Gee, I still can’t get it into first gear. Letters we never finished: “Dear Editor, Enclosed please find a column on bringing life back to an old car by adding new loudspeakers.”
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“She is a very appealing candidate: non-threatening and articulate and well-versed in the ways of the white world, but she still has the sense of being in touch with regular black folks”–that’s community organizer Lu Palmer on would-be U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun, quoted by Salim Muwakkil in In These Times (April 15-21). “Surprisingly,” adds Muwakkil, “Braun has been able to retain the favor of people like Palmer–whose views can be characterized as militantly black nationalist–even while operating within the political mainstream. And it’s even more unusual for a black woman with avowed feminist sympathies to attract the support of black nationalists….Braun’s odd coalition will have to stick together if she is to have any chance of defeating Republican Richard Williamson in the November general election. And, according to one political operative familiar with Chicago black politics, such a feat is becoming more difficult. ‘There currently is a struggle going on for the soul of Braun’s campaign,’ he said. ‘The Democratic Party’s upper echelon have realized that a lot is at stake here, and they don’t want to blow it by letting political passions obscure the need for political calculations. But grass-roots passion is what brought Carol to the party.’”
“The argument [over school funding] always comes back to the question does money make a difference,” says Margaret Goertz in the Educational Testing Service’s newsletter ETS Developments (Winter). “Any time you try to give money to the poor school districts, wealthy communities will say ‘No, money doesn’t make a difference.’ But if you try to take that money away from the wealthy districts to give to the poorer ones, all of a sudden, money makes a great deal of difference.”
