1.
AMY GOODMAN: As voters went to the polls
Saturday for South Carolina’s Democratic primary, presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton crushed rival Bernie Sanders, winning the primary by a
staggering 73.5 percent of the vote and picking up 39 additional delegates,
compared to 14 delegates for Sanders. African Americans in the state favored
Clinton over Sanders by more than six to one, while white voters narrowly
preferred her, as well.
Clinton’s decisive
win propels her into this week’s critical Super Tuesday voting, where a dozen
states go to polls and about 880 delegates are at stake. It’s the biggest day
of the 2016 presidential election. Over the weekend, Clinton campaigned at two
different predominantly African-American churches in Memphis, Tennessee.
2.
HILLARY CLINTON: If you will
join me on this journey, I know we can do it. And I need your help on Tuesday.
The Tennessee primary is really important. So, please, if you will stand up and
vote for me, I will stand up and work and fight for you, through this campaign
and into the White House together.
3.
AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders
vowed to fight on and drew hundreds of supporters to a campaign rally in
Oklahoma City. He told the crowd the current federal minimum wage is a
starvation wage, and vowed to increase it to $15 an hour. Sanders also
criticized his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and reiterated his call for her to
release transcripts of speeches paid for by Wall Street, saying, quote,
"If you’re going to get paid $200,000 for a speech, must be a pretty damn
good speech. And if it’s such a good speech, you’ve got to release the
transcripts, let everyone see it." Sanders also spoke to supporters at a
rally in Minnesota.
4.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: And you
are a super super PAC, and I thank you for that. And I’d rather have you on my
side a million times over than all the money in the world from Wall Street.
Now, my opponent has a different position. She has a super PAC. And in the last
reporting period, her super PAC, her major super PAC, received $25 million, $15
million of which came from Wall Street. She also received, you know, many
millions of dollars in speaker fees. Now, she’s a very good speaker, I admit
that. But to get $225,000 for a speech to Goldman Sachs, you’ve got to be
really good. I don’t know that she’s that good.
5.
AMY GOODMAN: The Democratic race now
becomes a broader national contest. The 11 states, along with American Samoa,
that will vote during Super Tuesday include six in the South with large
nonwhite populations. Of the 880 delegates up for grabs, more than a third of
those are needed to win the nomination.
For more, we go directly to Columbia,
South Carolina, where we’re joined by civil rights activist and community
organizer Kevin Alexander Gray. He edited the book Killing Trayvons: An
Anthology of American Violence and is author of Waiting for Lightning to
Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics.
Kevin Alexander Gray, welcome back to Democracy
Now! Can you talk about the primary in South Carolina, its significance,
who voted? Well, first, talk Democratic primary politics, and then we’ll talk
about Donald Trump and his hesitance to disavow the Klan and David Duke’s
support.
6.
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: Well, I’m glad that
all the candidates are gone. I think people have reached that burnout stage.
But, obviously, on the Democratic Party side, you—even expressed by that clip
you showed with Bernie Sanders in Minnesota, Bernie Sanders went to Minnesota
before the votes were counted here in South Carolina. And when—and before—the
Friday before the election, CBS News led with a piece about the upcoming
Saturday primary, where they showed Bernie Sanders in Minnesota surrounded by
an all-white crowd and then Hillary Clinton in two locations in South Carolina
surrounded by black people, surrounded by Jim Clyburn. And that’s been
the story of Bernie Sanders’ campaign even here in South Carolina. It’s been a
tour of colleges, a tour of black colleges, a tour of state colleges, but never
any penetration into the black community, not even being able to go a block
away from those colleges to actually go out into the community.
And when you look at the mailers that
Bernie Sanders sent out, one particular mailer that comes to mind is the one
that he sent with the young black male with—behind bars, with his hands behind
bars, and one with a diploma. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is sending out mailers surrounded
by black women, in particular. The electorate here in South Carolina, the
Democratic electorate, is 60 percent black, and that electorate is 60 percent
black women. So, you know, if you’re going to come down here and
you’re going to run a Northern liberal kind of campaign, if you come down here
and you talk about revolution and movement but your campaign doesn’t look like
the movement you claim to represent, I think people go with the devil you know.
