Ron Miller is the president of the Tea Party group Regular Folks United, and a former Republican candidate for Congress and the Maryland state senate. Miller, who is a black former staffer with the Bush Administration, adamantly defends Tea Party activists from charges of racism, blaming Obama for his “open display of condescension toward ordinary Americans.” But while Miller deplores charges of racism against members of the Tea Party, he claims that African Americans only support Obama because he is black. He told the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow that anyone who backs Obama cannot be Christian, and black Obama voters “place their blackness ahead of Christ”:
“As I tell some of my friends who don’t understand why a race that has such a strong faith-based foundation could then support a man who obviously goes against many of the things that are taught in that faith — I say, well, that’s because whether they admit it or not, they place their blackness ahead of Christ,” Miller says.
“And I think that you’re going to find that whatever someone puts first in their lives influences everything else that follows. And unfortunately I think it doesn’t matter that he hasn’t done this or that or the other — ‘he’s one of us.'”
Miller says that while the “us versus them” sentiment is still overwhelming, he hopes that enough blacks will be disenchanted with the president to drive down his support at least a bit among minority voters.
