Written by Guest Blogger Preston Ledger of Consternations

Fearing his rock-solid support among African-Americans may be cracking, Democrat Sen. John Kerry yesterday turned to a man who could very well expand the spidering fissures rather than contain them.

Kerry has hired race racket guru and corporate shakedown artist Jesse Jackson to serve as a senior adviser to his presidential campaign in an effort to shore up his slipping poll numbers among black Americans. According to poll results released this week by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, Kerry is supported by 73 percent of blacks, compared with 12 percent for President George W. Bush. These would be great numbers for Kerry in almost any electoral demographic, but not in what has historically been a lock-step-loyal voting block for Democrats. The poll reveals significant slippage in black support from 2000, when then-Vice President Al Gore garnered 90 percent of the black vote.

As he pushed his panic-button speed dial to recruit Jackson, Kerry should have thought about the effect his hiring decision could have and why his support among blacks has softened in the first place. More and more African-Americans are now hip to Jackson’s dubious record as their cause champion. A downside-of-influence figure whose self-serving interests and moral failings have been well documented (extortion of corporations by threat of racism charges, cronyism, nepotism, mistress-silencing payoffs, etc.), Jackson may not be the best black face to put on the Kerry campaign at this late stage. A certain percentage of black voters are likely to view the hiring as a desperate move by a candidate too out of touch with them to know he should have hired someone else — and done so much sooner.

Which brings us to timing. Less than five weeks out from the election and Kerry now thinks it important enough to focus on energizing Democrats’ African-American base? How energized can black voters be when it’s clear they’re viewed as a Kerry afterthought? That they have been ignored for lo these many months is largely because Kerry and the Democrat Party fully expected to win the black vote without earning the black vote. They believed they could just point African-American citizens to their polling places Nov. 2 and expect near-perfect results. Under this assumption of automatic votes freely pouring forth as in the past, the we-care-about-you party continued not to care.

However, now that fragments of the loyal voting block are breaking off to question and/or renounce the rhetoric and record of those they have followed for so long, concern has obviously set in among Dem Party leaders and Kerry. From their standpoint, something had to be done, and fast.

But I’m afraid the hiring of a retread “civil rights activist” like Jesse Jackson amounts to less than something. In the minds of those African-Americans shown to be shifting from Kerry, it could provide them just one more reason to keep on walking.

Cross posted at Consternations

Dummocrats.com linked with Kerry hires Jesse Jackson. (In the Bullpen)