The Gantt Report
By Lucius Gantt
Every election year political pretenders prowl around Black communities. They show up at your churches, they show up at your schools, and they attempt to attend your social and community organizations to solicit your votes.
In this column, political pretenders are the candidates who have little community service, little or no recognition, and slim to no chances of winning a political battle at the polls.
The last time Ralph Nader ran for office, he got a significant number of votes but didn’t come close to winning the race for President.
In 2024, I’m not surprised by the so-called leaders that you respect and support are all over the place. It’s normal for African Americans to be the first group to support candidates, the first to contribute to candidates, and the first to endorse candidates.
We have a historical tendency to put politicians first even when those same office holders put us last.
Anyway, The Gantt Report doesn’t have a history of telling readers who they should vote for.
However, even Stevie Wonder can see the winner of the 2024 Presidential Election will be Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
Other Presidential candidates are pretending to have a chance of being victorious.
Cornel West, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and other “minor” candidates have been meeting with and drawing praises from Blacks in your community, but they don’t have a ghost of a chance to win.
The 2024 election is not a time to play around with politics. No matter how many times you’ve been called, or you’ve been visited or you’ve been lied to about how much you’re loved and supported, political pretenders are like the Scarecrow was in “The Wiz”, they can’t win, they can’t break even and they can’t get out of the game because they may have been paid to take votes from one of the major party’s presumptive candidates.
But winnability has never stopped so-called Black leaders from telling us who we should vote for.
This is the most important election in my lifetime. I’m no friend of any Presidential candidate, but I prefer a “democratic” government over a dictatorship. I prefer a country where no man is above the law. I prefer a country that says I have rights over a country where the President can kill us because he has immunity.
It’s no secret that the candidate that can generate and turn out the most Black votes is the most likely candidate to win.
It’s also no secret that Presidents have always lied about riding and dying with Black Americans and Black voters. There is nothing important that we want from the federal government protections under the law, we can’t get total health care rights, we can’t get affordable housing, we can’t get access to loans and other fair financial services, and more.
One major candidate wants to take us back to America’s dark days when racism and segregation were widespread and thriving.
And the other doesn’t necessarily want to take us back, but doesn’t exactly want us to move forward either.
We still need to vote. The political devil is on the ballot, dressed in friendly clothing.
