African American Political Opinion

This Time President Obama Literally in Gun Toters Sights

2012-01-29T21:04:00.001-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The bullet riddled tee shirt of President Obama posted brazenly on Facebook by seven semi-automatic gun toting men among them a Peoria, Arizona police sergeant was much more than the by now standard non-stop litany of racist cartoons, depictions, web postings, and kooky loose talk threats against President Obama. The gun toting men and the police sergeant were taking target practice on the president’s likeness at an undisclosed desert locale. This is Arizona. The state where many legislators think it’s ok to pack guns in the legislature, and for citizens to openly pack them in public. This is the state where former Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was nearly killed in an assassination attempt, and where there’s a wide body of respectable opinion starting with a finger in the face of the president governor, Jan Brewer, that simply loathes the president’s policies and in many cases him personally. The gun toting men made a virtual public call for the gunning down of the president comes on Facebook.
It comes against the backdrop of Secret Service reports that the rate of threats against the President Obama has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush. He receives dozens of assassination threats continuously, and that number has been steady before and during the campaign and increased after he took office. Federal law is very clear on Threatening the President of the United States. It is a class D felony under United States Code Title 18, Section 871. It consists of knowingly and willfully mailing or otherwise making "any threat to take the life of, to kidnap, or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States."
The Secret Service has taken the threats against the president seriously and has diligently investigated every one of them. In a few cases, prosecutors have brought charges. But here is the problem, in fact several problems. How seriously do other public officials take them, especially in places like Peoria, Arizona. Peoria, Arizona officials did not suspend the police sergeant pending review and investigation, let alone fire him, or call for a prosecution of him or his gun toting pals. Their weak, duck and dodge response was at worst that he may have violated the police department’s employee conduct rules on the use of social media. There was no immediate response from Peoria, Arizona Mayor Bob Barrett or Peoria, city council persons to calls for them to take action against the officer and men involved.
The Secret Service also has had other worries, namely about staffing. At one point, in 2010 there was a report that in a budget request the Secret Service was understaffed and under-resourced. The Service denied it and insisted it had the resources and personnel to meet any security issue involving the president. But the president’s hands on meet the people routine during his non-stop road travels throughout the country is a constant challenge to any protective and enforcement agency.
The intense concern over Obama’s safety has been intense since he announced he would seek the presidency in February 2007. He had the dubious distinction of being the earliest presidential contender to be assigned Secret Service protection on the campaign trail. This didn't ease the jitters over his safety. Several congressional members even then demanded that Secret Service officials provide all the resources and personnel they could to ensure Obama's and the other presidential candidates' security. They heard the whispers and nervous questions from his constituents about Obama's safety.
During the presidential campaign in 2008, the flood of crank, crackpot, and screwball threats that promised murder and mayhem toward Obama continued to pour in. This prompted the Secret Service to tighten security and take even more elaborate measures to ensure his safety. This was especially important given the deep doubt and even paranoid suspicion that some blacks have that shadowy government agencies were complicit in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, and the fervent belief of millions of other Americans that the CIA or other government agencies were deeply complicit in the killing, if not outright murder of JFK.
There is nothing shadowy or conspiratorial about what police sergeant Shearer and his gun packing friends in Peoria, Arizona did. It was brazen and very open. The clueless Shearer for his part saw nothing inappropriate, let alone, dangerous, about what he did. He chalked it up to much ado about nothing or as he put it he didn’t think that shooting up a t-shirt with President Obama’s face on it “was that big a deal.” It was more than a big deal. The target in their in gun sights, not a regular bull eye, a likeness of Howdy Doody, or a Cactus plant. It was President Obama. Federal prosecutors should see that they see it as the “big deal” that it is and bring charges.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Will Gingrich Bring White Supremacy Back to the White House?

2012-01-25T08:01:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Put “President” in front of Newt Gingrich and there’s an even chance “white supremacy” could be put in front of his presidential moniker. The suddenly surging Gingrich upped his racially loaded pandering scorecard with the resurface of a handwritten first draft of a series of talks he prepared in 1993 a couple of years before his ascendancy to House Speaker for his prescription for “renewing American civilization”. Gingrich initially scrawled that while Asians, and presumably whites, understood how to build businesses and acquire wealth, Latinos were sorely lacking in wealth and business acumen and blacks were even more hopelessly ignorant of what it took to succeed in the business world. Gingrich cited no figures, studies, or research to document his blatant falsehood. But he really didn’t need to for two reasons. By the time a member of Gingrich's staff typed up the notes and prepared the speech for delivery at the National Review Institute, the racially inflammatory digs had been scrubbed out. By the time he delivered the talks they appeared to be racially neutered and came off as just Gingrich pontificating on the his stock tout of free enterprise, personal strength and values, American resolve, and America’s alleged technological superiority.
The other reason Gingrich’s racial pandering passed under the public radar scope is that the GOP had long refined the art of racial code speak. So Gingrich simply entitled his talks “the five pillars of American civilization.” It was understood that talk of values, strength, enterprise, and technology punctuated with the caption “American civilization” was a not so subtle way of boasting of the alleged paramount role of whites in building American civilization and the alleged drain on building American civilization by Latinos, and especially blacks.
Gingrich’s “American civilization” talks were more than bigoted, historically skewed pretensions of original thought and scholarship. They were talked up and more importantly acted out in House Speaker Gingrich’s full throated attack on welfare, entitlements, and supposed runaway big government spending, all allegedly by Democrats. The dots from these themes connected directly back to the notion that blacks and Latinos were economic ignoramuses and chronic feeders at the government trough and that they had utterly failed to pull themselves up through business and entrepreneurship. The conclusion was inescapable that blacks and Latinos were dragging the government into a hopeless sinkhole of poverty and spending waste and this in turn put the free enterprise system in grave danger. Gingrich struck gold in those themes at the time. And at the height of his congressional power was able to bring government to a near screeching halt and whipsaw President Clinton into pecking even harder at reining in welfare, health care and education spending, and at times out GOPing the GOP in his talk of the Democrats taking the lead in taking the burden of government off the backs of the white middle class, and not placating minorities.
We fast forward nearly two decades and Gingrich hasn’t missed a beat. He reached back and recycled some of the old coded racially front-loaded themes with his attacks on welfare and food stamps. And despite his profuse denials that tossing these terms out had anything to do with race, he knew full well that the stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in the popular mind that the prototypical welfare and food stamp grifter is poor, black, and female that it isn’t necessary as two decades earlier to put black or Latino in front of the words. The mere mention of welfare and food stamps instantly pricks the emotional hot buttons of millions of Americans who consider these programs prime examples of the Democrats and President Obama’s government giveaway to minorities.
One could cite fact after fact that the majority of food stamp and welfare recipients are white, and that the food stamp rolls increased more under President George W. Bush than Obama. But these are facts and they seldom get in the way of stereotypes. There is absolutely no danger that the press and much of the public will tar former President Bush with the label “the food stamp president.”
There’s as yet no solid evidence that Gingrich’s presidential resurrection from what was thought to be an entombed candidacy and his even more dramatic surge to the top in the South Carolina primary and his bolt to the front in some polls in the upcoming Florida primary can be attributed to his crude play of the race card. But given the dump Obama at all cost rabid fanaticism of many ultra-conservatives, Tea Party leaders and followers, and plain, old school bigots, racial pandering can’t be discounted as a factor in the headwind apparently gaining force behind Gingrich’s presidential bid.
If that’s the case, Gingrich will keep recycling and spewing out the shop worn racial code themes as the pathway to the GOP presidential nomination. If that’s so, white supremacy would surely be on that same pathway back to the White House.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

President’s State of the Union Speech Will be Under Fire—Again

2012-01-20T15:50:00.001-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Before President Obama uttered a word of his second State of the Union Speech last January, he heard the loud chorus of criticism, attacks, denunciations, and just plain boos from the usual suspects. That is GOP officials, Tea Party leaders and followers, and the pack of professional Obama loathers, the right wing bloggers, talk show hosts and websites. This year won’t be any different. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels will give the official GOP response. He’ll hammer Obama on the usual GOP hit points that Obama and the Democrats, are guilty of alleged rampant government spending and waste, imposing crushing taxes and regulations that supposedly hamper business, and for a rudderless, dead-end policy on jobs and the economy. There’s even a plan this time for Herman Cain, that’s right the virtually forgotten and disgraced Herman Cain, to give the Tea Party rebuttal to the president’s address.
Though Obama wisely hasn’t dropped a hint of what he’ll say in his Third State of the Union Address, it doesn’t much matter. The reasons for the pre and post speech attacks are the same. The State of the Union speech is in effect a sort of de facto report card on the past accomplishments, and the present and future planned initiatives of a presidential administration and the president’s vision for the country.
The stakes, though, are much higher this year than last. It’s an election year, and Obama’s popularity approval ratings have wildly see sawed back and forth between a plus and a minus. And with jobs and the economy being the GOP’s stock hit issue on Obama and with a majority of Americans preoccupied with the economy, his speech is both an economic and political campaign referendum on what and how Obama will deal with both issues in 2012 and if reelected for the next four years. But it’s the reelection issue that looms largest in the hawk like watch from Obama’s GOP opponents on his State of the Union speech.
The State of the Union Address is every president’s time to shine. GOP and Democratic presidents have always been keenly aware that their Democratic and Republican opponents know that State of the Union Addresses boost the stature, prestige, and power of the presidency, and usually bumps up the president's approval rating by a point or two. They also know that the opposition's response to the speech is feeble, pale, and little watched or counted by Americans. One can only imagine how dismal the ratings will be on Cain’s “rebuttal” to Obama.
The history of the State of the Union speech underscores the power to shape policy and bolster the president's image. President James Monroe announced the Monroe Doctrine in 1823. In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln flatly called for the end of slavery in the rebellious states. This was the prelude to the Emancipation Proclamation he issued a year later. Woodrow Wilson warned of the dangers of impending war in 1913. Franklin Roosevelt outlined the famed Four Freedoms in 1941. Lyndon Johnson unveiled the outlines of his Great Society program to fight poverty in 1965. Bill Clinton unveiled his health care reform plan in 1993. George Bush in his State of the Union speeches in 2002 and 2003 prepped the nation for the Iraq invasion. Presidents quickly latched onto the media to give their State of the Union speech more exposure and political wallop. Calvin Coolidge gave the first radio broadcast in 1923. Truman gave the first televised broadcast in 1947.
Obama almost certainly will survey his administration’s foreign policy, war on terrorism, immigration reform, and health care accomplishments. But it’s the thorny problem of jobs and the economy that’s still the prime issue. No matter what Obama says about it, whether he restates his repeated calls for more investment in infrastructure projects, an end to Bush’s tax cuts for the rich and more spending on education, technology and green energy projects. Or, he goes big as some clamor for him to do, and propose sweeping overhauls in the tax code and massive new job spending projects, the GOP knives will dig hard into his political flesh and belittle his accomplishments and blast away at his proposals.
GOP leaders will do as they’ve done in his prior two State of the Union addresses and loudly shout that he’s giving a partisan State of the Union speech that’s tantamount to a reelection campaign stump speech that does nothing to allay the fears and worries of Americans about the country’s economic malaise. But that’s just GOP attack talk that rams even more politics into the State of the Union address. The days of a differential, somber and respectful listen to the president’s State of the Union address are a thing of a nostalgic bygone past. Obama’s state of the union speech will be no different than his other two. It will be under intense fire again.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Why the GOP Presidential Candidates Talk Race (in Code)

