The Party of Lyin’

[Geee]

Issues & Insights

The Republican Party is the Party of Lincoln, Honest Abe being its first president. But by the time the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary arrive, the major candidates for the Democratic Party’s nomination may find they’ve turned their brand into the Party of Lyin’.

Most recently, there was South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, surging in Iowa of late, whose inconvenient recorded comments from 2011 were unearthed and proceeded to go viral. “There are a lot of kids, especially in low-income, minority neighborhoods, where they just haven’t seen it [education] work,” Buttigieg had observed, adding: “There isn’t someone they know personally who attests to the value of education.”

As the Manhattan Institute’s Jason Riley noted on Fox News over the weekend, this was right out of President Barack Obama’s talking points, and is the kind of rhetorical fare heard regularly from the pulpits of black churches across America.

Nonetheless, the black left, which Buttigieg was already having a lot of trouble with, pounced. One profanity-spewing commentator accused him of preferring “to perpetuate the fantastic narrative of negro neighborhoods needing more role models and briefcase-carriers than make the people in power stare into the sun and see the blinding light of racism,” and compared his “whitely” pronouncements to “negligent homicide.”