Stephen A. Smith may catch a ton of flak for these comments regarding black voters and a one-election, jump over to the GOP.
In the clip provided by Mediaite via Breitbart, Smith openly suggested that for one election — “black voters sided with the Republican party.”
“What I dream is that for one election, just one, every black person in America vote Republican,” Smith said Tuesday afternoon at the Impact Symposium at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
His explanation was based off the Barry Goldwater vs Lyndon B. Johnson election — in which black voters may have been duped into believing a candidate had their best interest at heart — based off political affiliation.
From what I’ve read, Barry Goldwater is going against Lyndon B. Johnson. He’s your Republican candidate; he is completely against the civil rights movement. Lyndon B. Johnson was in favor of it — civil rights legislation. What happens is, he wins office, Barry Goldwater loses office, but there was a Senate, a Republican Senate, that pushed the votes to the president’s desk. It was the Democrats who were against civil rights legislation — the southern Dixiecrats. So because President Lyndon B. Johnson was a Democrat, black America assumed the Democrats were for it.
Smith tried to clarify his comments further by saying that black people voting for the Republican Party would be a great way to get both parties to pay attention to the racial demographic’s needs:
Black folks in America are telling one party, “We don’t give a damn about you.” They’re telling the other party, “You’ve got our vote.” Therefore, you have labeled yourself “disenfranchised” because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb. The other party knows they’ll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest.
Smith then compared blacks voting for Republicans to customers “shopping around,” essentially asking shops to “cater to them” so that they will do business.
“We don’t do that with politics,” he lamented, “and then we blame white America for our disenfranchisement.”