Part II
You can be sure that Ted Hayes —who came to wide attention in the 1980s and ‘90s as a smart-talking advocate for the huge homeless population of Los Angeles — will order sunny side up on Tuesday’s Congressional election results.
Showdown Day comes Nov. 5, he says.
[img]125|left|Mr. Ted Hayes||no_popup[/img] Vowing to stick his thumb — both, if necessary — in the eye of one of Washington’s most entrenched Democrats, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Mr. Hayes was hardly put off by the space that voters put between the two in their separate primary elections.
In the 35th District, which ranges from South L.A. to the southwestern communities of Inglewood, Lawndale, Hawthorne and Gardena, Ms. Waters attracted 31,615 votes from Democrats, Mr. Hayes, 4,665 from Republicans.
Money, Money
The gap on Primary Day is meaningless, says Mr. Hayes, who attempting to scale one of the tallest political mountains in Los Angeles. The only election that counts is in November.
He insists that the money-challenged bid he will be making over the next 5 months to unseat Ms. Waters has a
reasonable chance of succeeding.
Whether he can convince the overwhelming proportion of skeptical voters he will meet this summer that she is ripe to be dethroned will be his next test.
Everything except his sunshine attitude is against him.
A Monolith
As sure as the flag is comprised of three colors, virtually all community activists in America are liberal Democrats, as Mr. Hayes himself was until September of ’01, when he was 50 years old.
“I quit being a Democrat then,” he says, “when I began to realize that Democrats were one of the main reasons why the education system is so screwed up. That’s a reason why my black people are screwed up. We bought into the socialist agenda.
“But Malcolm X had warned us in 1963 when we were following the Kennedys, Lyndon Johnson and the Democrats with their socialist welfare agenda. ‘Knowing our history,’ he said, ‘black people you are getting hoodwinked, bamboozled.’”
When Mr. Hayes was growing up in the Maryland military community of Aberdeen, north of Baltimore, in the 1950s and ‘60s, “my parents, stupidly, were Democrats, so naturally I became a Democrat,” he says.
“What else are you going to be? My impression of Republicans was that they were crew-cutted, white, rednecked racists — not country club members. They were just rednecks, man.
“I always thought Democrats were wealthy. The Kennedys, you know, gave me the impression they were cool, rich white people.
They Were Not a Match
“I tried to support Jesse Jackson in his first bid for President. I wanted to be a delegate for him, being I was an advocate for homeless at the time and had somewhat of a reputation. I figured he’d love to have me come aboard.
“Come to find out, he rejected me. I never could understand that. No reason given. But Jesse knows me. In fact, most of the black leadership knows who I am. They all know who I am.
“Especially after my last bout with Maxine Waters last summer when she had me arrested at her office on Capitol Hill.
“I had to go back to D.C. a few times. I had to go to court because of this. The judge said the charges did not fit, so therefore he had to acquit me of the charges that Maxine Waters leveled against me.
“I had gone to Capitol Hill, as we do, to lobby the Black Caucus and the Latino Caucus about the devastating effects of illegal immigration on U.S. black citizens.
A Rerouting
“We weren’t planning to go to Ms. Waters’ office,” he said with a hollow chuckle. “Just so happens the elevator…
“We were going to see Ms. (U.S. Rep. Carolyn) Kilpatrick, the chair at the time. We ran into people from Chicago, and they were all excited about going to see Maxine Waters.
“’Hey,’we said, ‘we’re from L.A. We’ll go see Maxine Waters, too. So she had a nice visit with the Chicago people. She received them into her back office.
“We were (out front) waiting to see her, too. But she would not come out of the back room. She stayed and stayed and stayed. I was sitting by the door as she finally comes out.
“Instead of stopping and saying, ‘Ted! James! Brothers, how you guys doing? Listen, I would love to talk with you, but I can’t because I’ve got to be on the floor. But if you wait right here or come back, I would love to see you. Nice to see you all.’
“Instead, with her nose up in the air, she walked right past us. I said, ‘Wait a minute. No you don’t. Come back here. You don’t disrespect us.’
“I said, ‘Congresswoman, why are you betraying the United States of America? Why are you giving our civil rights legacies away to people who do not belong in this country?’”
Firing Back
According to Mr. Hayes, Ms. Waters, in response, spewed a string of obscenities, ending with something that sounded as if she were saying he deserved a punch in his mouth.
She probably exploded, he said, because a year earlier Mr. Hayes and some cronies confronted Ms. Waters at her South L.A. office over her well advertised support for illegal immigration and amnesty.
“She really became angry about that. So she brought that up when we were in Washington. She’s screaming at me, and I’m walking with her, and she was telling me, ‘You’re full of it, Ted Hayes. You’re full of it.’
“I’ll tell you. Her mouth covers her whole head.
“So I said, ‘No, m’am. No, m’am. We are full of you. We’re going to extricate you from our system at some point here.’ She went back into her office and slammed the outer door, the lobby door, which belongs to the people.
“She went to slam the door in my face, and I said, ‘Oh, no,no,no,no. So I grab the door handle. I’m pulling, and she’s pulling from the other side. She got to cussin’ and hollerin’ at me.
“I finally said, ‘Congresswoman, please calm down.’ The more I said that, the louder she got.
“Finally, she reached out, and she assaults me. Pushes me into my chair. She didn’t hurt me, but…
“I said, ‘Congresswoman. What you go and do that for?’
“’I went out into the hallway, and I yelled, loud as I could, ‘Security!’ Security. We need security.’
Off to Jail
“The Capitol police come running down the hallway, and, of course, I ended up getting arrested. They handcuffed me, and they wanted to charge me with terrorist threats. Oh, it was a mess.
“So I went to jail. Spent the whole day in jail. Went through all kinds of testing to see if I was crazy or not, or whether I was a real serious threat. Of course, I fully co-operated with the officers. They were great. They apologized for everything.
“Sure enough, I had to go to court. But some people raised money, got an attorney for me, and it all came out. Instead of her ruining my reputation, she hurt her own reputation.
“Think of it. She tried to hurt a representative of the people of Los Angeles, someone who worked with the homeless for over 20 years, who came up with a formidable housing concept, someone who is fairly well respected by black and white, Hispanic, rich and poor.
“To have me arrested simply because I was asking her about her duty to our country, and about her reputation to black people. Instead of sitting down and educating me, as dumb as I supposedly am, she decided to behave like a queen, like nobility, which is outlawed in our society.
He Was Not Surprised
“Consequently, she has hurt herself. And this will come out in the campaign, that Maxine Waters, instead of meeting with the people, jailed us, slammed the door in our face.
“This is typical of the way she performs in the leadership of the Congressional Black Caucus. This is really sorry. Not only to us but to our whole nation.
“Going back to Jesse Jackson, her mentor in many ways, I have recognized that he, the advocates for the homeless, in downtown L.A. and throughout this country, are Democrats with a socialist agenda.
“Many of them are outright communists, card-carrying communists, proud of it, and hate America for what it is. They want to re-do this country into a socialist regime.”
(To be continued)
