HACKSHAW: If that thought never crossed your mind I have to wonder if you are even trying to be objective. Since the debate I have spoken to scores of blacks who tell me they are voting for the Rent Is Too Damn High guy.
AFTER THE ELECTION:
DOMINIC: We’re back with another edition of Blogger’s Corner; and to do our post mortem on the Angry Black Man’s Primary is New York 8’s resident angry black man, Rockwell Hackshaw. Rock, what’s the scoop?
HACKSHAW: This recent election was one where I voted without enthusiasm. I voted for Andrew Cuomo because I felt I would be wasting my vote on Charles Barron's Freedom Party ticket. The overall FP campaign was a joke; but (as usual) the black-nationalist-fanatic types will spin and spin everything but the “objective” truths. Plus, I came to the conclusion that their platform (FP) which mandated that the party must be Black and/or Hispanic-led, was reverse racism in sheep's clothing. I also suspected that Jimmy MacMillan -from the “Rent is too Damn High” political party- would get more votes than Barron (see my last column on this). Also, I wasn't about to take chances with a nut like Palladino in the race for governor; after all he had already surprised me by winning the Republican primary.
The fact that Barron could only amass 20k votes (statewide) further highlights the impotency of electoral strategies coming from race-based and race-obsessed places. It also highlights the repeated political and electoral failures of the black-nationalist front. The sad thing about this is Barron continues to demonstrate an unwillingness to retrospect. He never seems to learn from his many mistakes and failures. He goes on recruiting and deluding more black and Hispanic newcomers to the political process -almost on a daily basis- without ever stopping to make needed adjustments in his VALID fight to transform this society. In many ways he is well-meant: but in many other ways he is a total disappointment -for a guy as intellectually gifted as he is. I love the brother, but I doubt he will ever fulfill his true promise and potential: unless there is divine intervention and an awareness on his part that Christ's message is racially all-inclusive. The bigger disappointment is that his wife -who has a big influence on his actions- is totally unable to comprehend these truths, especially when she professes (even more so than he) to be a God-fearing Christian.
BARRON: I am not disappointed. We didn't come behind the Rent is Too Damn High and the Madam. That was the media we had to go up against. They had major media and I was whited out from the media. They had major media. The Rent Is Too Damn Guy he was on the front of every newspaper…When you get name recognition and media hype you are going to get some votes. And that's what he and the madam got.
GATEMOUTH: WHATEVER CHUCKLES; problem is you not only ran behind “the madam and the madman” (h/t to Lew Fidler), you also ran behind Howie Hawkins, who would have killed to have gotten 1/10th the free media you did, and Warren Redlich, whose ample free media was all about false accusations he was a child molester.
HACKSHAW: When you get to two of the five embryonic political-party-initiatives on the New York ballot, you find two black men. One who is articulate and cerebral (NYC council-member Charles Barron/Freedom Party), and the other is more buffoonish than intellectual (Jim MacMillan/The Rent Is Too High Political Party). Much to his political detriment, the articulate one is stuck in rather anachronistic thinking-patterns because of a fealty to failed ideas around black-nationalism; while the other possesses a single-issue platform that is quite compelling. Both failed to attain a level of campaigning deserving of the vote-threshold required for party-status (50k voters). Thus when the election was over neither one had enough votes to secure ballot-status for the next four years -given the strange election laws under which we function in this state.
The dramatic feature of all this was that MacMillan (40k) got twice as many votes as Barron (20k). What does this tell you about the state of the black-nationalist movement in New York after all these years? That it has failed to bear political fruits? Sure there have been cultural gains; but which black (male or female) will be on the state-wide ticket of a major political party, in four years time? Pray tell!!!
FREEDOM PARTY: Where's the proof that black people who would've voted for Barron, went with McMillan. I think McMillan got 40k because of the MTV/SNL/YouTube crowd.
