I'll just be suffering the pop-unders at The Raw Story today. Having found Dara Purvis, I think the time will be well spent.

Behind the rhetoric: Bush is bad for Blacks
By Dara Purvis | RAW STORY COLUMNIST

…This bizarre belief that blacks are being led around by white liberals saw its flip side in one of the funniest moments C-SPAN ever has aired, when a representative from Project 21 (an organization of black conservatives) came to defend the group against charges that it was a front for the same old white conservatives that normally espouse opposition to affirmative action and other socially conservative views. This accusation is bolstered by the fact that Project 21 is a subsidiary of the National Center for Public Policy Research, an association of those same old white conservatives formed at the height of Reagan-mania. The clear and concrete link between the NCPPR and the very creation of Project 21 led prominent blacks like Kweisi Mfume, president of the NAACP, to say that the group is a "make-believe black organization."

The key to the hilarity of the interview was due to a simple traffic mishap: The representative who was scheduled to appear got a flat tire on the freeway on his way to the C-SPAN studios. So Project 21's director had to fill in.

Project 21's director is, in perfect irony, white.

Robb Harlston, the host of the show, barely clung to his professional demeanor as he issued what is now my favorite introduction to an interview of all time: "The director of Project 21, a program for conservative African-Americans … you're not African-American?"

The director, David Almasi, immediately issued a stream of defensive remarks that only added to the surreal humor. First he explained the tire blowout, and said he called another member of the group trying to get someone else to appear, but nobody was available (guess the flat and the one phone call exhausted the ranks of conservative blacks in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area). Then he gave a tortured explanation that he was only an employee of the group; he took his marching orders from all of these mysterious black conservatives suffering from flat tires and broken phone lines. He didn't actually "direct" the organization; he was just the director. (As a bonus, this means that the difference between the group of black conservatives and the white guy working for the group of black conservatives is that the white guy gets paid to do it. You really have to love that as an affirmative defense!) Frankly, it was the best real-world re-enactment of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain — I am the BLACK CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT!" that I've ever seen.

Luckily, such chimeras of black Republicanism don't seem to be having any effect on the larger community. A recent poll by BET and CBS news showed that support for John Kerry is almost at the same level as support for Al Gore in 2000. And despite what Bush and other Republicans would have you believe, blacks are not being led astray by white liberals — the views of black Democrats on most issues are generally in line with those of the Democratic Party. Nine out of 10 (roughly the proportion of blacks that voted for Gore in 2000) believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and that the Iraq war was a mistake. The same poll found that black voters, much like white voters, consider jobs and the economy to be "the most important issue," followed by education, health care and the war in Iraq.

Furthermore, there was a slight increase in the percentage of those surveyed planning to vote in November over August 2000.

In short, Bush is wrong to ask blacks what the Democratic Party has "done for them lately," to borrow a phrase from Janet Jackson, a black woman who recently raised the ire of social conservatives for another reason. Blacks do not vote for Democrats simply because Democrats (unlike Bush) work to create a more racially just society — although that is most certainly one of the reasons. Blacks vote for Democrats because the Democratic program reflects their views on almost all issues: the economy, health care, education, social programs, the justice system, and every other plank in the party platform. Issues that might engage blacks more strongly are not carrots to be dangled to entice black voters toward the grand old elephant waiting to stomp on them; they are integral parts of a larger Democratic philosophy that favors inclusion over divisiveness, fair treatment over prejudice, and one society versus the haves trumping the have-nots.