I ran into Vernon Robinson last week at the charter schools conference downtown. Vernon’s an old charter schools guy, one of the originals, actually. Anyway, he said he needed to get busy raising money for his congressional campaign. What campaign? I asked.
Well, he didn’t say. Vernon announced his candidacy for Brad Miller’s 13th District seat awhile back, but that’s when the weirdly gerrymandered 13th wandered over toward Winston-Salem, where Vernon lives. It has since been weirdly re-gerrymandered to go east from Raleigh, leaving Vernon out unless he chooses once again to run in a district he doesn’t live in.
More off-putting from his standpoint is that the new & even more gerrymandered 13th District is now a lock for a Wake County Republican, which is why both Paul Coble and George Holding (and Bill Randall) are running in it.
This is all assuming that the gerrymandered districts survive federal court challenges, which is anything but certain given how far the Republicans in the General Assembly went in trying to eliminate Democratic officeholders.
But for now, the districts are what they are — weird, gerrymandered, would be illegal in a sane world — so where do they leave Vernon?
This morning, the answer arrived in the form of a fundraising email. Vernon is running for the Republican nomination in the new & also gerrymandered 8th District, where Larry Kissell is the endangered Democratic incumbent.
If you’ve been missing that Vernon Robinson touch since he last appeared on our shores in the 2006 election against Brad Miller, here’s a sample:
I happen to be a black man, but the only thing I have in common with Barack Obama is a good tan! If you share my belief that that socialist and his Democrat allies in Congress are destroying America, please read every word below.
While Obama was smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine, I was earning badges to become an Eagle Scout. While Obama was being mentored by Communist Party Member Frank Davis, I was taught to love God and country by my parents. While Obama was consorting with Marxist professors, Black Panthers, trial lawyers, union bosses, hippie peaceniks, anti-Christian atheists, militant homosexual agitators, radical pro-abortion feminists, gun grabbers, illegal immigration/open border zealots, Chi-Com sympathizers, globalists who worship at the altar of the UN, and environmentalist wackos, I was earning my bachelor’s degree alongside my fellow cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy.
While Obama was hanging out with terrorists such as Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers (who bombed the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon), I was serving my country as a Missile Combat Crew Commander and Intelligence Officer. While Obama was attending “Socialist conferences” at Cooper Union, I was reading Milton Friedman, watching William F. Buckley, Jr., and attending the 1980 Republican National Convention that nominated Ronald Reagan. While Obama was learning his redistribution-based economics theory from law professors at Harvard, I was earning my MBA and learning the virtues of free market principles and pro-growth policies. While Obama was following in the footsteps of Saul Alinsky to become a Chicago-based community organizer, I was working as a business professor and serving in the first Bush Administration.
While Obama was saying “Amen” to the loony, vile, anti-America, anti-Whitey, anti-Semitic, pro-reparations, “black liberation theology” spewed by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, I was worshipping at a church that preaches the Gospel and erecting a Ten Commandments monument on municipal property (to the dismay of the government bureaucrats and high priests of political correctness who insist that God must be ejected from the public square). While Obama was supporting the NAACP, the ACLU, the NEA, and ACORN, I was filing the successful lawsuit against the University of North Carolina that put an end to its practice of electing trustees according to strict racial and gender quotas and providing blacks-only scholarships at taxpayer expense.
It goes on.
The sad part is, Vernon channels the inner Republican in more GOP candidates than you might think. They don’t say these things — not right out, anyway. In public, they use code words. He doesn’t. He tells it like it is on the planet Republican, in a galaxy very close to home.
Here’s the proposed 8th District, by the way (Kissell lives in Montgomery County):