2012-01-19T21:32:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
South Carolina Democratic Congressman James Clyburn lambasted the GOP presidential candidates for talking race in code. There’s plenty of ammunition for the attack with the stream of race tinged references Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, and Mitt Romney made to food stamps, welfare, work ethics, and an entitlement society. Then there are the racially loaded newsletters from Ron Paul that resurfaced. The candidates when challenged have ducked, dodged, and denied any racial intent, or in the case of Paul’s newsletter that he even penned them. The denials seem plausible only because the GOP presidential candidates have made it a practiced art of saying absolutely nothing on the campaign trail about discrimination, poverty, and the gaping racial health care and educational disparities. They are even muter in denouncing the non-stop barrage of racist taunts, digs, slurs, depictions of President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama by some Tea Party leaders and GOP elected officials.
GOP presidential candidates for the past three decades have crunched the voter numbers and the stats. The GOP base is the white South and the Heartland. They deliver more than one third of the electoral votes needed to bag the White House. These are the also the voters that GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. George W. Bush, and John McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked on for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance. They haven’t disappointed them. Racial code talk has been a key weapon in the GOP’s campaign arsenal. It has been the spark to reignite the GOP's traditional conservative, lower income white male loyalists.
The final presidential vote in 2008 gave ample warning of the potency of the GOP’s conservative white constituency when aroused. While Obama made a major breakthrough in winning a significant percent of votes from white independents and young white voters. McCain still won a majority of their vote. Overall, Obama garnered slightly more than 40 percent of the white male vote. Among Southern and Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact. In South Carolina and other Deep South states the vote was even more lopsided among white voters against Obama. The only thing that even made Obama’s showing respectable in those states was the record turnout and percentage of black votes that he got. They were all Democratic votes.
McCain would not have been as competitive as he was during campaign 2008 without the bail out from white male voters. Much has been made since then that they are a dwindling percent of the electorate, and that Hispanics, Asian, black, young, and women voters will permanently tip the balance of political power to the Democrats in coming national elections. Blue collar white voters have shrunk from more than half of the nation's voters to less than forty percent. The assumption based solely on this slide and the increased minority population numbers and regional demographic changes is that the GOP's white vote strategy is doomed to fail. This ignores three political facts. Elections are usually won by candidates with a solid and impassioned core of bloc voters. White males, particularly older white males, vote consistently and faithfully. And they voted in a far greater percentage than Hispanics and blacks.
The 2010 mid-term elections was political textbook proof of that. The GOP snatched back the House with a deft play on the long favored racial code themes of tax and spend Democrats, wasteful big government, run-away deficit spending on entitlement programs, and their full blown assaults on so-called Obamacare, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security programs, and labor unions. The major recipients of these programs are and have always been white seniors, retirees, women, and children, and white workers. But these programs have been artfully sold to many Americans as handouts to lazy, undeserving blacks, Hispanics and minorities.
Then there are the always thorny social issues. They slid off the nation’s radar scope the past few years mostly because the laser preoccupation and worry of most Americans has been over jobs and the economy. But they didn’t completely disappear as potentially inflammatory issues. GOP leaders have long known that blue collar white male voters can be easily aroused to vote and shout loudly on the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and prayer. Rick Santorum and before her failed candidacy fell apart Michelle Bachman, have done everything they can to play the family values card to fire up ultra-conservatives and Christian evangelicals.
The GOP's traditional path to the White House has been to stoke the fears of whites over big government and minority encroachment. It failed in 2008 only because of the rage and disgust of legions of white voters at Bush's horribly failed and flawed domestic and war policies, and the GOP’s sorry record of scandals, and ineptness. This was not a radical and permanent sea change in overall white voter sentiment about the GOP as the 2010 mid-term elections showed.
The ultimate end game of the GOP presidential contenders is to make Obama a one-term president. If they have to speak in racial code terms to do it, they’ll do it. It worked too well in the past for them not too.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Why Bain Won’t be Romney’s Bain

2012-01-16T09:10:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

GOP presidential contenders Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich, GOP strategist Karl Rove, and a few other GOP stalwarts loudly claim that the Bain issue is a potential presidential game loser for presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. The story has been well-worked over. Romney supposedly cut, slashed and burned a rash of private companies during his years as an investor and operative for the private equity firm, Bain & Company. There’s absolutely no way the conventional wisdom goes that Romney can claim that he can do what President Obama allegedly has failed to do and that’s be a job creator. In a head to head general election dual with Romney, Obama will repeatedly loop the Bain ad attacks from Perry and Gingrich on Romney about Bain and this will sink his campaign faster than the Hindenburg.
Yet what appears to be a loser of an issue for Romney could just as likely be a potential winner. He’s got a big trump card when it comes to venture capitalism that even President Obama is well aware of. And that’s the engrained attitudes of many American’s toward free enterprise. A lot of Americans, including many of those that rail at the greed of Wall Street and corporations, dream of striking it rich, and that means owning their own business.
Polls continually show that a majority of Americans fervently believe that the poor aren't poor because the capitalist system is greedy, corrupt and exploitive. They blame their poverty on their personal failings. When poverty started to inch up in 2001, National Public Radio (NPR), the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University's Kennedy School found that respondents no matter their background was routinely said that the poor were "unmotivated," "lacked aspirations to get ahead," and "didn't work hard enough." That included a significant percent of the poor. The overwhelming consensus was that with hard work and determination anyone could succeed. A second consistent finding is that Americans just as fervently believe that free enterprise system and free markets is far and away the best, if not only, system in the world to generate, growth, prosperity, and jobs. The collapse of Communism, the fiscal woes and convulsions of European social democratic governments, and the massive GOP sell job that ballooning government spending and mounting deficits has retarded economic growth, is proof positive for a majority of Americans that free enterprise, unchecked and unbridled is the engine for job growth and individual wealth building. A Gallup poll in 2010, found that nearly 90 percent of Americans gave a positive rating to free enterprise. Though there were sharp divisions about the merits of small versus big business, with near universal approval for small business, few said that big business was the enemy of economic growth.
Romney’s push back is that Bain was not an evil ogre and that he was not a greedy corporate rip-off artist at the expense of workers and that small to medium sized businesses would not have a prayer of getting off the ground if venture firms didn’t supply the cash. This sounds even more compelling considering the virtual freeze by the big banks on lending to small, start up, or debt ridden firms. Even Obama has at times sounded like a fervent free marketer in touting private business as the key to growth in countless speeches and appearances.
Romney’s contention that he created 100,000 jobs through his Bain actions is unverifiable at best and hogwash at worst. But his point that a range of enterprises such as pension funds, charities, and university endowments, have put money into venture funds and made money to fund programs and endowments is true. His other point that many of the businesses that Bain and other private equity firms dump cash into were failing any way is also true.
Romney has tried to turn the table on Obama and paint him as a venture capitalist citing the Solyndra flap. This is the shaky Fremont, California company that got over a half billion in government dollars to manufacture cylindrical solar panels. There’s more. By the end of 2011, the White House also plans to channel more than $50 billion through tax credits, low-interest guaranteed loans and grants to green energy ventures. These ventures may well be just as risky, unproven, and with no guarantee of success in creating jobs or doing much to achieve energy independence. The big difference though is that the Obama administration is not dumping government money into these ventures to make a fat profit for individual investors and speculators but to implement the government’s energy independence policy.
This crucial distinction between Obama’s green ventures and Romney’s Bain money making pocket lining will be deliberately blurred, distorted, and lied about to try and defuse the Bain bomb. Romney will try and make the case that free enterprise and entrepreneurship is the cornerstone of American prosperity and venture outfits like Bain make that prosperity possible. He’s got a lot of public belief in that going for him to make that case, true or not.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour heard weekly on the nationally network broadcast Hutchinson Newsmaker Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Ron Paul’s Fetish on Civil Rights

2012-01-02T18:22:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul just can’t seem to help himself when it comes to his fetish on a law which has been on the books for nearly five decades and which has long since been rendered a moot point by even avowed white supremacists. That’s the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Paul caught much flack when he flatly said he’d have opposed it if he had been in Congress in 1964. He dredged it up again as an issue in 2004 when he voted against a symbolic resolution honoring the law on its fortieth anniversary. He dredged it up again during his abortive presidential bid in 2008. And now he’s dredged it up yet again stumping for 2012 presidential votes.
To hear him tell it, it’s a matter of the simple principle of upholding the sanctity of private property from any government encroachment. It’s a libertarian purism taken to the nth degree and it’s a legal and public policy fraud. Paul’s oft times uttered quip that private business owners have an absolute right to decide what to do with their own property to make his point that it is legally wrong to tell private business owners what they can do with their business is laughable. Local, state and the federal governments tell businesses what to do all the time. They compel businesses to pay state and federal taxes, business taxes, adhere to environmental, building and safety codes and regulations, have liability and workers compensation insurance, file employee tax reports, and corporate filing reports, and publish a DBA notice.
Paul, and GOP anti-government deregulation crusaders pay obligatory lip service to the campaign to slash and burn government regulations, but the long laundry list of subsidies, protectionism, tariffs, import controls, benignly weighted tax shelters, tax write offs and depreciation options that corporations use to reduce taxes and increase profits all courtesy of government intrusion would fill up a small telephone book.
Paul knows that the times that government has gone lax on “intrusion” into the affairs of private business it’s been an unmitigated disaster for the public and business. The loosening of oversight on the savings and loan industry resulted in failure of banks, and left taxpayers holding the bag for lost account values. The deregulation of the electricity industry allowed for large-scale manipulation of rates for profit-making. The result was market panic and skyrocketing electricity prices. The jewel in the crown of government non-intrusion is Wall Street’s scamming of the real estate and financial system in 2008. That did much to get the country into the fiscal mess it’s still struggling to get out of, and for which President Obama gets blamed for. Paul makes no fetish of the appalling failures of business left to its own devices without government intrusion to handle, well, its own business.
There’s no mystery why. Carping about workers compensation or safety regulations as government intrusion into private business is not chic, media eye catching and will not stir up controversy. It won’t get lusty cheers from the legion of Paul devotees that think taking shots at a civil rights law decades after the fact proves he’s a fearless, uncompromising fighter for his principles. Harping on the Civil Rights Act has even greater value since it’s provides cover for race baiting without the odious stench of actual race baiting.
Paul’s use of the Civil Rights Act as a foil to snatch a headline any other time could be dismissed as an archaic rant from the fringe. But Paul now has virtual house hold name identification, hordes of fanatical backers, unbridled media allure, and he’s stirred nervous tremors among GOP mainstream leaders. He’s not going to fade away no matter what happens in the presidential caucuses and primaries especially since he’s dropped the coy hint that if the GOP doesn’t play ball with him and take some of his positions more seriously he may just pick up his political marbles and not support the eventual GOP presidential nominee, meaning in reality Romney.
This makes Paul’s broadside against civil rights laws more dangerous. There’s no danger that government or corporations will roll back the clock on the Civil Rights Act but it does send another strong signal to government agencies to slacken up even more in vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws. The relentless water down and outright elimination of affirmative action laws and measures by courts, state legislatures and ballot initiatives and the near impossibility of scaling the stratospheric bar of proof of intent required to win discrimination lawsuits against corporations and financial institutions that engage in blatantly discriminatory practices has already severely crimped the fight to broaden civil rights protections.
Paul is clever though. He recognizes that attacking the 1964 Civil Rights Act while in the next breath saying he’s against discrimination makes his ploy seem like it’s solely about protecting private property, and not the bigotry that it is. We haven’t heard the last of Paul’s civil rights fetish.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Iowa’s a Sideshow It’s Still Romney Versus Obama

