Quite apart from his eagerness to ride to Congress on religious intolerance, the political career of Vernon Jones is more than a little odd. A Black Democrat in roughly the same suburban Atlanta district that elected Cynthia McKinney to six terms in Congress, Jones admits voting for Bush in 2000 and 2004 and publicly flirted with switching to the Republican party in 2002 and 2003. The biggest contributors to his current political campaign are the family, employees and lawyers of Mel "you pay a little more, you get a little more" Sembler, a former chief fundraiser for the 2000 Republican National Committee. Sembler is a real estate developer with billions of dollars in projects ranging from big box retail stores to office towers and luxury condos in Dekalb County GA, where Vernon Jones is the county CEO.
Most observers agree that Vernon Jones is only pretending to run a doomed and desultory statewide campaign for the Democratic nomination against Georgia's odious Saxby Chambliss. From his traveling to DC to meet with Chambliss on the eve of his announcement to his posturing as a self-described conservative Democrat, to his support of current and future wars abroad and questionable police practices at home, and his endorsement of the regressive and harebrained "Fair Tax," Jones' stands on the issues place him far to the right of Democratic voters, let alone Black ones in Georgia or anyplace else. That he has nonetheless managed to carve out a political career as a nominal Democrat at all speaks to the hollowness of Democratic party politics, to its distance from the lives and concerns of Georgia Democrats, most of whom are African American."
As they say, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and looks like a duck, the odds are that you are not dealing with a pony.
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