Thursday, May 8, 2008
Page 1
Presidential Candidate Drops Endorsement of Judicial Contender
By KENNETH OFGANG, Staff Writer
Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has retracted his endorsement of Los Angeles Superior Court candidate Bill Johnson, the congressman’s chief of staff said yesterday.
Tom Lizardo explained in an e-mail message that the congressman and his staff had “gone through the process of setting up a method by which candidates are to be considered for such endorsements” and found Johnson to be lacking.
“Although Bill Johnson’s name ended up on the endorsement list, he did not go through this process,” Lizardo explained. “In light of this fact, and in light of the revelations regarding his past statements and associations, Dr Paul has retracted the endorsement and hopes that, in the future, the process that has been put into place will mitigate the likelihood of similar errors.”
Paul is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and has vowed to continue his efforts up to the national convention even though Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has won a majority of the pledged delegates and is the presumptive nominee. Paul on Tuesday won 7 percent of the primary vote in Indiana and 8 percent in North Carolina.
Johnson, who is running in the June 3 primary against Superior Court Commissioner James Bianco for the seat held by Judge Daniel S. Pratt before he retired, could not be reached for comment. Holly L. Clearman, who is Johnson’s campaign manager and Paul’s state campaign coordinator, could not be reached either.
The MetNews reported last week that Johnson, who has also used the names Daniel Johnson and James O. Pace, was the author of a proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to limit citizenship, as well as permanent residency rights, to “non-Hispanic white [persons] of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is in the British Isles or Northwestern Europe.”
Paul has been criticized during his campaign, and in the past, because of newsletters, published under his name in the 1990s, that contained statements such as that “opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions,” that “if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be,” and that Barbara Jordan, an African American who served in the Texas Senate and U.S. House and is now deceased, was “the archetypical half-educated victimologist” whose “race and sex protect her from criticism.”
Paul—an opponent of illegal immigration who has urged a constitutional amendment denying the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens of the citizenship now guaranteed to them by the Fourteenth Amendment—has insisted that he did not write the articles in question.
Copyright 2008, Metropolitan News Company