Capitol Fax: The old guard has got to go...

Touched upon this yesterday and Rich Miller decided to write a Sun-Times column about it:

Carol Moseley Braun’s loss on Tuesday was “the embarrassment of a lifetime for black people,” said Rickey Hendon moments after he resigned from the Illinois Senate on Thursday.

Hendon was just being Hendon. Rhetorical flourishes are his specialty.

The fault lies not with “black people,” but with folks who worked to make Braun the “consensus” candidate. They figured that a woman in an all-male field would be a tremendous advantage. Add that to her proven vote-getting history in the black community and she was a mighty contender on paper.

But anybody who knew anything about her U.S. Senate career understood that Braun would be a disaster. She’s simply unmanageable. Her supporters were left disappointed and dejected within months of her departure for Washington, D.C. And in the end, her election proved to be a fluke that she could not repeat.

The worst mistake by the consensus crew, however, was looking backward for a standard bearer instead of promoting someone with fresh, new ideas. That’s probably because most of the people doing the choosing cut their political teeth decades ago and have been in power so long that they’ve lost touch with today.

You should go read the whole thing. The discussion in that post is pretty good as well.

In that other post from yesterday, Miller mentioned Rush and Davis. Namely they used to serve as ward committeemen. Both no longer hold those posts one retired and the other was defeated in his re-election bid. They both cut their teeth in city politics years ago hence I may refer to one of them as a dinosaur when he attempted to mount a mayoral campaign this time around although he had dropped out of the race.

Miller mentioned two people who ran for statewide office in 2010. He said one of them failed to really mount much of a campaign. Since I'm unsure of what it takes to mount a campaign for a statewide office I can only guess at what that means.

All the same in all of this dust in the many races run for significant races in both Illinois & Chicago, there are lessons to be learned. Hopefully we will have a black Lt. Governor, or state Treasurer or Comptroller (well assuming those offices aren't merged at some point in the future). Perhaps again a black will be able to succeed a race for US Senate as one had failed to secure a nomination for that seat last year.

You know in the comments someone compared CMB to Roland Burris. I sincerely hope in the future that it won't be Bobby Rush who will cry about the lack of Blacks in the US Senate and support the appointment of a flawed candidate into the US Senate. Especially one that won't be able to retain the seat. Hopefully a candidate for US Senate will prove to be viable enough to support and they just so happened to be Black.