The other thing that people are not
paying attention to in this huge victory that Hillary Clinton had over Bernie
Sanders is the fact that so many people didn’t vote from 2008 to 2016. I would
say that a lot of those people that didn’t vote didn’t vote because of their
reticence to the Clintons and what happened between them and Obama and
understanding that history.
But while Bernie Sanders—I hate to say
it—while he’s talked about a movement campaign, he hasn’t run a movement
campaign. He’s just run a campaign. And if he’s talking about something
long-lasting to build out in the communities, well, he hurt himself here in
South Carolina. He left South Carolina like the first defeat of the North in
Bull Run. And to not be with his people in defeat, that went out and did the
best they could, lets you know what he thinks about black voters, in some
people’s minds. I think it’s going to hurt him tremendously in the South,
moving forward.
7.
AMY GOODMAN: According to ThinkProgress,
"More than 33,000 people in South Carolina are behind bars, and 62 percent
of the prison population is black. Most of those people are not eligible to
vote. In 2012, the [South Carolina Legislature] took voting rights away from
state residents on parole and today, more than 48,000 South Carolina residents
in prison, on parole, and on probation are disenfranchised by felony or
misdemeanor convictions. African Americans [make] up 64 percent of South
Carolina’s disfranchised population, even though they comprise only 27 percent
of the state’s voting age population. One out of"—
8.
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: Let me say
something, Amy. Let—
9.
AMY GOODMAN: —"every 27 African
American voters is disfranchised in South Carolina, compared to one out of 65
South Carolina voters." Your thoughts on this, Kevin?
10.
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: Let me say this,
Amy. Let me say this, Amy. First of all, that’s a
problem in and of itself, that the discussion on black politics starts talking
about criminal justice issues and prisons. Black voters want the same thing
that white voters want. They want to be able to pay their house payments, to
pay their mortgages, to pay their rent, to pay their utility bills, to pay
their taxes, to educate their kids. And when you think that the whole
foundation of black politics is just about talking about criminal justice and
crime, well, that’s playing a stereotype in and of itself. And while
there are a lot of black people in jail in South Carolina disproportionately
and we understand the effects of structural racism, we still have a million,
close to a million, eligible black voters in South Carolina and probably close
to 600,000 to 700,000 registered voters. And when you look at the results from
2008 to 2012 and the number of people that didn’t vote, that are registered to
vote, that says something about the Democratic Party. That says something about
someone telling them that they are waging a revolution, and it’s not a
revolution.
If you want to talk
about building and building a progressive movement, build a progressive
movement, but do not come into South Carolina or anywhere, where basically
you’ve got the same kind of campaign that Hillary Clinton got. You’ve got white
men on the top running it, and you come into the state, and all your surrogates
are men. You have a program in Greenville, South Carolina, with Danny Glover,
and everybody on the program is a man. And those kinds of things matter. But to
start out just talking about crime, just talking about police and using Black
Lives Matter talking points, well, the black community, I believe, is more
sophisticated than that. And if you’re running a progressive campaign, you
ought to have sense enough to know that you have to talk to people and tease
out the issues a whole lot better than you did.
Hillary
Clinton is a neoliberal Democrat. The purpose of the Jackson campaigns in '84
and ’88 were a counter to Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and the rise of the DLC,
the Democratic Leadership Council, which Jesse called the Democratic Leisure
Class. And Bernie Sanders is supposedly running a campaign in that
tradition, bringing people together, bringing coalitions of people together.
I'm not seeing that. I’m not seeing the nuclear activists and the peace
activists and the Arab-American community and the labor community and the black
community have a real say in defining a platform that makes some sense.