2011-12-31T10:49:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The Iowa caucus is a sideshow, a good one, but a sideshow nonetheless. The one man who knows that is President Obama. He, and his reelection team, publicly slam the only challenger that can make the 2012 presidential race competitive, if not an actual horse race. That’s Mitt Romney. It doesn’t much matter how hard ultra-conservatives, Christian evangelicals, tea party leaders and followers rail at him for being too moderate, too vacillating, too establishment, and too bland. The hard reality is that not one of his GOP presidential rivals is electable, no matter how close they hue to the social and fiscal conservative political faith line.
The GOP conservative base just simply doesn’t have the votes to put any of them in the White House. Independents do. The 20012 election will be won as the 2008 election was on whether Obama or his GOP presidential rival can do the best sell job with them. Obama did it in 2008 and he won.
There’s some truth to the contention that independents conform pretty close to a party affiliation be it Democrat or Republican, and tend to reflect their views and vote for one or another of the parties that they identify with. In other words if an independent is pro-Democrat, the Democratic candidate is likely to get their vote. If they are pro-GOP leaning, the GOP candidate is likely to get their vote. But that doesn’t change three facts. One is that independents are independents because they have serious doubts, criticism, and conflicts with Democrats and Republicans and prefer to keep their vote option open. The other is that they back a candidate based on their positions on the issues first. And they have made it plain that the two issues they will judge Obama and his GOP rival on are the economy and budget deficits and how each one handles both. The other is that independents are inching closer and closer to making up nearly half of the total American voters. This is a staggering number.
In 2008, McCain had a good shot at winning the majority of independent voters with his maverick, bucking the party, restore fiscal responsibility line. The fiscal meltdown on a GOP president Bush’s watch wrecked any chance he had to make the case that he could do a better jon than Obama on the economy and the fiscal crisis. Nothing has changed in 2012. In repeated polls Obama has hit crushing lows and at times inched back up all on the basis of what independents thought of his handling of the economy.
But there’s more. Independents also are fickle, and scare easy. The bare hint that a presidential contender is an ideological hard liner on waging wars, torpedoing abortion, imposing iron-clad religious dogmatism, reinforcing gender and sexual preference inequities, and backs a radical slash and restructure of government will drive them into the opposing candidate’s camp faster than a skyrocketing sonic missile. Romney understood that and has took great pain to make sure that he has stood slightly to the center of the often times, wacky pronouncements from the successive GOP flavor of the month presidential candidates. He’s done this even though this further stokes the ABR (Anybody but Romney) mania from GOP ultra-conservatives.
In 2008, Romney was the first GOP presidential candidate to publicly warn that Obama would be the likely GOP opponent, and then say that he could beat him. This was not mere political braggadocio. He like Obama sold himself as the change guy who can go to Washington cut the cronyism, bureaucratic and congressional inertia, and restore public confidence. But more importantly, Obama was then and is now a cash cow and again will have a king's ransom campaign war chest. And the 2012 presidential race will be the costliest in American history, with some estimates putting the price of winning the White House at more than two billion dollars. Romney is every bit the corporate cash cow as Obama. He pumped tens of millions into and virtually self-bankrolled his campaign in 2008. He can do what no other GOP contender can do and that's open the GOP's corporate money spigot in 2012.
The one policy issue that GOP ultra conservatives have pounded Romney and say that makes him unfit to be the GOP presidential nominee is his much harangued health care plan he helped craft as Massachusetts governor. But that won’t scare independents away in the general election. In fact it could be an asset since polls showed that more Americans supported some or all aspects of the health reform law than opposed it, and lambasted Congressional Republicans for their hysteria in opposing the health care reform law, and for continuing to snipe at it.
The presidential race will be a year-long slog. The winner must have lots of cash, feed the perception that he can best handle the economy, and not give any hint that he will pander to the GOP or Democratic hardliners in how they will govern. Romney is the only GOP candidate that comes close to fulfilling that bill. And President Obama knows that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Paul Flunks the R (Racism) Test for Good Reason

2011-12-25T12:24:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Things got worse for GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul when his GOP presidential rival Newt Gingrich called Paul on the carpet for purported racially inflammatory utterances he made in the 1990s in his officially approved newsletters, Ron Paul’s Political Report and Ron Paul’s Freedom Report which brought in a considerable haul of cash. Paul’s purported half-baked racial scribbles are by now well known. He bashed blacks as chronic welfare grifters, thugs, lousy parents, and said they are inherently racist toward whites. Paul issued a terse denial that he authored or even read any of the racial slanders at the time but there is no evidence that he wrote a correction, or issued a clarification.
Paul was back at it again in 2008. On his campaign website ronpaul2008.com, Paul spotlighted race as "Issue: Racism." "Government as an institution is particularly ill-suited to combat bigotry." In short, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of education school desegregation decision, the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and legions of court decisions and state laws that bar discrimination are worthless. Worse, said Paul, they actually promoted bigotry by dividing Americans into race and class. None of this would have much mattered to Gingrich or much of the media if Paul hadn’t become a front runner in the Iowa Caucus.
His kind of sort of, let’s drop the subject retort to the press challenge to forcefully repudiate the past writings was the standard Paul dodge. The jury then and now is still out on whether those views truly represent his feelings or not. He loudly protests that he's not a racist now because he has to if he is to have any credibility as a serious presidential contender. But protests and dodges, don’t change the reasons for Paul’s seemingly out of the pale attacks. They likely did accurately reflect Paul’s thoughts about racial matters, if not in the crude wording, as he protests wasn’t his wording, but in political sentiment. That’s the operative word, “sentiment” because this sentiment can easily morph into lethal and incendiary public policy advocacy.
Paul’s boast that he would not have voted for the landmark 1964 civil rights bill that's been the law of the land for nearly six decades is a textbook case in point.
Paul's rap against the bill is just as absurd and tortured as the rap that Southern Democrats and Northern GOP conservatives who bottled the bill up for more than a year in Congress used to pretty up their opposition to it. It violated property rights. Paul, nearly six decades after their efforts failed in a interview reiterated, "...I'm for property rights and for state's rights, and therefore I'm a racist, that's just outlandish."
The equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment wiped away the bogus claim that property rights trumps racial discrimination a century before Paul and Jim Crow maintenance proponents used this ploy to torpedo the civil rights bill. But his anti-civil rights position linked directly to the old property rights canard fits neatly into the stock libertarian argument that the best thing that government can do is stay out of the affairs of private citizens and private business. That the root of America's woes -- bloated spending, soaring deficits, congressional gridlock, crippling energy dependence, massive tax disparities, the drug plague, and even America's wars are the result of top heavy government interference and intrusion in the lives of Americans. Paul also knows that spicing up the horribly distorted Jeffersonian principle of limited government with race has broad implications for scrapping regulations on environmental and civil liberties, and consumer protections, gutting regulations to prevent corporate abuses, and of course, slashing funding or eliminating government health services, education, welfare, and labor rules and laws. He has drilled home in his talks, lectures, and innumerable GOP presidential debates. Paul’s seeming anti-establishment, anti-party, maverick position plays well to the legions of frustrated, disgusted, even enraged GOP rank and filers and purported libertarians that are desperate to have an alternative to the GOP establishment anointed presidential contenders.
Paul can be magnanimous and apologize for the racist rants while deftly deflecting blame to someone else and then quickly lecturing the press to get over it and talk about the “substantive” issues. But the dredge up of the newsletters gave him what he wanted. He is a near household name and a viable force in the GOP. A slash and burn assault on government, even when its race tinged, doesn’t hurt Paul one bit. It gets media and public attention, draws denunciations from his defenders as hitting below the belt, and quiet cheers from the multitudes that happen to agree with Paul, his racial suspect views notwithstanding. In other words, Paul flunks the R (Racism) test for good reason.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

The Nightmare of Ron Paul’s Iowa Win

2011-12-19T09:02:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Ron Paul will win the Iowa Caucus no matter whether he actually comes out on top or not. A win for him simply means a solid showing which he’ll make. He’ll accomplish that feat because he has a legion of young, and not so young, fanatical true believer devotees that have anointed him as the political second coming of St. Paul and Mother Teresa. They do three things that are absolutely indispensable to a successful campaign and that’s organize, organize, organize.
They do it with zest because they buy hard into his off-beat views, from slashing government down to virtually nothing to his controversial off beat quips on race matters. During the 2008 presidential campaign, they rabidly defended Paul against all comers even after he was unceremoniously dumped from the ballots. This created a huge problem not for the Democrats, but for the GOP. The millions that went into a swoon over Paul were in no mood to mob the polls to vote for another placid, corporate, Beltway insider GOP presidential candidate. John McCain was that candidate. The absence of Paul on any ballot meant an absence of thousands of voters who in any other season might have cast a vote for the GOP. GOP mainstream leaders thought then that they had seen the last of the aged party gadfly and his fanatical hordes. They assured that his extreme choke the eyes out of government view would not cloud the GOP’s tunnel vision drive to make President Obama a one term president in 2012. They were dead wrong. Paul not only refused to go quietly into the night but has emerged scarier than ever in 2012.
Paul's fanatical backers have been enthralled from the moment that Paul got a national platform to yap about the issues. He is their lone Jeremiah crying in the wilderness against big government, big taxes, big corporate domination, big socialized medicine, big wars, and demanding a return to unfettered liberty and freedom (conservative interpretation of it that is). But that's not the only thing they like about Paul. He fanned anti-immigrant flames. In a 30 second TV spot that ran in New Hampshire during the 2008 campaign, he demanded that students from alleged terrorist countries be denied visas into the U.S. Paul offered no proof that there are hordes of students pouring into America to commit terrorist acts. The ad was more than just a cheap ploy to fan terrorism fears. This reinforced the worst in racial and religious stereotyping and negative typecasting. The stereotype is that anyone in America who is a Muslim with a non-white face is a terrorist.
Paul topped that with the infamous slavery quip that he made on Meet the Press during the campaign. He claimed the Civil War was an unnecessary bloodbath that could and should have been avoided. All Lincoln had to do was buy the slaves. Other slave promoting countries, asserts Paul, didn't fight wars and they ended slavery peacefully. Paul's historical dumbness could and should have been laughed off. It wasn't. It was intently debated, and defended. The scarier point was that it was taken seriously at all.
Paul's intrepid band of true believers was unfazed by the controversy; they reveled in it. Paul gave them plenty more ammunition. He asserted that blacks are criminally inclined, political dumb bells, and chronic welfare deadbeats. There was also the alleged Paul hobnob with a noted white supremacist. Here's what Paul on his campaign website ronpaul2008.com had to say about race. In fact he even highlighted this as "Issue: Racism" on the site. "Government as an institution is particularly ill-suited to combat bigotry." In other words, the 1954 landmark Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of education school desegregation decision, the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and legions of court decisions and state laws that bar discrimination are worthless. Worse, says Paul, they actually promote bigotry by dividing Americans into race and class.
Paul's views are an arcane blend of libertarianism, know-nothing Americanism, and ultra conservative laissez faire limited government. In the four years since Paul rammed himself on the national scene as a name force that line has gripped the imagination of millions of Americans who believe that Congress and the GOP and the Democrats are hopelessly insular, corrupt, inept, and that they are rushing headlong to spend the nation into free fall debt. This they say will ultimately reduce the country to backwash penury nation status.
Paul made sure that he would stay within reach of grabbing the GOP presidential contender brass ring in Iowa by never wavering from his stock call in the debates for a debt free, bare bones government, and a neo-isolationist foreign policy. This has been a surefire formula to stir the juices of the frustrated, angry, and naive flock. This is the nightmare Paul adroitly poses for the GOP and the nation in Iowa and beyond.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

The Black Vote is Still President Obama’s Trump Card, But only if the numbers are there

2011-12-13T09:21:00.001-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Black voters will again give President Obama a sky high percentage of their vote in 2012. That was never in doubt. What is in doubt is how many will make up that percentage. It is the number, not percentage of black voters that turn out that will again ease the President’s path back to the White House or make that path rocky. The 2008 election decisively proved that the presidential reelection bid is a pure numbers game.
If black voters had not turned the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries into a virtual holy crusade for Obama, and if Obama had not openly in the South Carolina primary and subtly in primaries thereafter stoked the black vote, he could easily have been just another failed Democratic presidential candidate. Through its voter education, awareness, and mobilization campaigns, the NAACP played a huge role in galvanizing and boosting the numbers of black voters, nearly all votes for Obama. It was part race, part pride, and all sense of history in the making and being a part of Obama’s epic win.
The mass rush by blacks to the polls was the single biggest reason that Obama carried the traditional must win states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, and broke the GOP presidential grip on North Carolina and Virginia. There’s no certainty that will be the case this time around. The GOP dominates the state legislatures in North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and Virginia. Four of these five states have GOP governors and there’s warfare between the GOP and the Democrats over GOP concocted remapping plans in Florida and Ohio, and other states. The plans would virtually insure a spate of redrawn GOP friendly voting districts in the 2012 presidential election. The GOP aim is to gain greater dominance in the House and win majority control in the Senate. But the biggest prize is the White House, and the more GOP controlled districts in the states that Obama won in 2008, the greater the odds are of rolling those states back into the GOP win column. GOP strategists almost certainly will spend massive sums and mount a relentless, intensive blitz in these states to paint Obama and the Democrats as the cause of the economic woes of the middle-class, with the always subtle undertone of soft pitch racial code language to prick the lingering unease of many conservative white voters toward Obama and the Democrats
This political ploy is even more worrisome. Obama’s centrist appeal to independents played a significant role in getting many of them to punch the Democratic ticket and augment the huge black vote he got in 2008. But a repeat of that in 2012 is questionable. Polls consistently show that a majority of independents are disappointed, dismayed, or hostile to Obama’s handling of the economy, always the Achilles Heel for any incumbent who wants to keep his presidential job.
The good news is that polls are showing the enthusiasm level for Obama is still as high as it was in 2008 among a majority of black voters. Polls also show that blacks are the most optimistic that the country is heading in the right direction. That’s due almost exclusively to their backing of Obama. This is the key factor in getting numbers of voters to show up at the polls on Election Day.
Obama has done two things to keep the enthusiasm level high. In November, he held a black leadership conference and unveiled what is as close yet to a white paper the White House has issued on race. It ticked off a checklist of initiatives from health care, job stimulus and small business aid that have benefited blacks. The position paper was an obvious counter to the shouts from some black activists, and on occasion the Congressional Black Caucus, that he hasn’t said or done enough about the chronic high unemployment, failing public schools, high incarceration rates, and worries about home foreclosures, and poverty crisis facing black communities.
Obama strategists recognize that the novelty of his history making election has worn off with many blacks. This realization and in some cases, frustration and impatience, set in among many blacks, caused far more second guessing about Obama’s priorities then the White House found comfortable.

