Wannabe 2nd Black President Fails the Quota Test!

Over at the WaPo, Colbert King is in a snit and whines Is Kerry's Campaign Colorblind? (Hint to improve comprehension - to Colbert "colorblind" is bad.)

John Kerry, oh, John Kerry, say it isn't so. But, alas, apparently 'tis true.

The Massachusetts senator, putative 2004 Democratic standard-bearer and soon-to-be leader of the party that most voting African Americans and other people of color call home, has an innermost circle of advisers that is practically as white as the driven snow. That slam against the Kerry high command appeared last week in "The Inside Edge" column of Carlos Watson on CNN.com.

Not wanting to believe that Kerry would assemble a team of insiders with faces that exclusively resembled Europe -- especially after proclaiming throughout the length and breadth of the land that he wants our workplaces to reflect the full face of America -- I called the Kerry campaign in Washington and got press spokesperson Stephanie Cutter on the phone.

I asked her: Is Carlos Watson's assertion true?

Watson, for the record, had written that, unlike former vice president Al Gore, who had an African American campaign manager, political director and finance director, Kerry has no person of color in his inner circle, including the campaign manager, campaign chairperson, media adviser, policy director, foreign policy adviser, general election manager, convention planner, national finance chairman and head of the vice presidential search team.

Cutter's answer to my question was truly Clintonesque. It all depends, she said, on what you mean by inner circle.

You guessed it. The day Watson's column appeared, Lurch's "senior staff" got a big expansion. Tsk, Lurch! Colbert's not buying it.

Let's be fair, you might argue. Doesn't Kerry have a right to surround himself with close friends and top assistants who click with him? Of course. But is it too much to expect that the Democratic Party's top liberal, the candidate who cries that he has "fought for civil rights and equal opportunity for every American my whole life," who brags about his efforts to "enhance diversity," and whose message is inclusiveness, would in fact have a presidential campaign inner circle that is reflective of the diversity of his party and the country? And if elected, will Kerry govern that way?

As for grand strategists, Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill made it plain in a story this week by The Post's Jim VandeHei that only six people qualify in Kerry's camp as real insiders: herself, Bob Shrum, Michael Donilon, Tad Devine, Tom Kiley and Mark Mellman.

And they don't look like America.

Too bad for Lurch. Live by the pander, die by the pander.