As a white Democrat, I found John McCarron’s vicious Op-Ed Page attack on Roland Burris (“Democrats court disaster in governor’s race,” Dec. 29) to be both offensive and misleading.
Of course, McCarron is entitled to his opinion that Roland Burris is the least competent and least electable of this year’s four Democratic gubernatorial candidates and that the political bosses, not the voters, should decide who their next leader will be.
But I am supporting Burris for governor because I prefer to elect someone who, as Illinois state comptroller, managed a state budget for 12 years without a hint of scandal and who, as Illinois attorney general, fought hard for consumers, children and women. I therefore prefer someone like Burris over the candidates who have no executive state government experience whatsoever.
As for his electability, Burris is one of the top two vote-getters in Illinois Democratic history, while none of his opponents has ever won any statewide office, and two of them have never even run for statewide office.
Finally, McCarron’s commentary warns that a victory by Roland Burris will “set the stage for the biggest debacle to hit Illinois Democrats since 1860.”
Let us not forget that Democrats of 1860 were the party of slavery and that the split led to four years of bloody Civil War. I became a Democrat in the 1960s because Democrats became the party of social justice and civil rights for minorities and women.
For Democrats to now renounce this new heritage is to court the very disaster that McCarron falsely predicts with a man of integrity like Roland Burris at the helm. McCarron also slanders the tens of thousands of “white” voters who proved in 1992, with the election to the United States Senate of Carol Moseley-Braun, that they want to put racial politics behind them in the State of Illinois.