HACKSHAW: We shouldn't be arguing about whether or not Macmillan took black votes from Charles, but instead we should be discussing how to get back on track given the political needs of the black community. Losing to Jimmy Mac at all was embarrassing enough to any sane political thinker, far less losing double….Look, Charles lacks objectivity and it hurts him more than he would admit. We need a new black political leader in this city like nobody's business. Sure, there are qualities CB possesses that some do like but the downsides are far outweighing his upsides. His negatives are smashing his positives. This was definitely reflected in the vote he received here. When he ran for Congress in 2006 he got more than half this amount. That represented about 3 per cent of his pool here. Some people will want to make excuses for him but deep down he must know the truth by now: his brand of racial politics has been rejected by most blacks in this state. I try not to have problems with anyone but I do have problems with inept and ineffective black electeds.
GATEMOUTH: Pretty Soon the Board of Elections will post its numbers, and then we will know where Jimmy got his votes.
Till we have some numbers we know not what we speak of.
HACKSHAW: I do know of what I speak: McMillan whipped Barron two to one. It doesn't matter where he got the votes from. Barron has been in office for almost a decade now. He has been an activist all his adult life. JM has been running around with this silly excuse of a political party without 1% of Barron's media exposure over those years. Barron goes back to the Hurbert Daughtry school of activism that has been around NYC for over 40 years. People can spin it all they want but even an ex-madam whipped him. Now what else do you need to prove that he was rejected by even his own black voters? This isn't rocket-science for you Gate. I am surprised that you haven't taken a piece of his hide for this disappointing performance. His brand of politics was rejected: PERIOD. Spin and truth are two different things.
GATEMOUTH: I have taken a piece of his hide; more than once. Go back and check my Gateway columns after the election…I wasn't disagreeing with you. I was only commenting on Freedom Party's very narrow point about where Jimmy Mac got his votes. I happen to know more people who voted for McMillan than I do who voted for C-Pal, and they are all white.
On the narrow point all I was saying was we don't know until we see some real numbers. As to your greater point, I think I've been clear that Chuckles embarrassed himself.
Some of this may have been Jimmy Mac taking black votes–I submit we don't know it. Some of it may have been Jimmy Mac taking angry white votes (I know a very smart white pol who believes that Mac appealed to a lot of angry whites who may otherwise have votes for Barron as a protest). Some of it might have been Barron's cowardice and opposition on same-sex marriage (which may have turned off some of those angry white protest votes–and may have gotten the Greens their line). Some of it might have been the scariness of C-Pal (look at you).
But in the end you are right. He did lay out a not unconvincing road map of where his potential votes were, but he could not get them. After the election, he tried to blame the lamestream media, but that is pathetic excuse making. Those votes were under the mainstream media radar. They were not under the black media radar, which largely treated him as a serious candidate.
Barron knew where those votes were; he just failed to attain them.
HACKSHAW: I didn't phrase that right. I did see some of these links but I guess I was looking for one whole column totally devoted to the analyzing and breaking down the gubernatorial race exclusively.
GATEMOUTH: I always check out all the local election returns, and publish pieces on them if I find anything worthy of analysis. I will look at the Gov race, but somehow doubt it will qualify.
As to Chuckles, I gave him one full scale column during the Gov's race, which was probably one too many compared with what he deserved. He also got extensive Gateway mentions and a heavy supporting role in at least one of my McMillan pieces.
Frankly, though I don't think Barron has proven himself significant enough to merit any more attention right now.
ANONYMOUS OBSERVER: Gatemouth you are so on point. Charles Barron gets too much attention from media. Attention he doesn't deserve. Rock has written too much on Barron over the years. Maybe he is guilt ridden for helping barron get elected. Regrets Rocky boy?
GATEMOUTH: In defense of Rock:
1) I've certainly given Barron too much ink as well.
2) Rock's woken up and smelled the coffee on this one. And his criticism on this matter surely is far more important than mine.
BARRON FOR BOROUGH PRESIDENT IN 13: Why Barron ran for governor.
Clearly most of those 20,000 votes Barron got, if not all of them, came from his base in Brooklyn. Which I think was the whole idea. Barron is term limited and needs a new job after his current term ends. I think he intends to run for Brooklyn Borough President in 2013. I think Barron's blood boils at the idea that Brooklyn, a center of black power, has had this white Borough President for the last decade. He wants to be Marty Markowitz's successor.
