THIS IS APPALLING – AT 8:38 A.M. ET:  We rarely see the race card played in as ugly and blatant manner as this.  It is shameful.

David Dinkins is the former mayor of New York, and was the city's first black mayor.  He was famously defeated by Rudy Giuliani in 1993, ending liberal control of City Hall in a city with an overwhelmingly Democratic registration.  We'd had high hopes for Dinkins, an apparently decent if underqualified candidate for mayor, but he could not overcome his racial identification and became, essentially, the mayor of black New York.  It was a true tragedy.

You'd think he would have learned.  But David Dinkins is back with a political endorsement that displays for all to see what the race card is really like.  From the New York Post:

Mayor David Dinkins encouraged voters to embrace a state Senate candidate because he looks "more like us."

"It's important, it is so very important, particularly for the people of this district who vote on Tuesday to recognize how important it is to understand that the city is changing," Dinkins said in his endorsement of state Senate candidate Assemblyman Adriano Espaillat on Thursday.

"Most people in the city are going to look more like us than others and that's just a fact," Dinkins said.

Espaillat opponent Mark Levine, who is white, yesterday called on Espaillat, who is Hispanic, to denounce the divisive comment.

Espaillat did not repudiate Dinkins' words.

That is pure ugliness.  It is an insult to the Hispanic community and to all New Yorkers, and it shows the race card for what it is, an appeal to bigotry.  Can you just imagine if a candidate of a different background had appealed to voters to vote for a candidate because "he looks like us" or "sounds like us"?  There's be an uproar, and the usual suspects would come out of the woodwork to shout "racism." 

Dinkins should be widely denounced for this disgrace, but he won't be.  And that is the heartbreak.

Expect the race card to be played nationally this year, and, especially in 2012, if Obama runs again.  It brings out the base and intimidates others.

September 13, 2010