The backstabbing, infighting, and clownish antics of the pack of GOP presidential contenders and the constant hectoring of them as weak and ineffectual at this stage of the election game should not be cause for the Democrats to uncork the champagne and declare the 2012 election a cakewalk for Obama. Despite fielding arguably one of the weakest GOP presidential tickets in recent history in 2008, the GOP contenders still got the bulk of the white vote. There’s no guarantee that this can’t happen again. The GOP will rally its fractious base when the Election chips are down. The black vote is still Obama’s trump card, but only if the numbers are there.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

The GOP Hit on Holder is a Hit on Obama

2011-12-09T08:24:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Even before President Obama publicly announced that he would tap Eric Holder for Attorney General, he knew Holder would be a tough sell job. So he quietly asked key Senate Republicans whether they would go to war to block his confirmation. The GOP response was at best a tepid, and a far from satisfactory no. The last thing Obama needed was a bitter, partisan, and contentious fight over Holder. Yet during the confirmation hearing, Holder was grilled over his role as Deputy Attorney General in Bill Clinton’s administration in a handful of controversial Clinton pardons. The panel also dug at him for lobbying on behalf of telecom giant Global Crossing after the company went belly up in 2002. Global Crossing incurred millions in debt. The Republican National Committee first brought this up and claimed it would push to make it a campaign issue in the 2008 election, because Holder was an advisor to the Obama campaign. The RNC didn’t say just what the issue was. It didn’t matter since the issue was really to hit Holder, on any and everything it could to sully Obama.
Then there was the Elian Gonzalez case. In 1999 Cuban leaders in Florida were furious at Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno for enforcing a court order requiring that the 6-year-old Gonzalez be removed from his relatives' home in Miami's Little Havana and returned to Cuba. Holder took some heat for enforcing the court order.The same year Holder drew more fire for his role in approving the clemency request for 16 members of the radical Puerto Rican independence group FALN, convicted of a string of terrorist bombings and murders. The FBI, Bureau of Prisons and U.S. state attorneys opposed clemency for the 16. Holder refused to comment on what part he played in the clemency action. This charge against him also went nowhere.
Holder was overwhelmingly confirmed as AG. But there was always the sense that GOP leaders were just watching, waiting, and marking time until they could pounce on him again. He was clearly seen as a pawn in their relentless attack plan on Obama. If they could discredit, taint, and tarnish Holder for even the most picayune act, it would be another slap at Obama.
Since the GOP got back in the saddle in the House, Holder was back in their gun sights. The issue is Holder’s alleged duplicity in the botched ATF’s Mexican gun sting operation “fast and furious.” The issue is just as partisan politically vengeful as the other GOP ploys to taint Obama through Holder.
The ATF gun sting is nothing new. Former President W. Bush’s DOJ ran a similar gun sting a year before Obama took office. The program resumed in 2010 with no evidence that Holder knew all the details or the problems with the sting operation. Many of which as he testified were not disclosed to him by operatives. The program ultimately was not a DOJ operation but a local law enforcement program that should have drawn fire but should not have been blown up into a manic partisan crusade against Holder.

A distressed Holder made that exact point during the sweating he got from Congressional GOP attackers when he bluntly called the attacks “politically motivated gotcha games.” The implication is that the attacks are just another in the saber rattle against him and by extension Obama. Holder has enough GOP partisan lashes on his back to know that no matter how many facts he cites to bolster his case that he didn’t know or certainly approve any illicit doings in the sting operation, the issue won’t go away. The GOP will toss out empty threats such as demands for his firing, or resignation, and even talk about impeachment. It won’t happen. But it’s media catchy and sensational enough to keep Holder on the hot seat. The issue will be bandied about even more in 2012 to paint Holder as an incompetent, conniving political hack who supposedly typifies the poor and untrustworthy judgment of Obama in picking his political appointees. Holder has tried to stay out front of the GOP attack dogs by spending hours in testimony before the GOP controlled House panels. He has repeatedly publicly admitted that mistakes were made, calling the ATF’s tactics “unacceptable,” and has accepted blame for them, calling them “inexcusable.” But with the start of the 2012 presidential election weeks away and with the GOP’s manic vow to make Obama a one term president, if the GOP can keep the heat on Holder, the nation’s top law enforcement official, and an official close to Obama, it will serve as a red herring to toss more mud on Obama and hope that it sticks. In the end the hit on Holder is no different than the others. It’s a hit on Obama.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

With Cain out Turn the Glare on Gingrich’s Racial Skeletons

2011-12-06T07:45:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

With GOP presidential contender Herman Cain’s presidential candidacy effectively dead, now’s a good time to turn a hard glare on the suddenly surging GOP Presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s racial skeletons. His closet is stuffed with them. The first reminder of that was his off the cuff crack at Harvard that ghetto children are lazy and chronic thieves and should be dumped into menial jobs early on to break their alleged ghetto slothful habits. This racially loaded slur was vintage Gingrich. More than any other major party office contender he has never shied away from spewing some of the most bigoted, racially charged, digs on and off the campaign trail. The crack about ghetto kids having “no habits of working” was a near verbatim repeat of Gingrich’s jab at poor blacks nearly two decades ago.
Then he chided a group of black journalists that blacks were poor because of their “habits.” Gingrich didn’t stop there. The habits that he said held blacks back were that they were too religious, and too law suit happy (meaning mounting legal challenges to discrimination), rather than acquiring the good old habits of business and professional skills to lift them out of poverty. In his ill famed Contract with America he touted as Congressional House Speaker in the 1990s, he moved to encode his obsession with the presumed “habits” of social and personal dysfunctionality that supposedly pervades all black communities when he proposed lopping off all welfare benefits for poor teen mothers and taking some of that money saved and dumping their kids into orphanages.
This harsh throwback to 19th century poor houses and workhouses was mocked, laughed at and sneered at the time by critics but a part of the proposal wove its way into law when then President Bill Clinton signed the Welfare Reform Act. The law contained rigid time frame limits and top heavy work requirement provisions for welfare recipients.
Private citizen Gingrich was out of the news for the decade after his House tenure ended. But that didn’t mean he had toned down, let alone, altered his thinking, about minorities and how society should deal with them. With the 2008 presidential election close at hand a politically reenergized Gingrich was back on the media’s radar scope, and he didn’t miss a beat. He trotted out his obsession with alleged ghetto pathology and lambasted bilingual education as “the language of living in the ghetto.” Gingrich claimed this posed a grave danger to the nation and would undermine the American way of life. The quip didn’t get much attention in the wake of the presidential duel between Obama and GOP Presidential contender John McCain. But Gingrich didn’t go away and neither did his compulsion to ram race into any public issue he could. In 2009, his race bait target was then Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Gingrich mocked Sotomayor’s comment about being a “wise Latina” and said that if a white man had made a similar remark he’d be summarily drummed out of the nomination. Gingrich branded her a Latina racist and called for her to be dumped. But Gingrich at that point was still a bad joke in most political circles and whatever he had to say could be easily shrugged or laughed off as irrelevant. However, things changed in 2010. Gingrich announced that he was tossing his hat back into the presidential ring, and though he was still stuck at the tail end of the pack of GOP hopefuls he had a national platform. He wasted little time in putting his race baiting act back on full display. He dredged up the old slur of President Obama as an alien in the White House with the odd ball charge that he engaged in Kenyan anti-colonial behavior. This drew howls of protest that Gingrich was pandering to the bizarre Birther sentiment. Gingrich in reality was just being Gingrich, and as in the past simply took another opening to race bait in the public arena.
In a Meet the Press interview last May he did double duty on racial bigotry. He slammed Obama with racist code name calling, branding him the “food stamp president.” He double downed on racist coding by huffing that Obama’s policies would turn the country into Detroit. Gingrich may have preferred to lambaste blacks again for the alleged “bad habits” of the ghetto—sloth, poverty, and dependence on government handouts—but Detroit is universally recognized as the poster city for urban decay, the mere mention of the city was enough to make the point about alleged black dysfunctionality.
While blacks are a favorite target of his, Gingrich has spread his bigotry around. He’s gone after Muslims, railing at the notion of putting a mosque near the twin towers, and endorsed racially profiling them under the guise of fighting terrorism, and likened gay activists to fascists. Gingrich gets an occasional mild rebuke in the press, and quiet cheers from his supporters, whose numbers have climbed with the crash and burn of Bachman, Perry, and Cain, and the fear and loathing of Romney by ultra conservatives. This insures that Gingrich’s blatant bigotry will continue to get headline coverage. If Gingrich forbid should make it to or near the White House race baiting would be back on the nation’s table. Before that happens turn the glare on Gingrich’s bigotry.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

GOP will shut down Cain's sideshow act

2011-11-29T15:33:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain was predictably defiant when a pack of GOP pundits and insiders strongly hinted that he should fold up his candidacy tent. Cain said he was in the race to stay and did his by now patented bizarre, double-speak, Bill Clinton style denial that he did not have sex with that woman. The woman in this case is Ginger White, the latest in the legion of alleged Cain targeted sexual victims to come forth and wag the “inappropriate” conduct finger at Cain. But Cain’s defiance and defense was just a sideshow act to cover a candidacy that was never really a candidacy to begin with.
Almost certainly the most surprised guy in the house at his string of straw polls wins in a few states was Cain. But Cain’s sideshow trail of wins served several purposes. It fanned the delusion that a man with no money, no political organization, no protracted work in primary states developing crucial party ties and loyalties, was actually a credible presidential contender.
That didn’t much matter since Cain gave the media and much of the public something that the GOP presidential candidate’s circus team didn’t and that was a flamboyant, sound bite spewing, political oddity. Cain spiced things up and that insured that every Cain inanity, gaffe, and malapropism would be the stuff of instant headlines and news bites. The lengthening trail of allegations of sexual harassment and affairs hurled at Cain was the topper. It pushed Cain from political curiosity to a hot ticket item with the media in an eternal hunt for the latest sex, salacious, titillation news peg.
Cain’s sexual woes initially made him serviceable in another strange way. He now conferred a sort of respectability on the other GOP contenders that had been stunningly lacking in recent weeks. As the GOP candidates went from dull to predictable to laughable in their debate performances, the great fear was that the GOP’s holy crusade to oust President Obama in 2012 would sink in a wash of vitriol, clownishness and the resultant public disgust. However, Cain presented an almost perfectly timed distraction that gave his GOP presidential aspiring counterparts time and breathing space to take the high ground, talk the issues of the economy, budget, and defense, without having to worry that the latest Cain goofball pronouncement or antic would further sully their image.
The best example of that is Newt Gingrich. Before Cain’s spectacular blow-up, Gingrich’s campaign was on bare life support. He wallowed in the lowest single digits in voter support. He was a tired war horse, that was seen as just along for the ride, media attention, and ego boost. Cain’s equally spectacular fall helped change that. Gingrich now finds himself the new GOP flavor of the month and going toe to toe with Romney in GOP voter approval. He’s labeled the political erudite, fount of policy wisdom, and party respectability. He even managed to get a kind word from Bill Clinton.
With the dice suddenly rolling in his favor, Gingrich moved quickly to pull off the tricky delicate balancing act of trying to appeal to moderate independents with a softer tact on immigration, while at the same time, trying to usurp Cain as the darling of GOP ultra conservatives and Tea Party leaders and followers. Cain’s public fall also gives the other candidates added value to pose as the ABR (that’s anybody but Romney) alternative. As the perfect pitched blend of businessman, proverbial political maverick, and hard core ultra conservative, Cain for a time seemed to be the most effective at stoking that sentiment among Romney doubters. These are the voters that are the most likely to vote in the official Iowa GOP Caucus in January and a few weeks ago said that they were three times more likely to back Cain over Romney.
Even if Cain officially limped along in the race for a while longer, it wouldn’t change things for the GOP mainstream leaders, hard-nosed GOP political operatives, and the big gun financial donors. From the start, they treated Cain’s candidacy as the fun and games, amusing, sideshow act that it was; an act that was destined to fade into the sunset, when it came time for the serious voting next year. After all straw polls with a handful of respondents in a handful of states months before the first real ballot is scheduled to be cast in a legitimate primary can hardly be considered to be any bellwether of voter sentiment.
Cain’s first reaction to the long term sexual affair allegation was to dig in his heels and say he’s in the race for the long haul. He could do that precisely because his candidacy was never about winning the GOP nomination but hyping Cain. A hype the GOP went along with because it kept the press fixated on the GOP presidential hopefuls, revved up a disjointed, disgruntled, and dismayed GOP party faithful, and blunted the withering attacks that the GOP was a pack of unreconstructed bigots and race baiters. Cain drop out of the race? No the GOP simply will close down its amusing but suddenly costly and embarrassing sideshow act.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Don’t Expect Much Diversity from “President” Romney