I predict that Barron runs for Borough president and if he can't win the Democratic primary,
he'll try to get all 20,000 of those who voted the Freedom party line to back him in the general election. Particularly if the Democrats nominate another white guy for borough president, lets say David Yassky for instance.
SKURNIK: Well, I refuse to comment about anyone who might be a potential client.
LITTLEFIELD: This is all a sideshow; why is no one talking about Generation Greed?
FREEDOM PARTY: Freedom Party should start from bottom up. Local elections in our communities shouldn't be that hard. WFP did it.
HACKSHAW: Your naiveté relative to local elections is somewhat amusing. What you just said can only be explained by suggesting that you haven't paid attention to local elections in communities of color for the past 50 years. Remember when you recently said that you never even gave thought to the possibility that MacMillan would get more votes than Barron? Well he doubled Barron's total. Go back and see what I told you then. I am starting to believe than you are a youngster in these matters homey. But that's okay. You will continue to learn and that's good. You seem willing.
FREEDOM PARTY: How slick of you my man. My McMillan comment, as you already know, concerned the Black vote, and I said what I said because I believe there is an element of our own who choose to denigrate Black voters without laying out any solid facts. I kind of agreed with GateMouth's view that McMillan would get some of the white vote because of his youtube/SNL notoriety. This would make sense because where is the proof that Mcmillan has won anything in Black neighborhoods?
JUDGE BOYAJIAN: Gentlemen, please calm down and join me in a rousing chorus of Kumbaya.
AND NOW BACK TO THE REAL WORLD.
I hope you had as much fun reading that compilation of ignorant posturing (my own included) as I had in compiling it, but it’s now time for me to rise to Rock’s challenge and look to the actual numbers and see what they mean.
Because of ongoing recounts, it may still be awhile before we have official statewide numbers, but the numbers in the City should resolve many questions all of us have been answering without having the benefit of the facts (not that has ever stopped anyone here).
1,409,598 votes were cast in the city in this year’s general election. 1,366,982 of those contained a vote for Governor. 19,890 of those votes were cast for Charles Barron and 12,858 for Jimmy McMillan.
Although the actual count in the City showed a 16% jump in the number of ballots reported in the unofficial count on election night (a phenomena which may or may not be replicated outside of the City), one can conclude based on the unofficial count (approximately 22,000 votes statewide for Barron and 38,000 for McMillan) that even though both vote totals will surely rise, McMillan cleaned Barron’s clock upstate and in the suburbs.
And, in case anyone did not understand this, the areas outside of New York City, where McMillan gained approximately 25,000 over Barron, were 81.86% Non-Hispanic White in the 2000 census and 7.7% Non-Hispanic Black. By contrast, the City, where Barron had a 7,000 vote lead over McMillan was 34.98% Non-Hispanic White and 24.50% Non-Hispanic Black.
The contrast becomes even more stark when one takes a look at the details of the City vote itself.
In the City’s 13 Assembly Districts which were drawn with a Non-Hispanic Black majority based on the 2000 census figures, Barron received 11,525 votes (4.167%), while McMillan received 2,308 (0.834%). In others words, in the City’s Angry Black Man Primary, the City’s Blackest Assembly Districts gave Barron 83.32% of the Angry Black Vote.
In the 11 Assembly Districts where Non-Hispanic Black population in the 2000 census ranged from 25%-49.99% of the population, Barron received 3291 votes (1.766%) to McMillan’s 1593 (0.855%), giving Barron 71.79% of the Angry Black Vote.
In the Angry Black Community, there was even the equivalent of the One Drop Rule. Barron beat McMillan anywhere where the Non-Hispanic Black Minority was even a blip on the screen. In the 11 Assembly Districts where the 2000 Non-Hispanic Black population was 10%-24.99% of the population, Barron beat McMillan 2576 (1.0405) to 2426 (0.980%), taking 51.50% of the Angry Black Vote.
