Nevada Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid found he wasn’t very popular at all. A poll was taken from January 5th through the 7th that showed 52 percent of voters don’t like him. As if this wasn’t enough for him, his book “Game Change” was put on the shelves and almost immediately the media was buzzing with energy over the ‘racial’ comments ‘against’ President Barrack Obama found inside.
The book cites Reid as saying privately in 2008 that President Obama could succeed as a black candidate partly because of his "light-skinned" appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."
Some people of the Republican Party feel that Reid should resign from his post because of these comments. They feel that his comments were inappropriate and that he will never be able to recover his career. I do not agree.
First of all, Reid was a large Obama supporter when Obama was running for office. His comment was not directed to Obama himself but to the people that elected the president. In a way, he was calling them racist. He was stating an opinion that part of the reason Obama was elected had something to do with his skin color. He wasn’t saying ‘I voted for Obama because he has a light-skinned appearance and talks like white people.’ He was saying that other people may have voted for him for this reason.
This brings me to my second point; Harry Reid is a citizen of the United States of America and therefore has a constitutional right to say anything he feels like. He cannot be fired or asked to resign for stating an opinion no matter what that opinion was.
And finally, it is up to him to recover his career. He has apologized publicly for offending people (I might add that I find his comments offensive). And Obama himself has publicly accepted Reid’s apology. He is responsible for his career and he knows this.
It doesn’t matter if I agree with his opinion or not; he has a right to state it and I have an obligation to allow him to do so. If I decide not to vote for him, that’s my prerogative.
Article Source:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/11/harry.reid.political.future/index.html?iref=allsearch
Picture Source:
http://wellsy.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/harry-reid.jpg
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