In case you didn't see this story from NY. It's just amazing how people will put on fronts to appeal to everyone, and karma comes around and reveals them to be the idiots they are. The message is: Be true to yourself, and don't lie to get ahead, because you'll always be found out.
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Corruption case a blow to GOP diversity
updated 10:43 AM EDT, Wed April 3, 2013
Editor's note: Errol Louis is the host of "Inside City Hall," a nightly political show on NY1, a New York City all-news channel.
(CNN) -- This is no way to run a party.
The details of the scandal sweeping the New York Republican Party
are tawdry, sad and infuriating -- and a wake-up call to a national
party that is urgently seeking to make inroads among black, Latino, and
young voters.
Barely two weeks after
RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and New York state Republican Chairman Ed
Cox held a press conference at a black church in Brooklyn to launch the party's ambitious, $10 million diversity campaign, FBI agents arrested Malcolm Smith, a longtime black state legislator.
Errol Louis
According to federal
prosecutors, Smith spent months organizing cash bribes to two top city
Republican officials in exchange for a slot on the ballot in this fall's
Republican primary for mayor. Unfortunately for Smith, a real estate
tycoon he enlisted to make cash payments was, in fact, an undercover FBI
agent, according to federal prosecutors.
The criminal complaint against
Smith and five others -- including a Republican City Council member and
the chairman and vice chairman of two Republican county organizations
-- details mind-boggling details of recorded conversations and alleged
handovers of envelopes stuffed with money.
All the scheming, say
prosecutors, was done in the hope that Smith might secure the Republican
nomination and somehow win the race for mayor in a city where Democrats
outnumber Republicans 6-to-1. Smith will get his day in court, along
with the five other men and women named -- but the damage to the party
is incalculable.
In a 100-page plan of action,
Priebus and the RNC laid out a pilot project to build support among
black urban voters, and specifically declared that "big-city mayoral
races provide our best 2013 opportunities for these projects." New York
can probably be crossed off that list, and the fallout will be felt in
other cities as the case unfolds.
And that's a shame.
Republican leaders are right to make their case to young, urban, black
and Latino voters, and should be grooming candidates from all
communities. America's two-party system can't function properly if the
parties are racially divided.
The flirtation with the
Republican Party by Smith, a lifelong Democrat -- if done honestly --
might have started a new conversation within black circles about the
cost and wisdom of always supporting Democratic candidates and policies.
It has long been noticed that black communities contain their share of
church-going social conservatives; the GOP theory is that intelligent
outreach to those voters could tilt close contests to Republicans.
That's not likely to
happen now. Smith's troubles -- and the arrest of Republican leaders
accused of taking money to advance Smith's cross-party ambitions -- will
supply ammunition to conservative party leaders who are skeptical about
the new diversity strategy.
The scandal also weakens
the argument, popular among national Republicans, that big-city
Democratic political machines are corrupt and wasteful. In New York, at
least, the shoe is on the other foot, with GOP party leaders in the
nation's biggest city hauled from their homes in handcuffs and facing up
to 40 years in prison or more.
