Black Republicans offer hope after Barack Obama's failures on race

Telegraph ^ | 09 Oct 2010 | Toby Harnden

[george76]

The Obama presidency has not led to a post-racial America, says Toby Harnden, but black Republicans in Congress could help break down barriers .

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.

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.

Obama made history by winning the White House. But it will take the likes of Scott to break down the racial barriers in America that the first black president has been content to leave in place.

[ken5050]

If the GOP is smart, either Tim Scott or Alan West will deliver the GOP response to the SOTU speech..