Carol Moseley Braun
Carol Moseley Braun
Carol Elizabeth Moseley Braun, also sometimes Moseley-Braun, is an American politician and lawyer who represented Illinois in the United States Senate from 1993 to 1999. She was the first and to date only female African-American Senator, the first African-American U.S. Senator for the Democratic Party, the first woman to defeat an incumbent U.S. Senator in an election, and the first and to date only female Senator from Illinois. From 1999 until 2001, she was the United States Ambassador to New...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth16 August 1947
CountryUnited States of America
I'd come back after having served as ambassador to New Zealand and found that I had real concerns about the direction in which this country was headed.
So I think that if we want to have a Congress, if we want to have government that looks like America, if we want to have government that is truly a representative Democracy, then we need to clearly address how we get our campaign laws out of the way of Democracy.
The notion that we won the war against Iraq is like saying we won a war against Arizona. I mean, the fact of the matter is it's not that big of a country. Nobody, I don't think, had any notion that we would do anything but win it.
I'm a results-oriented person and my Senate record shows that.
I want people who believe in my message and where I am on issues to support me.
The reason that minorities and women don't have a better shot at getting elected to the Senate or to statewide office is because the campaign finance rules are so skewed as to make it very difficult for non-traditional candidates to raise the money necessary to get elected.
The fact is that the diversity in this political class serves the same interest as diversity in any arena, which is it stirs the competitive pot.
There are a number of steps that we can take to reinvigorate and rebuild the economic and the physical infrastructure of our country and then to rebuild us, frankly, on a spiritual level.
To me, that means getting back to the point where our Constitution means that you don't tap people's phones and poke into their e-mail and you don't arrest people and keep them hidden for a year and a half without charging them.
All I really want to be is boring. When people talk about me, I'd like them to say, Carol's basically a short Bill Bradley. Or, Carol's kind of like Al Gore in a skirt.
I want to rebuild America.
I was the only person of color in the Senate, and my colleagues were Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott.
I'm used to people not paying me a whole lot of attention and underestimating me and, frankly, for me a big challenge is to have people believe that I can be the president of the United States.
It's not impossible for a woman - a Black woman - to become President.