2011-11-26T10:24:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Sooner or later presumptive GOP presidential nominee frontrunner Mitt Romney will have to publicly answer which Romney will show up on the issue of race and diversity if he indeed gets the GOP nomination and snatches the White House in 2012. Will it be the Romney that claimed in an interview on Meet the Press in 2007 that he got teary eyed when he heard that his Mormon church’s ruling elders publicly declared that blacks would no longer be barred from the Mormon priesthood. Romney didn’t directly say it but he strongly hinted that the moment stirred strong emotions in him because he never went along with his church’s decade’s old racial bar.
“I was anxious to see a change in my church.”My faith has always told me that and I had no question that African Americans and blacks generally would have every right and every benefit in the hereafter that anyone else had and that God is no respecter of persons.”
Now contrast that with the Romney that former GOP congressman J.C. Watts, a staunch black conservative, recently ripped for having a virtually lily white campaign staff. Romney was unmoved by the knock and flatly said that he hires the best persons that he can find. He underscored that with the rhetorical emphasis “What’s the charge? Is there something wrong with that?”
Nothing, nothing that is if Romney’s political ambitions didn’t extend any further than seeking to win a GOP seat in a GOP friendly congressional district in the GOP’s hard core voter geographic vote base in the Heartland and the Deep South. The presidency is a far different matter. The teary eyed Romney that chaffs at racial bigotry can’t trump the Romney that glibly condones it in picking his campaign staff.
Romney’s record on diversity as Massachusetts governor gives a strong hint of what his White House would look like. When it came to appointing minorities and women to judicial posts his record was atrocious. The Massachusetts Women’s Bar Association repeatedly lambasted him for his near exclusive white male state house. Romney partly in response to the public pounding, and partly with an eye on a presidential run where he knew his state record on diversity would be closely scrutinized made a slew of appointments of minorities and women to the state bench in his last year in office.
Romney’s successor Deval Patrick, a Democrat, and the state’s first African-American governor, wasted no time in knocking Romney for his blatant race and gender blind spot on appointments. In his inaugural address he made it clear that he would make diversity and inclusion a huge part of his administration. Romney, not surprisingly, did not attend Patrick’s inaugural.
Late night comedian-talk show host Jay Leno was bothered enough by Romney’s blind spot on diversity to ask him point blank in an interview during the 2008 GOP presidential primary campaign what he thought about diversity. Romney gave the GOP formula answer and said that he supported it in government and corporations. Leno wasn’t satisfied and pressed him on what his administration would do to promote diversity. Romney wouldn’t budge from the stock retort that discrimination is wrong. That’s even less than the bare minimum response to racial bigotry that any candidate for public office is required to give.
The embarrassing litany of Romney race tinged gaffes that include the metaphorical reference to hanging Obama, a joke about Obama’s birth certificate, using the racially offensive word “tar baby” to describe a public works project, and an animal reference in a pose with an African-American doesn’t tag Romney as a racist. He apologized or pleaded ignorance in every case. But it does touch off warning bells on race.
The loudest bell is what Romney will have to do, or more particularly who he’ll have to satisfy, to seal the GOP nomination. Romney will have to do a massive sell job to Christian evangelicals, ultra-conservatives and Tea Party leaders that he’s really at heart one of them. To appease them, he has little wiggle room on race. The mere mention of race, let alone diversity, emblazons red flags among conservative hardliners. They relentlessly bait him as a flip-flopper and closet moderate who will not dump conservative principles at the drop of a hat. There’s no likelihood that Romney would pick the nettlesome Watts as his VP running mate as the influential ultra conservative blog redstaterusa.org dared him to do in 2007 when Romney was fighting hard for presidential nomination. The Watts for VP call though was done more to needle Obama than any serious interest in promoting diversity in a GOP White House.
Romney’s actions, not tears about Mormon Church bigotry and protestations against discrimination, tell much about what to expect with a Romney in the White House. And that’s not much.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

GOP Presidential Candidates Tongue Tied on Paterno

2011-11-18T08:13:00.001-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

GOP presidential candidates have been loose lipped on any and every public policy issue imaginable. But suddenly they have all have lost their speech on the Penn State scandal. Not one has uttered a peep about the scandal. The closest that any name GOP figure has come to speaking out on the scandal is fast faded, non-candidate Sarah Palin who lambasted accused and indicted sexual predator Jerry Sandusky.
The scandal is seemingly made in heaven for the GOP to score moral talking points on. It’s chock full of their favorite themes on the perils of moral decay, and permissiveness, sexual deviancy, violence and the threat it poses to family and religious values. But as has so often been the case with the GOP when it’s one of their own that’s dumped on the legal and morals hot seat, mute silence quickly sets in. That’s been true with the dozens of sexual abuse, rape, child molestation, and sex harassment cases that legions of GOP political notables and boosters have been implicated in or jailed for over the past two decades. In the case of Penn State there’s an extra special reason for the GOP’s deafening silence. The culprit on the hot seat is Joe Paterno, a GOP made man.
But Paterno’s high place in the GOP celebrity pantheon goes much deeper than donating thousands to the party, his giving a seconding speech to George H W Bush at the 1988 GOP convention in New Orleans, his tout of W. Bush at a campaign rally at the York Expo Center in 2004, or even prepping his son Scott in his failed bid for a GOP congressional seat. Paterno’s unabashed enthusiasm for the GOP rose above and beyond the normal bounds of political propriety. Hs 1988 convention speech gave the first real glimpse of Paterno as the consummate GOP pitch man. The speech was less than three minutes and was only one of seven seconding speeches for Bush. Yet it was the one that drew headlines not because he gave it, but because in the words of reporters at the convention, he “ripped” the Democrats.
Bush campaign officials fell all over themselves gushing over Paterno’s speech. They excitedly called it “a great thing for us” and “a great thing for George Bush.” A handful of Pennsylvania Democratic state officials including then Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey screamed that Paterno was using his prestige and position at a state supported institution to spew partisan politics, and that it could even jeopardize state funding for a public university and have an adverse impact on the ability to raise private contributions. They accused him of trading on his name to blatantly boost the GOP. A defiant and unapologetic Paterno shrugged it off as much ado about nothing and said he would say what he pleased about a “guy I like very much.” Paterno had spoken, but the case wasn’t closed. Paterno couldn’t resist reminding the critics and the public that his tout of the GOP was “an honor” for the university and Pennsylvania.
Paterno didn’t stop there. He rushed to New Hampshire to campaign door to door for Bush and along the way endorsed a local Republican congressional candidate. In the next two decades Paterno kept a close eye on local and national GOP politics. GOP officials though ever protective of Paterno gave the stock answer that Paterno was not directly involved in party policy issues and decisions but rather was simply a celebrity endorser. But Paterno didn’t have to be involved in party politics or operations to have an impact. His name as a celebrity and sports icon was gold with an admiring public and that added priceless sheen and luster to the GOP locally and nationally.
Paterno certainly had a right to follow his convictions and endorse, campaign for, and bankroll GOP candidates. But his political right to be a GOP preppie was never the issue. The issue was the party that he went to the barricades for time and again. A party that has been the poster party for the past four decades of scandal, cronyism, corruption and most damaging of all, a party with a marked propensity to keep silent on racial and gender racist gaffes, digs, slander and abuse by GOP officials and notables. It’s been especially adept at the art of silence and the cover-up on scandals that embroil its own.
Paterno’s self admitted failure to “do more” as he put it to stop the abuse when his name, reputation, and the sports program that he put nearly five decades into turning into his personal fiefdom was in mortal danger of crashing down around him was a page straight out of the playbook the GOP on cover-up that it has so deftly turned into a studied art over the years. It is no accident then that the GOP presidential candidates could lose their tongue when one of their own is again on the moral firing line.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Did Race Explain Penn State’s Blind Eye to Sex Scandal?

2011-11-11T20:21:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Enough of the ghoulish, sordid facts are known about the Penn State University child sex scandal to say this. The alleged child rapes were known by some athletic department members, up to and including the football program boss, JoePa, Joe Paterno. The rumors, or worse, knowledge of the rapes may have been known by or at least heard of by others still unnamed that could eventually be a winding tangle through university staff, faculty, administrators, trustees, and corporate donors, and politicians.
The two prime offenders charged with the crimes were not some causal locker room jocks and hangers on, but long term, respected, and highly positioned athletic department mainstays. The Second Mile Foundation that served as a cover for the alleged rapes by its founder, the disgraced and accused child rapist Jerry Sandusky was not some fly-by-night, drive by, fast buck operation, but a well-established foundation that had been in business for more than three decades. Sandusky was with the Foundation from the start in 1977 until just last year. Even as the scandal unfolds, it is still in business. It has a big, impressive, full bodied website that boasts of its accomplishments, has three offices, and is actively soliciting donations. The reporters that have tried to get a comment from foundation officials have been summarily hung up on.
There will be more sordid facts and cases to emerge in the coming days and almost certainly more alleged victims will come forth and tell their stories. This poses the question that’s bantered about, agonized over, and reams of opinion written, and that’s why those who knew didn’t blow the whistle on and insure that the cuffs were slapped on the offenders years ago? The stock answer is that it was a case of fear, protectiveness, ego (Paterno’s), football deification and prestige, decades of institutional sports cronyism and the bushels of money that Penn State and other big time Division 1 schools haul in every year from their flagship football programs. This is all true.
But with the strong hints and now the public finger point by a parent of one of the victims that the victims were in her words “ Blacks about 10-12 and had a tall slim muscular build.” The Second Mile Foundation’s founder and accused Jerry Sandusky openly bragged that it was in the business of helping “underprivileged” youth, always the polite code word for poor, at risk, young blacks and Hispanics, it’s hardly a stretch to connect the dots to race.
Put bluntly, if Penn State officials kept their yaps shut for years in the face of open knowledge of and strong suspicions of the child rapes and the victims were young black males, than the last dot connected is the charge that black lives are routinely devalued when it comes to officials taking action to protect them. This charge has repeatedly been leveled in serial murders, inner city gang carnage, and against child service agencies that ignore or downplay repeated reports of abuse when the victims and the abused are black. That’s only part of the problem. Race can’t be separated from poverty or “underprivileged” in the parlance of Sandusky’s The Second Mile Foundation. A study in the March issue of the Journal Pediatrics, “Racial Bias in Child Protection? A Comparison of Competing Explanations Using National Data,” found that poverty was a huge determinant not only of levels of abuse. The study predictably found that a disproportionate number of the reported child abuse cases in 2009 which spanned the gamut from neglect to child rape were African-American children. The study directly linked the abuse to poverty. Parents and caregivers that are desperate to provide their children with a pathway out of harm’s way from any and every type of abuse that comes with poverty latch on to organizations that promise to provide resources, mentoring, nurturing, and a protective environment for at risk black children.
The Second Mile Foundation that so persuasively and passionately marketed itself under its accused founder Jerry Sandusky, and with the resources, clout and national name recognition of Penn State University’s premier football majordomo Joe Paterno to boot, as just such an organization would be hungrily grabbed at as the ticket out of the ghetto for the kids. Given the name and the prestige of those behind this Foundation, why would anyone in their wildest nightmares ever think or suspect that colossal evil lurked underneath the façade of its alleged unadulterated philanthropic and do good aims?
In the days to come as more details unfold about how the Foundation under Sandusky used its good name to commit alleged serial heinous crimes, all with the tacit blessing of Paterno and university officials, the hard suspicions and hints that the target of the crimes were young black males may well be confirmed. If that’s the case, then the deep soul search that university and others everywhere that turn a blind eye to child abuse must undergo will be rudely forced to confront one more horrifying possibility. And that’s that race was one more reason for that blind eye.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.comFollow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Cain, Not Sex, will sink Cain

