Jul 102006
Am I the only one who thinks that Congressional candidate Keith Ellison has made several amateurish miscues since he received the DFL endorsement? While failing to pay parking tickets and failing to timely disclose financial statements are minor offenses that rank relatively low on the malfeasance scale, they make convenient fodder for negative press. As soon as he received the received the endorsement, Ellison’s campaign manager should have sat him down and grilled him about any outstanding debts or black marks on his record and urged him to resolve those matters as soon as possible.
I still support Ellison’s candidacy and I plan on voting for him in the September primary. I’m not thrilled with his past affiliation with the anti-Semitic and homophobic Nation of Islam, but I believe him when he says that he was never a supporter of their core beliefs. Hopefully, these errors of omission will come to an end once Ellison and his campaign staff become more accustomed to functioning under a magnifying glass. But as Nick Coleman points out in the article linked above, I wonder if Ellison would receive the same level of scrutiny from the press if he was a white Protestant from the burbs.
