Keith Ellison a man committed to becoming the new Democratic Chairperson.
The Minnesota congressman — a powerful speaker and canny political organizer — was on the cusp of an easy victory in the race for DNC chairman until the past few weeks, when his decades-old writings on the Nation of Islam leader (he called him a “role model for Black Youth” in a 1995 student editorial) resurfaced and ignited.
Soon after, reporters unearthed 2010 comments about how Israel, “a country of seven million,” dominates U.S. policy in the Mideast — prompting a denunciation from the head of the Anti-Defamation League and Democratic mega-donor Haim Saban, casting his coronation into sudden and serious doubt.
Keith Ellison’s response to this dilemma was to the writer “I have four kids. My youngest child is 20. Some of the things they want to hit me for, I was younger than her when I wrote them. And so, come on. At some point, we all are human beings who have evolved over the course of 25 years, and yet we want to freeze each other in time.”
Ellison is an open and engaging guy to talk with — and he relishes the chance to explain himself at length, as he did in a recent memoir — but he bristled when I suggested that everything an elected official utters or scribbles during their adult life should be fair game.
“But every single word, though?” asked Ellison, a convert from Catholicism to Islam who was the first of his faith to be elected to Congress.
I guess you can disgrace women and tell an audience you fondle women for fun and become elected president??? But a chairman candidate of a major political party who speaks about views in his teens is held seriously responsible even after he has apologized for those views made 25 years ago.
We as African Americans must get behind a man of this stature support him in every manner possible because the party we have blindly supported for all these years must be held accountable. This party is in a huge mess after losing so much in the last 8 years by not supporting local and state candidates and letting so many states become Republican strongholds. Politics is always Local!!!!