That was my first thought too. Ironically, that was about a morally-questionable black guy pretending to be a better-known white politician.
Normally I wouldn’t recommend taking political strategy from second-rate Eddie Murphy movies but hey, whatever works.
This is my view too. The guy’s a sleazy douche and the electorate can boot him out at the earliest opportunity but it’s their fault for making unwarranted assumptions.
The earliest opportunity will be in 6 years.
Really? Even assuming that voters would have recognized, remembered, and rejected this fellow with the highly bland name if he had put his face on the website, and leaving aside that (apparently) he sent out mailers accusing the incumbent of being too gay-friendly (suggesting that his anti-gay views may not have been so poorly received), the criticism is that he implied that he was black and that that was unfair. It’s not illogical to conclude that people believe that he would have lost if he had been openly white. I may be wrong, and there may be other logical conclusions, but if it were a black candidate pretending to be white, eeking out a victory, and being criticized for not being openly black, I just think we might say that race played a factor here.
For everybody chiding the voters for not being better informed, you do realize that it’s laughably hard to get information on school board candidates, right? In my district at least, there were two incumbents, with short autobios on the school board website. Of the two non-incumbents, one had some news articles indicating that somebody with his rather unusual name was retiring as CEO of the local hospital, and the other had absolutely no information about him that I could find anywhere. It could very well be that that flier was the only information they had about Dave Wilson.
And here’s the kicker: suppose people did go online and find that some asshole named Dave Wilson ran for mayor and lost. They’d reasonably assume that this was a different Dave Wilson, because that one was white and this one is implied to be black.
Hey, cut the guy a little slack. After all, he killed Osama bin Laden.
(“Osama bin Laden” is what he named his pet goldfish before swallowing it.)
I don’t think anyone has used the word unfair. It’s dishonest because he made several misleading implications about himself.
If he’d been “openly white,” people might have realized he was the kook who ran for mayor and lost in 2011 and that Ron Wilson wasn’t endorsing him.
That should be:
*Osama bin Laden is his pet fish.
I think that summary is a bit murky. In fact, the lies came not from “white voters,” but from the circulators of the petition that placed the measure on the ballot. So far as I’m aware, there is no allegation of fraud surrounding the passage of the actual question – just the process used to get the measure on the ballot.
(And I have to say that one particular incident in connection with this was almost a movie moment of stupidity on the part of the petition circulators: a woman testified that she was approached by a petition circulator and asked to sign. She asked what it was about; the circulator mumbled something about how it was intended to “keep civil rights fair,” and told her that Ruthie Stevenson, president of the Macomb County chapter of the NAACP, supported the petition.
She replied that she WAS Ruthie Stevenson, and that she did not support the petition. He slunk away without answering.)
This.
And not a great deal of blame; ALL of the blame. Bottom line, as you said, do the research and know who and what you are voting for.
In the words of the old saying, “Fool you once, shame on you.”
Race shouldn’t be a factor in voting. If I liked a candidate, voted for him, and he turned out to be a different race than I expected, if I then decided I didn’t like him, that would make me a racist.
What if I liked a candidate because I thought that he was endorsed by a different politician I like, but it turned out that that endorsement was a lie?
I love Wilson’s explanation (from the KHOU Texas news site
So he has no problem deceiving voters, 'cause that’s just what politicians do.
Props for honesty anyway. Do the apologists here feel that if a candidate intends to “deceive the voters”, then it’s just their tough luck for believing him?
If you base your vote entirely on one mailed pamphlet you deserve the idiot you vote for.
I admit, I’ve never given a damn about endorsements of candidates by other people when choosing the person to vote for. I’ll pick based on my own view of the candidate, not by proxy.
More often I find that the act of openly endorsing a candidate just makes me like the endorser less - moreso if they endorse a candidate I don’t like, but even those choosing the same candidate make me want to tell them to shut up and just vote rather than going on about it. But that’s just me.
That says a lot about politics in America -
You can’t trust your politicians to be mostly honest, but instead have to do your own research and outside verification?
And you support / endorse the situation?
Stories like this make me wish there was somebody overseeing election advertising and people that outright lie and mislead get into trouble
Not if he misled you to win your vote.
It still makes me a racist, it just makes him a liar too. Seriously, I vote for a guy, then find out he’s black and decide I wouldn’t have voted for him if I knew that? Really, that makes me not racist?
How would voters feel if Dave Wilson turned out to be a white man who HAD secured the endorsement of former State Representative Ron Wilson.
How would they feel if Dave Wilson turned out to be a black man who had only secured the endorsement of his cousin Ron Wilson?
I think overall you’re going to get a lot more feelings of being defrauded in the second case than the first.
That said, local non-partisan elections are a complete crap shoot to begin with. All you have is what the candidate says about himself to you, if he lies about his agenda, there is absolutely no way to really find out until he gets in office, then you have to wait 4 years to kick him to the curb.
So has anyone checked to see if the cousin Ron Wilson actually endorsed him or if that was bullshit, too?