On being Bamboozled
McGlowan shares her special brand of political maneuvering as prelude to Athens visit?
By Beth Jones
beth.jones@onlineathens.com
Story updated at 6:59 PM on Friday, April 13, 2007
From: www.AthensOnline.com
Go ahead. Call Angela McGlowan the Black Barbie.
She’s heard it before.
She’s not ashamed of her looks. After all, they helped McGlowan sneak past the gatekeepers into the exclusive club of Washington D.C.’s political elite.
As an optimistic college grad, McGlowan walked the halls of Congress passing out resumes. She never got an interview.
So McGlowan - in a move Elle Woods of “Legally Blonde” would surely endorse - decided to run for the title of Miss Washington, D.C. 1994. She won.
As part of her pageant duties, McGlowan frequently made appearances at the same events where political players came out to glad-hand. She introduced herself to the bigwigs and brought up issues she cared about, like the number of children she’d seen in D.C. running in the streets when they should have been in school.
“I turned my celebrity into access to make a difference,” she said.
Sure, some people may dismiss her for being a former beauty queen, but McGlowan doubts folks like that would have taken her seriously anyway. “Even before the title, you look a certain way,” she said.
Beauty helps, but a pretty face alone doesn’t ensure success, McGlowan said. Intellect isn’t enough to do it. Nor is having all the right connections.
It takes all three, she said. “And at the end of the day, it’s about who you help.”
McGlowan wrote her book “Bamboozled: How Americans are Being Exploited By the Lies of the Liberal Agenda” to win Hispanics, blacks and women over to her opinion that the Democratic party uses them for votes.
McGlowan will sign copies of her book at Barnes & Noble on Atlanta Highway Sunday from 2 to 4 p.m. and at the University of Georgia on Mondayat 7 p.m.
After retiring her sash, McGlowan worked as a legislative aide, a government affairs advisor to corporations and as a political analyst for Fox News. She has appeared on “Politically Incorrect” and recently made the cover of the Black Republican.
She’s chief executive and founder of Political Strategies and Insights, a government affairs and public relations consulting firm.
In “Bamboozled,” McGlowan argues that minorities and women should vote with the GOP because the party works to stimulate economic growth, which provides more business opportunities for all Americans.
Democrats, on the other hand, she believes, make poor people in these groups dependent on handouts. (One chapter in her book is called “Uncle Sam Isn’t Your ‘Baby Daddy’”).
Then there’s the fact that Republicans have traditionally been against abortion and gay marriage. That, McGlowan argues, fits with the values of many blacks and Hispanics.
She spends much of the book making the case that Democrats have re-written history as far as the party’s involvement in civil rights. McGlowan examines the role Democrats played in the Ku Klux Klan and points to the Klansman past of Senator Robert Byrd (D) who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for more than 14 hours.
“The party’s history of oppression, lynching and intimidation has been hidden so well for so long,” state press materials for the book, “that the mere mention of it today seems conspiratorial rather than factual.”
Did we mention McGlowan’s book will likely be controversial?
So, she’s beautiful, divisive and good at giving sound bytes.
Sounds a little like conservative pundit Ann Coulter. Except McGlowan says she has something else, something that could alter the face of the 2008 presidential election: access to the black community.
“They might not agree with me, but they’ll accept me,” she said.