Will Bunch Beats Me to the Punch

One of the things I wanted to blog about this weekend was a column in the Inquirer. We were out of town for a few days and it took another few days to get caught up on all the papers. In the meantime Daily News blogger Will Bunch wrote a post on the same topic. He did a great job, so in the interest of saving time, I'll just link to his post.

In short, the Inky is taking some of my subscription money (and a lot of other people's as well) and paying former Sen. Rick Santorum a boatload of money to write a column. I read the first one and haven't read them since. However, skimming over the page in his most recent offering, he says:

In fact, his marquee issue puts him at odds with Democratic elites and deep-pocketed teachers' unions. Williams, you see, is an unabashed supporter of charter schools and school vouchers. This principled stand turns out to be incredibly popular with his constituents and helpful in one other important way: He raised more than twice as much money as any other contender last quarter, thanks largely to school-choice advocates and middle-class blacks who see him as the future.

As Bunch so clearly points out, there is no way, looking at campaign finance reports, to know what someone's race or ethnic background is. The amounts given provide some indication of income but it isn't a reliable measure of whether or not someone is middle class. As Bunch also says, Santorum is wrong. Most of the candidate's money came from three individuals. I googled images of them and they look pretty pale to me.

Santorum is just plain wrong.