Great Scott--Black Republicans running on conservative issues

Toby Harnden:

Campaigning a few miles from Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired in 1861, Tim Scott described last week how he was born into poverty and a broken home, much like Barack Obama.

"My dad was gone by the time I was seven," the black candidate for the House of Representatives told a mixed group of students at Fort Dorchester High School in North Charleston. "I was flunking out of high school. I failed geography, civics, Spanish and English. When you fail Spanish and English, you are not bilingual, you are bi-ignorant."

But the conclusions that Scott, 45, drew were very different from those of Obama. When he was 15, a man who ran a Chick-fil-A fast-food restaurant taught him "that there was a way to think my way out of the worst conditions". Scott went on to became a small businessman and a proud "conservative Republican".

Barring a cataclysmic upset, Scott will be elected to Congress on November 2nd. There, he will be a ferocious opponent of Obama, to whom he gives a withering "failing grade" for his presidency.

"Obamacare's an atrocity around the necks of average Americans," he told me. "His intentions might be good but he's leading us towards the brink of bankruptcy. Right now, the American people are simply saying they've had enough."

Scott will be the first black Republican congressman from the Deep South in more than a century. Republicans hope to elect at least two other black candidates to Congress next month. Allen West, in Florida, and Ryan Frazier in Colorado, both with distinguished military records, are in very close races against Democrats.

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Rather than ushering in a post-racial era, Obama's election to the White House appears to have intensified racial divisions in America. This is not, as the Left asserts, because Right-wing opponents are full of white-hooded bigots who refuse to accept a black man as President. Obama's own strange myopia on race has played a big part.

Timothy Johnson, co-founder of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group that helps promote black Republican candidates, told me that that Obama was not scrutinised properly in the 2008 election because of his race.

"The election wasn't so much about what Obama brought to the table," said. "People voted for him because they wanted to feel good about themselves, that they weren't racist."

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Scott, an avowed Tea Party supporter, dismisses the accusation that the movement is racist, saying: "this whole race issue is a diversion away from the real basic platform of the Tea Party".

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From my own experience with the Tea Party Scott is absolutely correct. I have never heard race as an issue at any of their events and I have grave doubts about the truth of allegations made by some politicians that race has been an issue in events I was not privy to.

I like Scott for the same reason I like Sarah Palin. I agree with them on the issues and I resent liberals who try to demean them because of there stand on the issues. Liberals fear addressing them on the issues and go right for political insults. Insults are not arguments and they are certainly not persuasive.