"When white people and brown people and black people vote together, that's when we make social progress in this country."
| A quote from Howard Dean, speaking before a Chicago union convention on Tuesday, in Jodi Wilgoren's New York Times article "In a Long Presidential Race, Dean Sprints"
"I hear Dean is Chinese. Is he?" a young African American man asked me before Dean, a physician and former governor of Vermont, appeared on stage.
Talk about a disconnect.
I thought this guy was kidding. Turns out he wasn't.
"That's what someone told me," shrugged the man, Allen Potts.
Allen and I were two brothers in a crowd, the only people of color among dozens of people standing in one corner of the plaza. As I spoke with Allen, a union painter in Seattle, I discovered he wasn't an uninformed boob.
He was a thoughtful, articulate person who was only now getting the Dean message -- and by accident. Allen just happened to stumble upon the big rally.
Allen spoke in detail about the Bush family's connection to the savings-and-loan scandal, about execution rates in the state of Texas, about why he had voted for Al Gore in the last election. In his right hand, he clutched some papers he had freshly printed from a Web site about the Posse Comitatus Act and Homeland Security.
"I know little about Dean's politics and I know nothing of his personal history," the 32-year-old said. "I'm looking to be informed, inspired."
| Continue Robert L. Jamieson's Seattle Post-Intelligencer column "Minorities await Dr. Dean's house call"
posted in articles on August 27, 2003 6:20 AM | t (3)
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