At noon today, former St. Pete mayoral candidate and now Bill Foster supporter Deveron Gibbons led a group of religious leaders and others to denounce Kathleen Ford for her now infamous "HNIC"crack on Bubba the Love Sponge's radio program last week.
Ford quoted Princeton Professor Cornel West in the interview when discussing Goliath Davis, the former Police Chief of St. Pete and currently a deputy mayor in the Rick Baker administration.
This follows an article written last month that had put Ford back on her heels, where she was forced to refute charges that she was racist, in a piece that also referenced her battles with Davis when she was on the Council a decade ago.
As I wrote in an earlier blogpost today, I attended the debate in St. Pete's Midtown section on Saturday morning, when the story was originally reported in the Times.
According to one of the organizers, Gypsy Gallardo, a straw poll taken after the event found that of the 62 people in attendance, the vote was tied at 40% apiece between the two candidates. The event, which featured a short opening and closing statement but otherwise consisted of questions from the overwhelmingly black audience, did not feature a single question asked about the "HNIC" remark. Nor did anybody at the event have anything to say about it afterwards. Now, having said that, the story may now be gaining more resonance with today's news conference, but at least among Ford's black supporters on Saturday,there was no blowback.
Earlier today I spoke with the Reverend Charles McKenzie, who emphasized that he was not speaking in his role with the St. Pete chapter of the NAACP (where he serves as Vice President), but in his position with Operation Push/Rainbow Coalition.
A Ford supporter, he said, "I think we have to be careful and investigate closely the real substance here. I believe there are forces that are designed to perhaps prejudice a candidate."
With new poll numbers showing Ford with a narrow lead, Pinellas County Democratic Excecutive Committee Chairman Ramsey McLaughan sent out an email to his membership yesterday that included this:
Look for Foster to try to create a division within the African American community. Despite the fact that Ford was on the Obama/Biden legal team trying to protect a fair elections and Bill Foster and many of his supporters were opposing the President, many African Americans are still undecided in the race for mayor.
Today's news conference can't be considered a good thing for the Ford forces, but it also illustrates how careful both candidates have to be in their public pronouncements, with their critics prepared to pounce on anything remotely controversial.
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2009.