Now, Bernie has done—Bernie Sanders has
done some wonderful things in his campaign. He’s brought young people into the
process. I hope he keeps them energized. But if the only mission is to say that
you’ve pushed the Democratic Party to the left at the end of this process, then
what have you accomplished? If we’re talking about building something
long-lasting and really changing the nature of politics, which means that you
have to change it on the local and the state level, you have to tackle these
state legislatures, you have to be prepared to tackle reapportionment and
gerrymandering, so that you can vote better people into office to move on to
Congress, so you can actually change things. But if you’re not going to do
that, you’re not—you have to have agents of change. You can’t simply be an
agent of change by yourself.
11.
AMY GOODMAN: Who are you going to be
supporting?
12.
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: I don’t know yet. I
might—you know, I support third-party candidates. I could possibly support a
third-party candidate from the Green Party in the general election. I haven’t
supported the Democratic Party in a national ticket since 1992. I was in the
room with Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition when Bill Clinton pulled a
Sister Souljah. I was here in South Carolina as Tom
Harkin, Southern political director, marching in a public housing project with
Jesse and Harkin, when Clinton called him a backstabber. I worked with
Harkin and wrote those ads with Adolph Reed, who now supports Bernie Sanders,
to call Bill Clinton out on the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged
young black man in Arkansas.
So, you know, I’m not supportive of
neoliberal politics. If Bernie Sanders would tell people, explain the
difference between what a progressive is and what a neoliberal is, which is
what Hillary Clinton is, someone that supports war, that supports Wall Street,
that supports privatization, a lot of things her husband did, like NAFTA and
CAFTA—these are things that have almost decimated the middle class and
increased the wealth gap. So, those are things that neoliberals
support. Some of the things they support are the same things that
neoconservatives support. It’s just about who’s running it.
But Sanders also has to be against the
idea of empire, if he’s going to raise up Martin Luther King’s name and talk
about marching with Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King said a threat to
justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. And that goes for Palestine
and Israel. And neither of the candidates, to include the progressive
candidate, has dared step on that rail in this campaign. How am I to
think that a so-called progressive candidate is really right on race and
ethnicity and the value of all humans and respect for human rights, if he can’t
stand up for Palestine? That’s important to me. But, you know, I don’t want a
so-called progressive campaign—for me, the foundation of that campaign has to
be right. How it’s constructed has to be right, if you claim to be a
progressive.
13.
AMY GOODMAN: So—
14.
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: It can’t just be
about people at the top vying for power within the Democratic Party.
15.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to the
Republican presidential front-runner, Donald Trump, who refused to condemn
endorsements from David Duke, the prominent white supremacist and former KKK
leader. Duke has told his radio audience that voting against Trump would be,
quote, "treason to your heritage." Speaking on CNN’s State of the
Union with Jake Tapper, Trump refused to disavow Duke’s support or the
support of other white supremacists four times. This is a clip.
16.
DONALD TRUMP: Well, just so you
understand, I don’t know anything about David Duke. OK? I don’t know anything
about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white
supremacists. So, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know—did he endorse me, or
what’s going on, because, you know, I know nothing about David Duke. I know
nothing about white supremacists. And so, when you’re asking me a question,
that I’m supposed to be talking about people that I know nothing about.
17.
JAKE TAPPER: But I guess the
question from the Anti-Defamation League is—even if you don’t know about their
endorsement, there are these groups and individuals endorsing you. Would you
just say, unequivocally, you condemn them, and you don’t want their support?
18.
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I have to
look at the group. I mean, I don’t know what group you’re talking about. You
wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about. I’d have to
look. If you would send me a list of the groups, I will do research on them,
and certainly I would disavow if I thought there was something wrong.
19.
JAKE TAPPER: The Ku Klux Klan?
20.
DONALD TRUMP: But you may have
groups in there that are totally fine, and it would be very unfair. So give me
a list of the groups, and I’ll let you know.
21.
JAKE TAPPER: OK, I mean, I’m
just talking about David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan here, but...
22.
DONALD TRUMP: I don’t know
any—honestly, I don’t know David Duke. I don’t believe I’ve ever met him.
23.
AMY GOODMAN: Donald Trump has also
declined to distance himself from a Benito Mussolini quote that he retweeted.
On Sunday, Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press questioned Trump about the
tweet.
24.
