Calif. Dems Tell Candidate To Change Name Because He's 'Too Brown' To Win
When it comes to sniffing out racism, California Democrats sure stay close to home.
A Democrat gunning for his party’s nomination to challenge veteran Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher got that message loud and clear in the run-to Tuesday’s “jungle” primary election fight.
And for Omar Siddiqui, an engineer, trial lawyer and sometime-consultant to the FBI, it was an eye-opening experience.
In a primary day interview with Siddiqui, Fox News’ Martha MacCallum introduced the candidate by noting how crowded the Democrat field was in California’s 48th Congressional District, and said:
“One of those candidates, Omar Siddiqui, was reportedly told by party officials that he was, quote, ‘too brown’ to win there.”
Siddiqui told MacCallum it wasn’t just his skin color Democrat officials objected to. They didn’t like his name much either.
“‘You have government experience, you’ve worked with the FBI, but you know what? The name Omar Siddiqui will not work in Orange County. You need to change your name,'” Siddiqui said he was told. “You can imagine that was just unacceptable to me. I do not want to be judged on the color of my skin, but rather the content of my character.”
Well, if he felt that strongly about being judged by his character, he might want to rethink his choice of political parties. But that’s a separate issue.
What’s really important here is that the same Democrat Party that has no problem accusing Republican voters of racism also has no problem invoking the possibility of racism in trying to convince a candidate to stay out of a race.
Basically, they were worried that too many Democrat candidates running in California’s bizarre “jungle” primary system – where the two top vote-getters in the primary advance to the general election regardless of party affiliation – could syphon enough votes from each other to give both top slots to Republican candidates.
That might be a legitimate worry from a strictly partisan voting point of view. But in the process, Democrat officials were essentially accusing their own voters of being unwilling to accept a candidate based solely on his skin color and unusual name. (The days of a black president named Barack Hussein Obama are apparently forgotten.)
As things turned out, they might well have been right about the racist core of California Democrats. After all, Siddiqui ended up finishing fifth in the race overall with 4.9 percent of the vote, according to The New York Times. He was fourth in the Democrat field.
Needless to say, Siddiqui’s story of California Democrats trying to ethnically cleanse a primary ballot to boost the party’s chances of victory in November hasn’t gotten the mainstream media attention it deserves (though conservative outlets and websites like the The Washington Examiner, The Washington Free Beacon and American Thinker have covered it). Racist Democrat electoral tactics are almost always ignored.
And needless to say, if there were ever a hint of that kind of blatant racism involving a Republican primary, the story would be flooding the airwaves and occupying the talking heads of CNN and MSNBC for hours on end.
That only proves how biased the mainstream media is. What Siddiqui’s story really does is prove how racist some Democrat Party officials think their own voters are.
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