2011-11-09T08:39:00.001-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
GOP Presidential candidate Herman Cain was emphatic when asked at his Scottsdale, Arizona press conference whether he’d drop out of the race over the lengthening sexual harassment charges against him. “No way” he said. He’s right about sexual harassment not being the torpedo that will sink his presidential hopeful ship. But he’s wrong about his candidacy’s eventual sink.
Sexual harassment is a vile, dirty and disgusting business. But it’s also the business more time than not that’s earmarked by he said, she said accusations and allegations that are rarely witnessed and verified, has little hard proof, and subject to a wide world of interpretation and innuendo. Scores of prominent men from former President Bill Clinton to Clarence Thomas, as well as legions of noted business leaders, athletes, entertainers, and would be politicians have been slapped with the label of sexual harasser, and had or been threatened with lawsuits, demands for settlements and pay offs. But in most cases, Clinton and Thomas, being prime examples, the sex charges aren’t enough to sink their careers.
Cain is fresh proof of that. During the first days of the scandal he bagged more campaign dollars than he had previously and polls showed that his support didn’t slip much downward. Cain like the others that have been slapped with the tag of sexual harasser did the predictable. He ducked, dodged, denied, probably lied, and then slandered his growing number of accusers. That got lots of press ink and more shrugs from his most impassioned backers. That confirms why Cain soared to the top and stayed at or near the top of the GOP heap of presidential candidates in the first place.
He has remained there even with the sex scandal dogging his every step for cynical practical and political reasons. He provides feel good relief for Tea Party leaders and followers and ultra-conservatives that have been pounded from pillar to post with the charge that they’re racist and hateful baiters of any and every thing black, starting with their favorite target President Obama. The wild eyed backing Cain’s gotten from them in straw polls in conservative bastions in the Deep South seemed to refute the notion that they’re a cabal of unreconstructed bigots.
He’s a businessman, and not a career politician. In this era of rabid public loathing and disgust of politicians, Cain is like the proverbial man on the White Horse who can make everything in the Beltway right by bringing his brand of corporate time clock efficiency to the White House. He brings wit, a crude charm, and most importantly entertainment to what has been a dull, lackluster, and pedestrian field of GOP hacks, retreads, and borderline zanies that have plopped themselves before GOP voters as the men and women who can take out Obama. None of them before Cain dashed onto the scene registered much of a pulse beat among the GOP rank and file.
Cain appeared to be the most effective among the GOP presidential contenders in posing as the ABR (anybody but Romney) alternative. The Iowa poll conducted by the Des Moines Register in which Cain ran neck and neck with him among GOP voters reconfirmed that Romney has what's charitably called "serious vulnerabilities" meaning that ultra conservative don't like him and what they perceive he represents. These are the voters that are most likely to vote in the official Iowa GOP Caucus in January and they said that they were three times more likely to back Cain over Romney.
Cain has one more asset that fascinates a celebrity chit chat and gossip star struck media that guaranteed him a star place on the national media and political gab show circuit. He could spew out a catchy, goofball, sound bite or gaffe. His botching the name Uzbekistan, as Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, calling for an electrified border fence complete with alligators and moats, branding blacks that back the Democrats as brainwashed, and botching the issue of trading prisoners at Guantanamo for hostages presumably that meant dealing with Al-Qaeda, were laughable. And these amused stumbles and bumbles made political featherweight Sarah Palin look almost like the second coming of FDR and Lincoln in comparison to him. That just made him even more a marketable curiosity item for the media and the much of the public.
GOP mainstream leaders, hard-nosed GOP political operatives, and the big gun financial donors have mostly treated the Cain candidacy as a fun and games, amusing sideshow act that is doomed to fade into the sunset long before it’s time for serious primary politicking and voting. The sex charges are just the playful icing on the Cain circus act. It’s an act that would fold in due time anyway. Despite Cain’s defiant pronouncement that sex won’t derail him and he’s in the race for the long haul, his drop-out time is close at hand, sexual harassment allegations, or no.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com

How the GOP Will Again Try to Hijack the White House

2011-11-06T07:47:00.000-08:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama and national and GOP officials agree on one thing. The battle for the White House in 2012 will likely again come down to who wins the handful of election deciding battleground states. At the top of that list are Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Virginia. These are the states that have swung back and forth between the GOP and the Democrats for the past quarter century. Florida arguably and very dubiously put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000. Ohio did much to put Bush back in the White House in 2004. In 2008, both switched party hands, and along with the other three Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Virginia did much to put Obama in the White House. The GOP is bound and determined to make sure that doesn’t happen again in 2012. It has for the most part dumped the crude stuff to suppress votes that got a lot of media attention, a slew of legal challenges, and stirred public outrage. That included making sure there was an absence of polling places in minority neighborhoods, ballot and vote machine irregularities, using lists of foreclosed homes to challenge voter's residences, rigid time lines for filing voter applications, the lack of information, misinformation or deliberate disinformation about voter registration forms and materials. Courts ruled that these blatant and naked efforts to torpedo minority voting were illegal, and Democratic Party officials were vigilant and aggressive in challenging these ploys.

But the GOP has gone back to its dirty campaign playbook and found a rash of new playbook schemes to insure that as many voters that are most likely to vote Democrat and for Obama stay home on Election Day in the must win states. This time around they have powerful new weapons to try to pull off their voter scam with GOP governors and GOP dominated state legislatures in the driver’s seat in the states that Obama won in 2008. The GOP state officials have expanded the scheme that they unveiled a few years back and that is the rigid requirement that voters produce a government-issued identification, such as a driver's license, a passport, or a state or military ID card as proof of their identity to be eligible to vote. Months before the 2008 election, the Supreme Court upheld Indiana's rigid voter registration law that required such proof. Since then nearly twenty other states require either photo or non-photo IDs. Other states have jumped on the bandwagon and require iron-clad proof of identity. Florida and Ohio are among those states. North Carolina came within a hairs breath of passing a similarly restrictive voter ID bill. The bill was vetoed by the state’s Democratic governor. The cover excuse for this vote suppression scheme is that this is a bona fide measure to prevent voter fraud. This flies squarely in the face of several studies that debunk the myth that tens of thousands of mostly poor, ineligible black and Latino voters flood the polls and illegally skewer the vote total toward the Democrats. Estimates put the number at more than 20 million possibly eligible voters that through lack of time, money, or access to documents were unable to get the required ID proof.

GOP officials in the two key election deciding states, Florida and Ohio, didn’t stop at requiring hard-nosed voter ID proof. Both states knocked out voting on Sunday before the election. In the absence of any employer paid time for voting on Tuesday, Sunday voting was a huge boost for black and Latino voters. Both states also radically shortened the early voting time frame from 14 days to eight in Florida and from 35 days to 16 days in Ohio. Black voters accounted for nearly one out of five of the early return voters and nearly one of three of the Sunday voters. Latinos accounted for nearly one out of five of the Sunday voters. In North Carolina, more than half of blacks voted early.

Obama also got a huge election shot in the arm from students and other youthful voters. A number of states now prohibit the use of student IDs as voter eligible proof. In Wisconsin, students now must have a new student ID with a two year expiration date to be eligible. In Virginia, Governor Bob McDonnell's Republican-controlled State Board of Elections proposed tightening rules that make it easier for election officials to disqualify absentee ballots for even the most trivial mistake such as a misspelling on a signature.

GOP officials have not scrapped the old tried and true methods of voter suppression. They include: district gerrymandering, tightening felon bans, skimping on the number of polling places and machines in mostly black and Latino neighborhoods, stationing police at the polls, and challenging citizenship papers where they can get away with it.

The GOP vote suppression schemes are aimed at one thing and one thing only and that’s to hold onto the White House or in the case of the 2012 election hijack the White House from Obama. Democrats will again pull out all legal stops to fight the schemes. They’ll need to the battle for the White House hangs in the balance.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Conservative’s Predictable Race Card Play with Cain

2011-11-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
It was predictable and laughable. The pack of conservative talk show hosts, bloggers, and web sites all quickly snatched a worn page from Clarence Thomas and screamed that Cain was being mugged by the liberal media on sex harassment charges because he was a black conservative. Some couldn’t resist spicing up their faux righteous indignation by tossing out the glib term “uppity” before “black.” Now this is the same bunch that has practically turned their screech at anything that has to do with race (when it’s blacks and the Democrats) into Biblical scripture,
But it was the sex harassment allegation that was a sure bet to stir conservative’s to flip race baiting on its head to rally around one of their own. There’s really no contradiction here. And Cain is the prime offender. Before the sex charge story broke, Cain thrilled his Tea Party fans and devotees with constant talk that race is meaningless when it comes to his candidacy. He delighted in spinning his heart jerking bootstrap, rags to riches stump tale of his humble family origins, bouts with segregation in a Jim Crow South, sweat of the brow success story as a military man, talk show host, top restaurant official, and major corporate executive. But race was never far from Cain’s mind. He could whip it out whenever he needed it to serve his purpose. In an early campaign interview Cain noted, "I label myself: American black conservative." But if race didn't matter to him then why did he insert "black" in between "American" and "conservative." He got a lot of mileage and the predictable headlines when he blasted blacks for being “brainwashed” for allegedly blindly backing Democrats and Obama and the even more ludicrous quip that he could get a big chunk of the black vote in a head to head match-up with Obama.
This Cain presidential fantasy was adroitly pushed, shoved, and stoked as a possibility by some conservatives who perennially delude themselves that a black conservative can somehow tap into the imagined well-spring of discontent, dismay, and dislike among many blacks of the Democrats. Race is always the centerpiece of this incredible narrative. It was no accident that Thomas grabbed at race when the furor broke during his confirmation hearings in 1991over accusations that he was a serial sexual harasser. Thomas and his conservative handlers quickly realized that his always precarious confirmation hung in the balance if he couldn’t come up with an angle of counter attack that could parry the charges and deflect attention away from his probable conduct. Race, again, was the perfect foil to do that. In this case, he simply stood on its head the ancient race tinged stereotypes of the sexually lascivious and rapacious black man and tossed in the even more loaded term “lynching” to drive the point home. It narrowly worked for Thomas. And the template was permanently set that when a black conservative came under fire for any real or alleged impropriety, indiscretion, or outright crime, there just had to be a racial motive behind the attacks.
The burning question is will the sex harassment charge now that conservatives have welded it firmly to a racial hit on an “uppity” black conservative work? Cain supporters loudly boast that they have raised bushels of money since the scandal broke, and that there has been no dip in his popularity in the polls. He’s supposedly still running strong in recent Nevada, Texas and Florida straw polls. But sexual harassment charges are a volatile and tricky business for a candidate whose candidacy is as fragile as Cain’s. He’s already changed his story several times about what he knew and when he knew it, and what he actually did. There’s a strong, even likely, possibility that one of his accusers may actually publicly shed her legally imposed anonymity and tell all about Cain. If the charges prove credible, then all the racial circling the wagon by Cain’s conservative cheerleaders won’t mean much. He is not Thomas who could play the race card effectively since there was no smoking gun documents, financial settlements or an organization that was privy to his alleged offensive doings with Anita Hill and other women. In Cain’s case there are documents, settlements, and his former organization, the National Restaurant Assn. that was privy to the legal action.
But race no matter what happens in the Cain soap opera won’t fade away. Back to Cain when he first muscled his way onto the big national political stage to make the point that he's the man to snatch the grand prize he invoked race in his talk at the Republican Leadership Conference last June, shouting "I've got another dream for 2012." The dream is the White House. Conservative’s race card play with Cain in his sexual harassment throes won’t be enough to make that fantasy happen.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Cain May not Be a Flash in the Pan

2011-10-30T16:38:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain’s win in the Iowa straw poll is more disturbing proof that his candidacy may not be the flash in the pan that many think. Cain added to his string of straw polls wins by barely nudging out presumptive GOP presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney in the Des Moines Register's Iowa Poll. The poll which has measured the GOP and Democratic Caucus candidate preferences of Iowa voters since the 1980s has proven credible and is carefully watched by political observers. It was the only poll to show that then Democratic presidential contender Obama had a substantial lead over party rivals Hillary Clinton and John Edwards.

