BY ANNETTE JOHN-HALL INQUIRER COLUMNIST She is girlfriend-warm, with welcoming eyes and features that resemble the Mona Lisa. And she can switch seamlessly between Mix Master Mike and Policy Maker Mike. She loves both the same.
Most of all, she admires that he stands strong in what he believes, no matter how much heat comes his way.
Even with his controversial “stop-and-frisk” proposal, which would allow police to stop and search those suspected of carrying illegal weapons in high-crime neighborhoods, “he didn’t back down,” she said. “He didn’t tell white people one thing and black people something else. . . . He treated every voter like they could think.”
Like Barack Obama, her husband represents a new-school black politician, one who rejects racial-identity politics and sticks to universal issues, reaching out to all voters while sacrificing no one.
Speaking of Obama, I had to ask: Just how did Nutter feel about the accusations of her husband’s not being black enough?
“That whole attitude distresses me,” she said. “Here’s a guy who grows up in West Philadelphia, from a working-class family, who gets a scholarship to a prep school, works his way through Penn, and suddenly he’s not black enough? There used to be a time when we were proud of that.
“I told Michael, ‘If you don’t do anything else, can you make being smart cool again?'”
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[Photo by TOM GRALISH/INQUIRER]