A Bottomless Bank
A firebrand activist, Mr. Ridley-Thomas thinks like an old-fashioned liberal. Government is Daddy Warbucks. The wallet that keeps on giving. His credo throughout 15 years of elected life is that government is the First, Second, Third and Fourth National Bank of America. Government is or should be eager to hand out bags of gold to any Angeleno who feels a need for more money. Which brings me to Mr. Ridley-Thomass effort of the year, his African American Voter Registration, Education & Participation Project. Dont try to pronounce the acronym or you will spray the nearest person. It is wonderful that 85 of Mr. Ridley-Thomass project persons knocked on almost 29,000 doors in the week and a half before the election. They also were credited with almost 22,000 telephone calls and, it says here, they coaxed 26,000 newly registered Angelenos to vote last week. But other data was more revealing than those meaningless ones. Although the race-obsessed Democrats deny that they give a fig about anyones race, the largest black delegation in state legislative history was elected last week. By amazing coincidence, all 8 are Democrats, making the Sacramento total 9 in the black caucus because an Inglewood senator was not on the ballot.
The Great Divide
The second most compelling piece of data about the black caucus is the wild margins by which every one of them was elected. As the only black senator voted into office, Mr. Ridley-Thomas drew 89.1 percent of the vote in his District 26. As for the 7 black state Assembly members, here are their yawning interest-shrinking totals: Karen Bass (Culver City), 85 percent, Mike Davis (Los Angeles) 89.1 percent, Curren D. Price (Gardena, Hawthorne, Inglewood, Los Angeles)74 percent, Sandre Swanson (Oakland) 90.1 percent, Mervyn Dymally (Compton, Los Angeles, Paramount) 100 percent, Laura Richardson (Carson, Lakewood, Long Beach, Los Angeles) 68.3 percent, and Wilmer D. Carter (San Bernardino) 68.7 percent. Given the lopsidedness, is there a need to go to the expense of staging an election every two years?
Postscript
Now we come to my favorite, and I should argue most indefensible, number. I was wrong when I suspected that the Democrats had recovered from their phony Election Day paranoia. When Democrats lose, they charge fraud at the polls. When they win, they build a bonfire out of their We Got Cheated Again scripts. Mr. Ridley-Thomas said that 11 poll monitors were specially trained by the African American Voter Registration, Education & Participation Project. I dont know yet what trained means. Does that mean they went hunting for Republicans packing 2 or more guns? Mr. Ridley-Thomas said the 11 monitors were dispatched to 50 polling places to observe voting procedures and safeguard the voting rights of those who cast ballots. I should write this slowly. You win the elections with embarrassing percentages 90.1, 89.1, 85 and you are spying on your voters to make certain they dont get cheated. I am not paranoid. I am not paranoid. Maybe we should think it over.
