Thursday, May 14, 2009

Liveblogging the Jackson Democratic Mayoral Debate, Part 4

While I was a little shocked by Johnson's claim that there hadn't been any promotions at JPD in the last 4 years, I was absolutely stunned at what I heard from Johnson just now. Johnson just essentially said that the white people accusing him of not being responsive to their concerns during his 8 years as mayor are quite possibly racist.

Crisler's response was a fairly well constructed call to a post-racial Jackson and a colorblind approach to governance, which sounded like something someone reading from the Obama playbook would say.

Johnson moves on to attack Crisler for supporting the recent 1% sales tax increase, which was something championed by business interests, and authored by Sen. John Horhn, if I recall correctly. That being said, it's becoming more and more clear that Johnson and the Jackson business community have differences over policy, not race, and that each may be engaging in a bit of that old Mississippi past time: race-baiting.

I am in no way amused.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

1 comment:

Jim Craig said...

Great job, Matt! This 4th post speaks directly to one of the concerns I discussed previously: that former Mayor Johnson is at odds with the Jackson business community. Even a paleo-liberal like me knows that you can't do economic development without the cooperation of business. Ask President Obama; ask the ghost of FDR.