As a result of his meeting last year with the Rev. Al Sharpton in the wake of the riots sparked by the shooting death of a black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul won’t be getting the support of Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, an outspoken black conservative,
The Daily Caller reports.
"I’ve been real disappointed in Rand Paul … I felt he was pandering," Clarke said Thursday in Cleveland, where he attended the GOP debate. "Early on, he met with Al Sharpton. And I don’t care who people meet with, but the reason he gave for meeting with Al Sharpton was he wanted to get the black perspective of things."
Politico reported in November that the two men met for breakfast to discuss criminal justice reform, demilitarization of police, and the senator’s recent trip to Ferguson.
Paul has been vocal about making the Republican Party more diverse and set a goal to increase the percentage of black Republicans from 6 percent in 2012 to 33 percent in 2016, according to Politico.
Sharpton, according to Clarke, "is so far removed from the black perspective," and meeting with the divisive civil rights leaders is "insulting."
"He doesn’t speak for all black people. So when I saw that, I thought, typical pandering."
Clarke suggested that Paul could have reached out to him if he was looking for the "black perspective."
"I’m not an unknown," he said.
"If you want to find out the black perspective, you need to start treating black people as individuals. Go down and start talking to people. Hang in some of these areas. The barber shops, the churches. And get a multitude of perspectives, not just one."
Clarke said he hasn’t decided who will get his vote in the primary, but acknowledged that he’s "a little biased, because of my relationship with (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker).
"We’re friends. But I’ve met a lot of these people, and got to spend some time talking to them."
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