Over at the Orange Juice Blog, liberal Democratic activist and blogger Greg Diamond posted yesterday that the OC Democratic Party Executive Board approved a resolution calling on the Anaheim City Council to re-structure itself as eight single-member districts.
You read Diamond’s full post here — assuming you have the time and patience to slog through it. But here’s some of the key segments of the resolution, bursting with racial world view that dominates liberal thinking about representative democracy:
WHEREAS Anaheim has a history of racially/ethnically polarized voting – a distinct group of Latino voters (almost a third of all voters) consistently votes for different candidates than the majority, cannot elect even a single City Council member of their choice, and the 125,000-person region of “West Anaheim,” with a Latino majority, has not had a resident elected to the City Council since 1998; and
WHEREAS the Anaheim City Council’s lack of minority representation has contributed to disproportionate distribution of city assets – park space, public libraries, community centers, and more – to areas outside of Latino-majority “West and Central Anaheim”; and its serving the majority has come at the cost of substantial detriment to its minority residents; therefore
Lovely. A philosophical reversal of MLK Jr. call for us to be judged by the content of our character, rather than the color of our skin. God forbid a great political party should consider that Americans can or should think beyond their pigmentation.
So why is the DPOC so strongly in favor of single-member districts? Diamond and others will offer the above racialist rhetoric, as well as the contention that it is more representative (I think it is actually the opposite).
However, here is the reality. Currently, the largest city in the county has been governed by city councils in which the majority have always been Republicans, with the odd Democrat here and there. Single-member districts offer the opportunity to permanently increase the number of liberal Democrats on the Anaheim City Council. And those would be liberals who would then be positioned to run for the state Senate or state Assembly or the Board of Supervisors.
This isn’t rocket science, Orange County Republicans. Time to wake up and smell the coffee.
Democrats, Republicans and Independents….wake up. This “district” scheme is all about race – which makes it racist.
Under this logic African-Americans should never run for office in Irvine, whites should never run for office in Compton…..This district plan is scary.
We should never divide people up by race, or have them live in a particular part of our city in order to run for office. It’s crazy!
“We should never divide people up by race, or have them live in a particular part of our city ..”
Anaheim brought that one on itself – by setting up barrios of low income housing. Some would call them ghettos.