CHUCK TODD: Right now on
Twitter, there is a trending retweet of yours. You retweeted somebody from
@ilduce2016. It was a Mussolini quote, but you didn’t know it was Mussolini
when you retweeted it. It said, "It is better to live one day as a lion
than 100 years as a sheep." That’s a famous Mussolini quote. You retweeted
it. Do you like the quote? Did you know it was Mussolini?
25.
DONALD TRUMP: Sure. It’s OK to
know it’s Mussolini. Look, Mussolini was Mussolini. It’s OK to—it’s a very good
quote. It’s a very interesting quote. And I know it—I saw it. I saw what—and I
know who said it. But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or
somebody else? It’s certainly a very interesting quote.
26.
CHUCK TODD: Well—
27.
DONALD TRUMP: That’s probably
why I have—
28.
CHUCK TODD: Mussolini is a
known fascist.
29.
DONALD TRUMP: —between Facebook
and Twitter, 14 million people, and other people don’t.
30.
CHUCK TODD: Do you want to be
associated—do you want to be associated—
31.
DONALD TRUMP: It’s a very
interesting quote, and people can talk about it.
32.
CHUCK TODD: Do you want to be
associated with a fascist?
33.
DONALD TRUMP: No, I want to be
associated with interesting quotes.
34.
AMY GOODMAN: There’s Donald Trump being
questioned on NBC. Kevin Alexander Gray, can you talk about Donald Trump? Talk
about his—I mean, it was only after tremendous outcry on Sunday, after being on
CNN and people speaking out all over the country, and Marco Rubio and others
attacking him around not disavowing the Klan, that he tweeted out that, OK, he
disassociated himself.
35.
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: You know, Donald
Trump is a narcissistic white supremacist. And the people that come—a lot of
the people that come to hear him, this whole idea of "make America
great," that’s all about making America great for a small group of people,
generally white males. I mean, that’s what white male supremacy is about, in
their mind. And they believe that they are superior, that America needs to
dominate everybody. And, you know, it’s all about chest thumping.
So, you know, I have not—I’m not going to
vote for Donald Trump. I think that the people that follow Donald Trump
obviously don’t understand how he’s made his money, the idea that someone who
was married to an immigrant can stand up and bash immigrants, someone who has
made so much money on the backs of the workers can bash workers and disregard
workers’ rights, that people support that. Part of the reason that people
support Donald Trump is the reason that they supported slavery: They thought
that one day they might own slaves. A lot of people think that one day they
might be rich. That’s why they play the lottery. And, you know, they think that
being rich means that you can say and do and get away with anything that you
want to get away with.
And the networks love it, because they’re
making a lot of money. It’s great entertainment. The Republican debates—I
watched the Republican debates, because you never know what they’re going to
say. And all these campaigns, be it the Democratic campaign or Republican
campaign, the people that are really making out like bandits are the networks,
because they’re getting all this advertising money. So, you know, the media
created Donald Trump.
You know, when he was out here
questioning Barack Obama’s—where he was born, and people called him out as a
racist, his record is very clear. And if the Republicans nominate Donald Trump,
well, they get what they get. It will be truth in advertising about their party
for him to stand on the podium with—what is it—with Jefferson Beauregard
Sessions, you know, an old Southerner, who believes in this old South supremacy
and the myth of the—the myth of the lost cause and that whole history of the
Confederacy. That’s what they’re about.
36.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about the
first sitting senator to endorse Donald Trump—
37.
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: Absolutely.
38.
AMY GOODMAN: —Alabama’s sitting senator,
Jeff Sessions.
39.
KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY: So, you know,
he’s—as you call him, Trump and those folk play those dog-whistle politics, and
I think that’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing, going into Super Tuesday.
40.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kevin Alexander Gray,
I want to thank you for being with us, civil rights activist, community
organizer, speaking to us from the capital of South Carolina, from Columbia. He
edited the book Killing Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence and
is author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black
Politics.
When we come back, Ari Berman joins us,
talking about voter rights, talking about who can vote and who can’t, as we
come into the biggest voting day in this country, outside of the actual election.
It’s Super Tuesday. Stay with us.
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