Only in those Districts where the Non-Hispanic Black Population was under 10% did McMillan score a victory.
Lest anyone think that The Freedom Party’s Rainbow Coalition of People of Color was anything but a fantasy, in the ten Assembly Districts where there was a Non-Hispanic Black Population of under 10%, but where Non-Hispanic Whites were nonetheless a Minority of the population, McMillan beat Barron 1476 (0.0987%) to 954 (0.638%), taking 60.74% of the Angry Black Vote.
As Paul Simon once said “And after it rains, there's a rainbow, and all of the colors are black.”
I should note that McMillan beat Barron in every one of these Districts.
And, in the 20 Assembly Districts which in the 2000 census were under 10% Non-Hispanic Black and had a Non-Hispanic White Majority, it was a blow out. McMillan got 5,055 (0.948%) votes to Barron’s 1544.(0.304%), winning the blanquito version of the Angry Black Primary with an incredible 76.60%.
A few thoughts.
Although Barron had considerable coverage in the Black media, and bragged of a statewide network of churches and activists, and actually beat Carl Paladino in eight City Assembly Districts, his showing was abysmal. He got 1.46% of the Citywide vote, and 2.19% in his home Borough of Brooklyn. In the 40th Assembly District, where his wife is Assemblywoman and District Leader and almost all of which overlaps his Council District, making up its majority, he ran second, garnering 6.67% of the vote, proving that to know Barron is not to love him.
But as poor as Barron’s showing was in the black community, it was virtually non-existent elsewhere. Although Barron did his worst among whites, he also got his clock cleaned in every Latino AD which lacked a black voter base.
By contrast, McMillan’s vote was remarkably consistent. The Black Majority ADs gave him 0.834% while the 20 ADs with virtually no black votes and a white majority gave him 0.998%. Still the figures also show that the fewer Blacks a District had, the more likely it was to give a higher share of its votes to McMillan, and of the Non-Black voters, the ones most likely to vote for McMillan were Whites. The difference were not huge, but they were there.
And given the Statewide population numbers (61.98% Non-Hispanic White to 14.82% Non-Hispanic Black), the Statewide racial distribution and where his votes came from, there can be no doubt that McMillan got the overwhelming majority of his votes from Whites.
McMillan is truly "THE GREAT WHITE HYPE."
By contrast, as has been demonstrated, Barron got virtually all his votes from Blacks.
Did McMillan cost Barron votes?
Well, clearly the black votes McMillan got were alienated enough from the process to vote for McMillan, so Barron might have been a likely second choice, but as has been demonstrated, that is a small pool of votes, which would have not brought Barron anywhere close to the 50,000 he need to obtain a ballot line.
As to the white votes cast for Jimmy Mac, I must beg to differ with my friend the Smart Pol. There were a lot of alienated white voters out there. They might have considered voting for Barron for a number of reasons, but in each case they had a better choice. And the votes in the 20 ADs with a black population under 10% where White were a 2000 Majority (The Blanquito 20) show it.
They might have voted for Barron because they thought Cuomo insufficiently “Progressive,” but Barron’s position on Same Sex Marriage probably cost him any chance with those voters. Without McMillan, most of those votes would likely have gone to the better “Progressive,” the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, who beat Barron in those ADs 4803 to 1544.
They might have voted for Barron because they considered the process a joke. But Barron’s humorless veneer (even though he is capable of great wit) probably cost him any chance with those voters. Without McMillan, most of those votes would likely have gone to the better Manifestation of Absurdity, the Anti-Prohibition Party’s Happy Hooker, Kristen Davis, who beat Barron in those ADs 2869 to 1544.
They might have voted for Barron because they wanted someone as angry as they were. But Barron’s anger was trumped by someone even angrier. Without McMillan, most of those votes would probably have gone to another bigot even more angry than Charles Barron, the Republican Party’s Carl Paladino, who beat Barron in those ADs by an astronomical margin, and actually beat Cuomo in two of them.
Barron lost big, but Jimmy McMillan had virtually nothing to do with that fact.