A Quote by Steve Erickson
I think for the foreseeable future we have to disabuse ourselves of any ideas of unifying, or coming together, or all getting along. I don't think we're going to reconcile the America that elected the first African American president with the America that just elected a president avidly endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan - I'm not sure I even want to reconcile the two.
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I do not diminish the incredible symbolic importance of a black man getting elected president. But my euphoria was a smart guy getting elected president. Maybe for the first time in my lifetime we had elected one of the thousand smartest Americans president.
This has never happened to a major - to a nominee of a major party just a few days ago Donald Trump was endorsed by the official newspaper of the Ku Klux Klan. They wrote their endorsement under the slogan of his campaign, "make america great again." Do any of us have a place in Trump`s america?
America was magnificently characterized in November of 2008 when we elected, for the first time, an African-American President of the United States.
The first thing that always pops into my head regarding our president, is that all of the people who are setting up this barrier for him... They just conveniently forget that Barack had a mama, and she was white - very white; American, Kansas, middle of America. There is no argument about who he is, or what he is. America's first black president hasn't arisen yet. He's not America's first black president. He's America's first mixed-race president.
When I was elected for the first time in '06 I'd never been elected to any body. City councils, school board, community college boards, trustee, water district trustee, class president, ASB president, senior class president - nothing. I was never elected to anything in my life.
As an elected official who comes from the African-American community, there are some similarities. You are always trying to reconcile your own personal biography and affiliations with the demands of the broader democracy. And you need to make sure you are representing everybody.
Voters in 1960 elected the first Catholic president. In 2012, I voted to reelect the first African American president. Each was a vote for a man of principle and character, for a man who had proved himself capable and courageous and who would lead our country with a combination of dignity, compassion and toughness along a path of progress.
I think it's high time that we had a woman president. But I don't want to elect someone just because she's a woman; I want the best candidate to be elected. I think that any woman who is elected to the highest office in the land would clearly have positive role model effects for other young women.
It's fair to say that white America wouldn't have elected an African-American president without the integrating effect of black music - from Louis Armstrong to hip-hop - and black drama and fiction, commercial as much as 'serious.'
To see an African-American elected president means that this country is really finally coming full circle from the birth defect of slavery.
I wasn't aware of Ku Klux Klan as I was aware of the widespread assumption that African-Americans were dumber than white people. I think my father believed that. I think everybody white did.
When I was elected President nobody asked me to negotiate between Israel and Egypt. It was not even a question raised in my campaign. But I felt that one of the reasons that I was elected President was to try to bring peace to the Holy Land.
We need a president who understands the first obligation of the commander-in-chief is to keep America safe. If I am elected president, we will hunt down and kill the terrorists. We will utterly destroy ISIS.
I myself would go for nonviolence if it was consistent, if everybody was going to be nonviolent all the time. I'd say, okay, let's get with it, we'll all be nonviolent. But I don't go along with any kind of nonviolence unless everybody's going to be nonviolent. If they make the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. If they make the White Citizens Council nonviolent, I'll be nonviolent. But as long as you've got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don't want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk.
So if Hillary [Clinton] is elected president, it will make history in two ways. She'll be the first woman president. And Bill Clinton, he'll be the first man and the first former president to return to the White House in the capacity of spouse.
President Obama, when he was elected, he could have been a unifying figure. He could have chosen to be a leader on race relations and bring us together. And he hasn't done that, he's made decisions that I think have inflamed racial tensions that have divided us rather than bringing us together.
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