But the far more intriguing thing about Cain’s candidacy is the consistency of the poll numbers. He has been either at the top or near the top as a favorite among GOP voters for weeks. He has not been the proverbial flash in the pan that recent GOP presidential candidates have been. That is the candidates burst on the scene, announce their candidacy with much fanfare, get a blast of media attention, create a momentary public buzz, and then fade quickly into the sunset. That pattern has been plainly evident in the candidacies of Michelle Bachman and Rick Perry. They announced their candidacies with much fanfare, got a quick surge, and then when they make the inevitable gaffes, inanities, and goofball pronouncements, set against the intense glare of the media, they fade faster than the sun in an Arctic night.

But Cain hasn’t. The reasons go beyond just the media and GOP voter fascination with the novelty of an African-American conservative tossing out pithy and in some case outrageously quotable sound bites. Cain is politically serviceable in several ways. He is the runaway pick of GOP ultra conservatives and Tea Party leaders and followers. This appears to refute the knock that they are nothing more than a pack of unreconstructed bigots that can’t stomach the thought of a black man in the White House. He is an outsider. The maverick, politically unconnected, noble citizen politician always grabs media and public fascination. It’s even more appealing at a time when much of the public loathes and abhors most politicians, and regards Congress somewhere between a used car salesman and a dentist. Cain has played hard on that loathing and disgust and never tires of reminding that he is not a politician, has held no office, and will manage government as if it was a corporation, and bring good business sense, management and efficiency to solve all problems. The notion of the man on the white horse riding into Washington, turning government on its head and chasing the army of corporate and fat cat lobbyists, flaks, and deal makers packing from the political temple in mad flight played well in 2008 with the Obama candidacy. It worked, and Cain took obvious note. Cain’s adroit stoke of the basest of social conservative rage on immigration, abortion, religion, gun ownership, and most importantly primitive laissez faire shred of the safety net and barebones federal government has aroused their passions to a fever pitch.

Cain’s added value is that he’s the most effective among the pack of GOP presidential contenders in posing as the ABR (that’s anybody but Romney) alternative. The Iowa poll reconfirmed that Romney has what’s charitably called "serious vulnerabilities" meaning that ultra conservative don’t like him and what they perceive he represents. These are the voters that are the most likely to vote in the official Iowa GOP Caucus in January and they say that they are three times more likely to back Cain over Romney. As a side note, with Perry fumbling and bumbling on the campaign trail and with his ultra-conservative credentials slightly frayed or at best suspect, Cain even has value as the anti-Perry Christian conservative surrogate.

GOP mainstream leaders, hard-nosed GOP political operatives, and the big gun financial donors have so far treated the Cain candidacy as a fun and games, amusing, sideshow act that will fade into the dust when it comes time for the serious voting. That may well prove to be the case. Cain certainly has shown very little interest in doing the hard politicking in the key early make or break primary states, has raised a relative bare pittance of campaign monies, and has no national organization to speak of. But at this stage of the political game that’s less important than revving up a disjointed, disgruntled, and dismayed GOP party faithful. Cain is the right guy for that. And that alone guarantees him a lot more shelf life than people think or want to believe he has.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Hillary for President Talk is Just Another Nasty Way to Slam Obama

2011-10-28T12:21:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Hillary Clinton can say “no” to the pesky pleas for her to run for president in 2012 until she’s blue in the face. It won’t make any difference. There will be yet another poll that shows she’s far more popular than President Obama as the Democratic presidential standard bearer. And that in a head to head race she’d shellac any one of the pack of GOP presidential contenders, and that includes the presumptive frontrunner, Mitt Romney. A Time Magazine poll is the latest to feed the Hillary clamor. A Clinton presidential run won’t happen. But the persistent romantic pining away for it is and never has been about putting another Clinton in the White House. It’s about the supposed shortcomings, risk, dislike, and betrayal of Obama. The alleged shortcomings have been stated so often that they’ve become a mantra. He’s too weak, vacillating, and conciliatory to the GOP. He broke his campaign pledges for a swift Iraq war withdrawal, caved in to Wall Street, the banks, and major corporations, bungled the economy, and dithered on shutting down Guantanamo, and put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block. The risk is that he could lose with his approval rating continuing to slip into the danger zone for presidents in their reelection bid.
This is all based on gross negative exaggerations, distortions, and the deliberate downplay of Obama’s record and positive accomplishments. It also ignores the recent history of presidential politics. In 1982 polls showed that a majority of voters said that Reagan should not run for re-election because of his supposed political failures. That included high unemployment, double digit inflation, and inexperience in dealing with these problems. His approval numbers at that point were even lower than Obama’s. The sentiment against a Reagan rerun was off base. He won a smash reelection victory in 1984. Reagan was hardly the first to hear talk that they were damaged political goods and could not possibly win reelection, Truman and Clinton heard that said about them after popularity plunges, legislative reversals, or midterm party losses. They won reelection.
The dislike of Obama is even easier to pinpoint. It comes to down to a mix of race, unrealistic expectations and fear. The seed of that was planted not by the relentless subtle and not so subtle race tinged assault on Obama by some GOP and Tea Party leaders and followers, but in the Democratic primaries in 2008. Polls showed that a significant percentage of conservative, rural, and blue collar Democrats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky flatly said that they would not vote for Obama, based on color. Clinton subsequently won primary victories in each of these states. The great fear was that the racial divide was not between the GOP and Democrats, but among Democrats and that would derail Obama’s drive for the White House. It was a false fear. Obama won Pennsylvania and Ohio in the general election. And he won it with considerable white voter support.
The question for 2012 is whether the racial fears that could have imperiled Obama in 2008, but didn’t could imperil his presidential reelection bid this go round. There’s no hard and fast answer to that. Race is always a tricky commodity in any election contest between a black and white candidate. But the evidence is clear on one point, the economy trumps all. If voters perceive that the economy is improving, will continue to improve, and that the incumbent has a firm grasp on how to insure that that will be the case, then the odds are always good for his reelection. This will be the case in 2012 as in all other presidential elections.
The shout from some for Hillary to muscle out Obama ignores another hard political reality. The GOP’s goal has never been solely to drive Obama from office. The war would have been waged against Hillary or any other Democrat that won the presidency, but especially Hillary with the same down and dirty vehemence that they have waged it against Obama. The GOP war is about regaining power, control, political dominance, protecting its corporate and financial interests, its strict construction definition and enforcement of the laws, and more broadly imposing its philosophical view of how government should be run. The presidency is the grand prize that pulls the political, economic and philosophical threads on how government and power will be exercised together for the GOP.
Hillary experienced that relentless down and dirty lust for power and dominance first hand during her years in the Clinton White House. She was just as much the prime target for the campaign of GOP slander, vilification and lies as Bill. The notion sprang from this that she is more savvy and tougher than Obama and would make much more formidable foe for the GOP as a candidate and as president. That’s wishful thinking, and easy to indulge in since she holds no elected office, and has not had to battle with GOP legislators across the negotiating table on any of the major issues that Obama has.
None of this talk about Hillary as the Democratic candidate will go anywhere. Not just because she won’t allow it to go anywhere, but because it’s just another nasty way to slam Obama.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

The Presidential Battle for the Latino Vote Will be Fierce

2011-10-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson GOP leaders are again salivating at the thought that they can make like George W. Bush who got more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in the 2004 presidential election and snatch a significant number of supposedly frustrated, disenchanted Latino voters from the Democrats in 2012. At first glance, there seems to be some cause for the optimism. Many Latinos are plainly peeved at President Obama for supposedly not doing and saying more about immigration reform. Their pique at Obama is based on their contention that he sees immigration reform as either a back burner priority or a lose lose proposition given the furor of wide segments of moderate and conservative voters to crack down on illegal immigration. Then there’s the continued push by some states to usurp federal authority on immigration and pass draconian immigration laws against undocumented workers.

The GOP has also done a much better job in the last couple of years in radically upping the number of Latino Republicans that hold state offices. In 2006 Democrats had a top heavy bulge of 6 to1 over Republicans in the number of Latino elected officials. Now the Democrat-GOP edge has sharply narrowed to 5 to 3. Even more worrisome to Democrats, Latinos bagged governorships and a Senate seat in the crucial battleground states of Nevada, New Mexico, and Florida. Obama won those states in 2008, and Latino voters played a huge role in making that win possible. Presumptive GOP presidential frontrunner Candidate mitt Romney has publicly hinted that he’d be comfortable with picking popular Hispanic Florida Senator Marco Rubio as his VP running mate. If that ticket pans out, Obama would have a mammoth uphill fight to win Florida again. The Republican State Leadership Committee sniffed the possibility of padding the number of Latino GOP officials and recently announced that it would pump millions more into recruiting Latino candidates to run for state offices in 2012.

The issue of Immigration reform and the increased number of GOP officials, though, are for now just speculative concerns. There's no guarantee that immigration will be the dominant issue when the presidential race kicks into high gear in 2012 or that the simply adding more Latino faces to the ranks of GOP elected official will turn the tide for the GOP. Despite the ramp up in Latino officials, the Rubio threat, and current immigration grumblings, polls consistently show that Latino voters by big margins will back Obama.

Yet, Republican strategists insist that the trump card issues that Bush adroitly used to appeal to many Hispanic voters are still very much on the table. They’re right. The emphasis on small business, anti-welfare spending, and family values are still issues of importance to legions of Hispanics. Polls show that many Latinos are staunchly opposed to gay marriage and abortion, and in favor of family values and school prayer. Latino evangelicals, for instance, are growing in numbers and influence; the majority is conservative, even fundamentalist. Even in the worst of voting times for the GOP, Latinos have never been the monolithic bloc for the Democrats that black voters have been. They have consistently given the GOP one quarter to one-third of their vote and in the states where the GOP has softened its anti-immigration rhetoric, and actively courted Latino voters, the numbers have been even greater. In the “National Survey of Latinos: The Latino Electorate,” conducted in 2002 by the Pew Hispanic Center, one-fifth of Latinos said they were Republicans. That number has remained steady in the decade since.

GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry has gotten significant Latino voter support in Texas from Latino voters. He got it in part because of conservative fiscal and pro-evangelical, and pro family pitch, and in part because he’s been considered legislative friendly to Latinos on education, immigration issues, and his willingness to appoint Latinos to key state positions.

But religious affiliation and sensitivities almost certainly will pale in relation to the two things that the White House race will hinge on with Latino voters. The first is the economy. Latinos and blacks have been the hardest hit by high joblessness and home foreclosures. A worsening of economic conditions and the sense that things won’t get any better will hurt Obama. But what can also inflict a wound is the enthusiasm factor. Latinos will almost certainly give Obama the majority of their vote, but it’s not percentages that count, it’s the number of voters that turn out. If there’s any significant fall off in the number of Latino voters that march to the polls that will pose a deep peril for Obama. GOP leaders can be counted on to will do everything they can to keep those numbers down.
Republicans know that they don’t need a majority to punch the Republican ticket; they only need a strategic minority of Hispanic voters in the must-win states to punch the GOP ticket. Obama knows that too, and he’ll wage a fierce battle to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

President Obama’s Iraq Withdrawal Should Silence the Naysayers

2011-10-22T07:53:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari HutchinsonPresident Obama’s Iraq troop withdrawal should finally silence the naysayers. And there have been many of them. GOP leaders pound him relentlessly for being weak, ineffectual, and indecisive on military and foreign policy aims and goals. His handling of the Iraq war supposedly was the ultimate proof of that. Liberal Democrats and progressives screamed at him for allegedly betraying his much stated pledge as a US Senator and a presidential candidate to end the war, and end it quickly once in the White House. The critics did not take one glaring fact into consideration. Wars are always easy to start, but never easy to end, especially when they are inherited from another administration, an administration of the opposing party. That was the case first with Korea. President Eisenhower made the dramatic campaign pledge in 1952 to end the Korean War stalemate. He inherited the war from Democrat Harry Truman. It took more than a year after he took office, and thousands more US casualties, prolonged and complex negotiations, and a determined opposition from military generals and war hawks to pulverize Korea and even China with nuclear weapons to get a final war settlement.
President Nixon had the same difficulty in ending the Vietnam War, a war he inherited from Democrat Lyndon Johnson. It took nearly six years after Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war, and won the White House in 1968. It took six years of hard fighting, thousands more US casualties and the final crushing collapse of South Vietnam’s U.S. backed puppet government before the U.S. finally cashed in its chips.
President Obama faced the same dilemma as his predecessors who made promises to end their unpopular wars but given the vagaries of war, political and military opposition, and massive vested interests in perpetuating war. Extricating the country from Iraq was no simple matter. The eight year ground war with U.S. troops taking casualties, inflicting death and destruction on towns and villages, and heavy collateral damage, i.e. civilian deaths, stirred international, and regional hatred of the US, and reaffirmed the US image as the bully boy of the world. The war was a colossal domestic and international disaster, and the mountainous lies and deception that the Bush administration used to get and keep the US in Iraq will be a permanent mark of historical disgrace and shame on the Bush legacy.

