Time for Sen. Sherrod Brown to Choose

It’s time to come out from hiding, Sherrod.

Sen. Sherrod Brown doesn’t want to make a choice in the Democratic primary race.

But it’s time for him to show some courage. Bite the bullet and give us your choice for the Democratic nominee.

Some Democrats with backbones need to tell Hillary Clinton that her performance and obstinacy in remaining in the race as a spoiler needs to end.

Her pigheadedness now endangers the chance for a Democrat to win the White House and others to win in the Congress.

As she gets more desperate she gets more destructive.

Clinton in an AP story after the North Carolina and Indiana races proved her weak, said that the voters in the two states “found how Senator Obama’s support… among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.”

The use of “white Americans” is so divisive, so odious, that she deserves no support any longer.

Even Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal found it offensive. “White Americans? Hard-working white Americans? ‘Even Richard Nixon didn’t say white,’ an Obama supporter said, ‘even with the Southern Strategy.’”

Hillary and Bill Clinton have played their own form of Southern strategy, determined to paint Obama as the “black candidate.”

It’s a strategy that has the potential in these final days to tear the Democratic Party apart.

So it takes courageous Super delegates as Sen. Brown to bring the inevitable to its inevitability by making their choice clear.

The time for hiding behind cowardly neutrality is over.

Brown earned his seat with the votes of African-Americans. His biggest county vote plurality was in Cuyahoga County where he won 319,645 to 133,260 votes. We know that blacks gave him much of that margin.

Now it is time for the Senator to repay the debt by endorsing Barack Obama.

Brown has said that “I will not be endorsing until after the Democratic primaries are over.”  He says that “I feel it imperative that my vote as super delegate not influence voters across the country as the primary process unfolds.”

I hardly think the voters of the few states remaining to vote are waiting with abated breath for Brown’s decision. However, African-Americans in Ohio have the right to judge his loyalty to them at this time.

Let’s have the vote, Senator.