Word: scheer
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Having the university in his district was no advantage, Scheer insists, "although everyone always assumes I did well because I had the faculty and all these fervent student leftists behind me." Actually one political scientist from Cal worked for him; the others, he says, were friends of Jeffrey Cohelan, the incumbent Democrat. Even the student leftists, including the Berkeley chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, opposed him. "They accused me of legimitizing the Democratic Party and ruining the left movement. I didn't care. But as it turned out, the 1000 kids who worked were mostly dormies and frat...
...Scheer claims his district is pretty typical of California and says what they did there can be done anyplace. "We had poor Negroes, bourgeois Negroes, fat cat whites in the hills, and the working class whites in Emoryville and Albany, outside Berkeley...
...Scheer swept all the Negro communities, although none of the established Negro leaders endorsed him. "I said Watts was a good thing, you know, and the people in the black ghettoes know that. None of them give a good goddamn how Cohelan votes on civil rights laws. They know you don't get action until you make trouble...
Announcements like these won Scheer a lot of free television coverage. Suddenly cameraman -- even from William Knowland's conservative Oakland Tribune -- were following him everywhere. "Some of my Ramparts friends told me to cool the 'Black Power' stuff if I wanted to win, but I insisted there really wasn't any white backlash in the District...
Instead, it seemed to Scheer that racists -- including Oakland's White Citizens Council -- thought their taxes were going to support Negroes on welware. When these voters were convinced that only two percent of their taxes were spent on welfare programs -- that it was the war that was putting the burden on them -- "racism disappeared." "I was frank with whites," he added. "I told them they had damn good reasons to build Negro schools and start other crash programs. I told them they were going to be the victims of Negro frustration...