Among the leading tropes about today’s Republican Party is that it is so inhospitable to African Americans that no serious black candidate wants to run under its banner — especially in our cities.
Yet today the bluest of cities has such a Republican candidate.
His name is John Burnett, and he’s running for Gotham’s second-most-important elective office: city comptroller. And it deserves attention.
That’s especially true because there are real differences in this campaign. Scott Stringer is a decent man, and we rejoiced with the rest of New York that his victory in the Democratic primary prevented the sociopathic Eliot Spitzer from getting his hands on the office.
But as the one debate between Burnett and Stringer showed, the two have differences that ought to make this a substantive race.
Scott Stringer, for example, is a lifelong politician and Upper West Side liberal with a long list of endorsements from the Democratic establishment. Against this, John Burnett is a political outsider who began work in the financial-services sector as a teenager. For more than two decades, his responsibilities have included supervising financial advisors, audits and compliance.
It’s not just the media that seems uninterested. We also fault the national GOP. When party Chairman Reince Preibus visited Brooklyn this spring to encourage blacks to give the GOP a new look, he said: “If you’re going to get the order, you’ve got to show up and try to make the sale.” So where’s the party now?
Yes, John Burnett’s got an uphill race in heavily Democratic New York. But he has a message worth hearing — and promoting.
And stronger and more visible GOP support for Burnett would send a welcome signal to two groups of African Americans the party professes to be interested in: those eager to see some competition for their votes, and those who might want to compete themselves.