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POLITICALLY SPEAKING Congressman Brother James E. “Jim” Clyburn was keynote speaker at the Mu Alpha Achievement Week program this past November. Afterwards, he spoke with Q-View Editor Brother Kurt Walker about the 2016 presidential election, voting, redistricting, and how to strategically fight the power! Here’s the Breakdown.... QV: In your estimation how should we as brothers, conduct ourselves in light of the election results? JC: I think that all of us are aware that this recent election was a big disappointment to the minority community. We had great hopes that the work of President Obama would be continued and would continue to be sort of a beacon of light for the future. We have to remember that history never moves on a linear plane. It doesn’t go from point A to point B to point C; history has always gone back and forth like a pendulum on a clock. It goes right for a while then it goes back left, then it goes back right. Sometimes the movement back in the other direction extends a longer period than others. This time we had sort of an 8-year period where the pendulum topped off to the left from 2008 and here we are in 2016 and it has done this big lurch to the right. The question we have to ask ourselves is how do we deal with this? I don’t think that we did dealt with Obama’s victory as well as we should have. In 2008 we all showed up, got him elected, and then in 2010 we sort of decided things should be on automatic pilot. But the people who opposed his election in 2008 did not stop. We all saw Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the senate, saying his priority was to make President Obama a one-term president. Many, many talk show hosts all across the country made it very clear that their number one priority was to make him a failure. What a lot of us did not feel the gravity of was how far people would go to oppose this President on every front…so what we have to do is be vigilant. We’ve got to remember that we have roles to play at making sure that whatever Donald Trump does, if it is to retrogress, we must make sure he is not successful. Now he’s www.omega6d.org
shown already with his appointments, the first being his White House staff. He’s appointed a white nationalist who is anti-Semite, anti-black, to be his personal strategist in the White House. I don’t think any of us would believe that we would see a President of the United States put someone in his White House to run the political strategy with that kind of a resume…we can’t stop his appointments, but we can stop his policies…and as I said in my speech today, I wrote my definition of living, and I said breathing is not living, its only a sign of life, to live is to be free, to live is to move through time and space, making old things new, discovering fire, inventing the wheel, looking for new mountains to climb other valleys to span, other rivers to cross, bridges to build over the many bodies of troubled waters. That to me is what living is all about. And we cannot spend these next two years breathing; we’ve got to live. If we use my definition of living as a guide I really believe we will checkmate this President at the polls come 2018. QV: The term “down ballot offices” was used a lot describing the impact the candidates at the top of the ballots impact a race. Can you elaborate on this? JC: That’s always the case. The biggest bully pulpit in this country is that of the President and the biggest attention grabbers when it comes to politics are the people running for President. So no matter what I may say in a campaign, running for Congress or somebody that’s running for the United States Senate, when it’s in a presidential year,
the focus is on the presidential candidate. When the Director of the F.B.I. performed that unprecedented act, he redefined this campaign. We’ve never seen anything like that in the history of this country. The F.B.I. has never put its thumb on the scale when it comes to a presidential election, but that’s what happened this year. Those elements saw Hillary Clinton ascending, her numbers where skyrocketing. It was no accident that Comey did what he did and I know enough about national politics to know that no one ever wants to question the results of a national election because of the destabilizing impact it could have on the country. But in 2000, every analysis of the 2000 election says that Al Gore really won. I think most people believe that. But because the Supreme Court really installed George W. Bush as President, people sort of stood down. And in this instance, irrespective of what anybody says, I was looking at those numbers and I saw how those numbers began to drop after that announcement by Comey about those emails. It changed the trajectory of this country. She was going up, topped out, and over the next 5 to 10 days her numbers fell dramatically and that impacted everything down ballot. I really believe, but for that letter, she would have won. But for that letter, we would have gotten a new Senate. I don’t think we would have gotten 30 house seats, but I really believe we would have gotten 15 to 20. QV: In each chapter we have a Political Action committee. Sometimes brothers don’t realize how important they are when its election time. What type of continued on pg.32
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