Senator Thad Cochran (R., Miss.) needs to reward the black voters who crossed party lines to support him in his runoff against tea party challenger Chris McDaniel by backing some concrete policy initiatives, according the the state’s only member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
“We have historically black colleges in our state who do the best job they can trying to educate our citizens,” Representative Bennie G. Thompson told National Review Online during a Wednesday interview at the Capitol. ”I’d like to see efforts that they receive full funding. I’d like to see the health care of our citizens improved; our children die too young. I’d like to see an increased effort to make sure that the minority unemployment rate inn our state is reduced. So, there are a lot of opportunities for us to start with.”
Thompson said that it wasn’t difficult for Cochran to rally black voters against McDaniel. “I don’t know anybody black who likes the Tea Party. So, if a tea-party person is running against another Republican and you ask a black person, they’re going to support the regular Republican,” he said. “Their platform is counter to a lot of the beliefs of many African Americans. We think there is a place in government to make the lives of its citizens better; that there is a place in government to make sure that education, health care, and other things are available to all citizens. So, that’s a reasonable expectation of government. But this ‘limited government’ and other things that you hear from a lot of tea-party candidates does not resonate well with the black community.”