Now that the specter of Street money has raised its ugly head again, I thought I would reprint what I wrote about it after the South Carolina Primary. Obama is doing something very courageous here. Spread the word.
The article is reposted after the jump in its entirety.
Barack Obama and the South Carolina Democratic Party made history on Saturday. A record 532,000+ voters cast ballots in the state’s presidential primary—20% more than voted in the Republican primary the previous week. Nobody predicted this turnout. The most optimistic expectation was in the 350,000 neighborhood. Obama brought tens of thousands of voters into the process who had never voted in a primary before and many who were voting for the first time. One in five Democratic primary voters was a self-described "independent." Look out Republicans, come November. This revolution has long coattails!
Aside from the historic turnout and Obama’s unprecedented margin of victory (better than 2 to 1,) there was another great and glorious thing that happened Saturday in South Carolina. It was the refusal of the Obama campaign to participate in the corrupt "Street Money" game. Barack Obama made a wise decision to eschew the typical technique for getting out the African-American vote. It’s a good thing, too. Street money—well placed cash spread around precinct by precinct on election eve to State Legislators, preachers and various other ward heelers-- has soiled Southern Democratic primaries for decades. Barack Obama didn’t need cash to "oil" his AA machinery. He oiled it with an undeniably steady drumbeat of hope and a promise of real change.
Barack Obama cut his teeth in Chicago, perhaps the toughest political playground in America. He knew full well that the "other guys" would try to play the "Street Money" game. And sure enough, the Clinton machine was well-oiled from the start. State Senator Darrell Jackson has been a $10,000-a-month "consultant" to the campaign for more than a year. There were others-- many others I think-- on the Clinton payroll. (When the quarterly reports come out we’ll find out about who got how much.) But I’d like to know if any cash went into the streets on election eve. I am going to ask all of the major newspapers and news organizations to look into it. Street money is one of those things that everybody knows about, but nobody talks about. Most of it is cash and quite a bit of it is unreported. I am not saying that the Clinton campaign put out unreported cash. I am only asking if they did. Somebody should know. We’ll see.
My documentary filmmaker friend, David Boatwright was here in Columbia following the Homeboys around with a camera on Thursday night (2 days before the earthquake that shook the world!) David interviewed me for about an hour in my home Thursday morning, while we were getting ready to cook and then he documented our day out in the field. Yesterday and this morning, we assembled a 9 minute documentary about the Homeboys and also a collection of interview clips, which we’ll be posting on YouTube tonight and tomorrow. (Keywords: onealbear, O’Neal Compton, Homeboys for Change, Barack Obama.
Here is a commentary I recorded as part of the above documentary. A lot of folks have linkled it in other diaries, so I am posting it again here: