WASHINGTON — Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker of Kentucky pummeled Mitch McConnell for an answer to a question that implies that Black Americans aren’t Americans.
“Being Black doesn’t make you less of an American, no matter what this craven man thinks,” Booker blasted in a fundraising email on Thursday, flagging McConnell’s remarks.
Asked at a Wednesday press conference what he’d say to African-American voters who fear about their ability to vote without passage of the John R. Lewis Freedom to Vote Act, McConnell replied, “Well the concern is misplaced because if you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”
When asked to clarify the comment on Thursday, McConnell, through a spokesperson, told McClatchy, “I have consistently pointed to the record-high turnout for all voters in the 2020 election, including African-Americans.
Nonetheless, the backlash was swift and brutal, with McConnell’s most vociferous opponents accusing the Kentuckian of saying “the quiet part out loud.”
In a series of tweets Thursday, Booker seized on the verbal slip.
“I am no less American than Mitch McConnell…Mitch may think I’m 3/5s of a person but he’s gonna have to acknowledge me as a whole senator when we beat Rand Paul this year,” Booker tweeted adding a link to his donation page.
McConnell’s comment came before all 50 Senate Republicans joined two Democrats to protect the 60 vote threshold to break a filibuster, blocking Democrats’ sweeping election reform bill from passage.
“Mitch never cared about the filibuster when he packed the Supreme Court. His doom and gloom talk about protecting the filibuster at the expense of our voting rights — more specifically, at the expense of the voting rights of Black and brown Americans — is a shameful lie,” Booker wrote on Thursday. “Mitch has never cared about us. And today, he just happened to speak his mind, and said the quiet part out loud. All the while, Rand Paul continues to idly stand by and join him in obstructing our democracy.”
Malcolm Kenyatta, a state representative in Pennsylvania who is gay, Black and running for U.S. Senate, also weighed in to argue McConnell’s choice of words wasn’t a mistake.
“Mitch McConnell’s comments suggesting African Americans aren’t fully American wasn’t a Freudian slip — it was a dog whistle,” tweeted Kenyatta. “The same one he has blown for years.”
Tom Bonier, a Democrat and CEO of the Democratic analytical firm TargetSmart, dubbed McConnell racist.
“Racists do racist things. Also, Black turnout generally isn’t higher than overall turnout, and that’s because of the voter suppression that McConnell is so desperately protecting. Black Americans routinely face 8 hour waits to vote,” Bonier tweeted. “White Americans aren’t subjected to the same.”
