Clueless star Stacey Dash drops run for office with 'plantation politics' lament

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/31/stacey-dash-congress-campaign-clueless

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The actor turned conservative commentator Stacey Dash ended her campaign for a southern California congressional seat on Friday, about a month after it began.

The Clueless star said in a statement she believed the bitterness in politics and the rigors of campaigning and holding office would be detrimental to her family.

“I believe we live under a system of ‘Plantation Politics’,” she said, using a word freighted with racial and historic meaning, “which offers people on the lower end of the economic spectrum little more than symbolic gestures instead of true political empowerment and improvement.”

Dash, running as a Republican, faced long odds in the heavily Democratic 44th district, which includes part of Los Angeles, the city of Compton and other communities running south of downtown LA.

I have released this statement on my campaign. It’s not an easy one. pic.twitter.com/HvKuUad48F

Republicans account for only about 10% of voters in the district, which Hillary Clinton carried in the 2016 presidential election with 83% of the vote. There was no Republican on the ballot in the November 2016 House contest, which the Democrat Nanette Barragan won.

Speaking to the Guardian this month, Dash said she believed her political views had seen her blacklisted in Hollywood.

“Because I’m black I’m supposed to therefore be a Democrat,” she said, “which is absurd. They’re supposed to be the party of tolerance. I don’t see any tolerance. I’ve made a choice to stand up for what I believe in and don’t think I should be condemned.”

In the same piece, Jack Pitney, a politics professor at Claremont McKenna College, said Dash’s “chances of making a credible bid [were] about equal to [Donald] Trump’s chances of winning the Nobel prize in physics”.

Dash co-starred with Alicia Silverstone in Clueless, a 1995 coming-of-age comedy. She worked as an on-air contributor at Fox News until 2016.