The more important thing for Obama and the nation is the political consequence of the withdrawal. The Iraq war was never simply a military contest to get rid of a hated dictator, in a country that supposedly posed a massive threat to Israel and moderate Arab governments. It was a political war waged to assert American political dominance, control strategic oil resources, to bolster the military hawk credentials of the Bush administration and to boost Bush's tenuous and sagging personal image and popularity on the home front. Obama understood that as long as the bullets, American bullets, flew at Iraqi targets, the US would continue to suffer the deeply flawed and failed political consequences of its overt military involvement in the country.
Obama also learned another lesson, a negative one, from Bush's Iraq folly. In announcing that the troops would be home by Christmas, he did not declare "mission accomplished" with the withdrawal. The mission accomplished boast would be tantamount to declaring the war a US victory. To tout a war that should never have been fought and then fought for the wrong reasons, and in the wrong way, would be laughable and insulting, especially considering that there is no guarantee that the country will be the oasis of peace, democracy, and stability that supposedly was the goal of waging the war in the first place.
The Iraq war was an ugly and shameful page in US history. Obama early on recognized that, and recognized that millions of Americans were furious and frustrated by it, and the first chance he got to fulfill his pledge to end the war would be a solid plus for his administration and the country. GOP leaders and presidential candidates will wag ineffectual fingers at him for supposedly weakening US resolve in the region, and some on the other side will rail at him for not getting out of Iraq the first day he entered the White House. But all that really counts is he did what he said and finally ended the conflict. The naysayers can’t take that away from him.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Why Cain was applauded for trashing the Unemployed

2011-10-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari HutchinsonThe cheers that GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain got from the GOP faithful at the Las Vegas GOP presidential debate for his full throated defense of Wall Street and his trash of the unemployed for being unemployed was no surprise. The mantra of the GOP crowd since the Ronald Reagan era has been that Democratic rule equals big government equals big spending equals stifling private enterprise job creation. This supposedly equals millions of unemployed whose job skills, initiative, and willingness to find work are sharply eroded. The conclusion is that if you’re unemployed, and poverty stricken don’t blame business, blame failed Democratic government policies, but most all they should blame themselves. It’s textbook blame the victim bashing and the GOP does it best. Cain just sniffed the political tea leaves on that line and knew that it would strike a comfortable nerve with the party faithful.

But the painful truth is that the cheers that Cain got for his poor bashing are no aberration. Political and public references to poverty and the plight of the unemployed virtually disappeared from the nation's vocabulary by the end of the 1960s. Such talk flew squarely in the face of the embedded laissez faire notion that if one lost a job, or never sought one, and remained on the unemployment rolls for prolonged periods of time, it wasn’t because of any failing of the system, but because of their personal failings, slough, or unwillingness to get training education and skills to make themselves job or career ready. The notion that the unemployed are to blame for their plight became even more irresistible in the 1990s. This was a time of renewed job growth and economic expansion. The unemployment levels had sunk to low single digit numbers and jobs appeared to be plentiful for anyone who wanted one.

By the first year of the Bush administration in 2001, a decisive majority of Americans were more convinced than ever that poverty and unemployment were the fault of those that were poor and unemployed. In a national poll, that year conducted by National Public Radio (NPR), the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University's Kennedy School, a majority of Americans repeatedly tossed out the terms "unmotivated," "lacked aspirations to get ahead," and "didn't work hard enough" to describe the downtrodden. A majority believed America was a place where with hard work and determination anyone could succeed. In other words, the loud message was that if you're poor and unemployed, don't blame society, and don't look to government to provide the tonic.
This line repeatedly cropped up again and again during the fight President Obama waged over opposition from Senate Republicans to extend unemployment benefits earlier this year. GOP opponents trotted out studies and cited the opinions of conservative economists that alleged that doling out unemployment checks for a lengthy period only made the unemployed hopelessly dependant on a government check, tarnished their job skills, and encouraged disinterest and indolence in getting back in the labor market. The same argument is ruthlessly cited again now that Democrats again propose to stretch out the time frame for unemployment benefits. GOP opponents of the unemployment benefits extension proposal in President Obama’s Jobs Bill latched onto the quip from Alan B. Krueger, picked to head Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, that increasing unemployment benefits prolong unemployment. Even a significant number of those unemployed agree with that. In a Rutgers University survey in September, more than one in four respondents opposed renewing the current extended unemployment benefits.

The massive corporate layoffs, downsizing, restructuring, and the sharp plunge in public employment by local and state governments that have dumped tens of thousands of hard working, educated, and diligent workers onto the unemployment rolls through no fault of their own, don’t count for much with conservatives. Nor does the Census Bureau report in September that says that unemployment benefits lifted more than three million people out of poverty in 2010 sway Cain and the GOP.

The widespread view that government should play a role in assisting the unemployed during times of economic crisis when the job market has shrunk or disappeared in many sectors will continue to be under assault. This suits major corporations and the financial industry to a tee at a time when they’ve racked up record profits, a record hoarding of cash, and are scrooge like in spending on job creation and making loans to small and medium sized businesses to jumpstart production and hiring. It lets them off the hook for their abominable economic failures and leaves the unemployed twisting and dangling on it. The applause that Cain got from his cheerleaders and the deeply embedded misguided notion from millions of Americans of why the unemployed are unemployed sadly isn’t likely to change.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Cain’s Black Voter Fantasy

2011-10-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

GOP Presidential Herman Cain again solemnly told a pack of pesky reporters in New Hampshire recently that he was absolutely confident that in a head to head match-up against President Obama that he could snatch a third of the black vote. The notion that he can get a big chunk of the black vote for the GOP is intriguing. It’s intriguing because it has a ring to it that appeals to GOP leaders who have long imagined that if they could get the right black candidate and package their message just right they could draw an appreciable number of black voters. It’s a good talking point with GOP hawker Cain out there leading the pack of GOP presidential contenders in some early but meaningless straw polls. Cain, though, is hardly the first to step into fantasy land with the notion that the GOP can grab lots of black votes.

In 2010, a record number of black Republicans ran for Congress. They had the GOP salivating at the prospect of not only putting a slew of black Republicans in Congress but doing it with substantial black votes snatched from the Democrats. Then former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell excitedly gloated that "This will be the most successful election cycle for African-American Republicans in at least 20 years." It wasn’t. The two black GOP candidates that won, Tim Scott in South Carolina and Allen West in Florida registered barely a blip on the chart of black voters and won with white votes in near lock down GOP leaning districts.

Since Cain has declared his candidacy he has not secured the endorsement of one major black business, civic, or political organization. He has not secured the endorsement of a single nationally known black political leader. That includes well-known, and well-connected, African-American Republicans, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell. In fact, he hasn’t even gotten the endorsement of Scott or West. His support has been almost exclusively from the noisy, extreme, and disjoined Tea Party acolytes.

Blacks in the past have groused at and bashed the Democrats. But they still overwhelmingly vote for them. The off the chart vote blacks gave President Obama is repeatedly cited even by black Republican hopefuls as an aberration in that blacks turned the election into a holy crusade to get one of their own in the White House. It’s wrong on two counts. Obama was more than just the fulfillment of a civil rights dream. He had a solid program for change that frontally challenged and promise of reversing the social and economic damage, race baiting, and neglect that characterized three decades of Republican rule in the White House and the sledgehammer attacks on or malign neglect of civil rights leaders and concerns when Republicans were out of the White House.

The rock solid loyalty of blacks to the Democrats is also based on simple pragmatism. The Congressional Black Caucus is Democrats, with the sole exception of West, and so are the leaders of the mainstream civil rights organizations. Despite the shots they take at the Democrats for taking them and their vote for granted, black Democrats and civil rights leaders are still highly respected. Most blacks still look to them to fight the tough battles for health care, greater funding for education and jobs, voting rights protections, affirmative action, and against racial discrimination. Civil rights organizations were the only groups that consistently fought back against Reagan, Bush Sr., and W. Bush's draconian cuts in job, education, social service, funding and programs, their retrograde nominees to the Supreme Court appointments that would roll back the civil rights clock, and their peck away at affirmative action, civil rights and civil liberties protections.

The Tea Party has done absolutely nothing to dispel that suspicion. Tea Party leaders loudly protest that blacks should not lambaste them as racists based on the quackery of a few bigots and race baiters among their ranks. The fact that those bigots and race baiters are there in the first place and with few exception Tea Party leaders have kept their mouths shut about them, let alone not drummed them out of the movement, is damning proof for blacks that their finger wag at big government, taxes and their tout of the Constitution and personal freedoms is just a cover for latent and no so latent bigotry toward one black man, President Obama.

The best assurance that black voters will not move even a fraction of an inch toward the GOP is Cain himself. His shoot-from the lip gaffes, jibes, and insults of blacks as “brainwashed,” his shrug off of racism as irrelevant, his tout of an economic program that would blatantly increase the already gaping economic disparity between rich and poor, and his outrageous shock jock type quips and demeanor make even the most disinterested, skeptical, and hostile African-Americans toward the Democrats stay firmly planted in the Democratic column. Cain’s quip that blacks will back him is the ultimate guarantee that they’ll stay there.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

The Unthinkable: a Cain Versus Obama Match-Up

2011-10-13T21:46:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
A month ago it was unthinkable. That is a head to head match-up between GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain and President Obama. It’s still unlikely, but Cain’s quick rise to the top of the GOP presidential candidate heap makes Cain versus Obama now at least thinkable. Cain certainly talks like he believes he can snatch the nomination from the presumptive GOP presidential frontrunner Mitch Romney. With the merciful sink to political non-entity and media darling status of Palin and Michelle Bachman, he’s got a media starved for a new flavor of the month infatuated with him and headlining any and every utterance by him. He’s got the Tea Party and conservative evangelical zealots cheering him on and pumping up his numbers in straw polls. He’ll probably fatten his coffers with some deeper pocket conservative dollars.
If Cain can convince that his candidacy is not simply hype and bombast to sell his book and get a gig on Fox News, and that his tax plan won’t soak the middle class and poor at the expense of the rich, his GOP presidential candidacy would be intriguing on several counts. GOP leaders would crow that it proves savage and relentless pounding of the GOP as a party of bigots is a falsehood. It would give voters the sharpest contrast in living political memory of contrasts in style and political philosophy between two presidential candidates. One is a flamboyant, outspoken, ultra-conservative, Christian fundamentalist, cut government, cutting, and unshakably pro-big business advocate. The other is a cerebral, moderate, pro labor, and expansive government advocate. The ultimate intrigue is that both are black. A Cain-Obama match up would be a textbook showdown on which direction Americans want government to go in the coming years. The debates between the two over this question would be fierce and would tightly draw the economic and ideological battle lines.
A Cain presidential candidacy would also pose two other challenges. It would test whether as he fondly boasts that he could pry a significant number of blacks away from backing Obama and into backing him. He told Fox News that in a hypothetical general election match-up against Obama he'd secure at least one-third of the black vote. He didn’t stop there.
He told an ABC Interviewer that blacks won’t vote for him because of his color but because of his ideas. If Cain is right and he can dent by even a few percentage points the solid wall of support Obama gets from black voters that proved pivotal in his breakthrough election wins in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania and locked up the White House for him, then it would indeed be a monumental fete for him and the GOP. Then presuming that his support among the GOP base holds up, the election could be a real horse race.
But Cain saying that a number of blacks will vote for him doesn’t make it so. Polls show that despite some grumblings, talk of disappointment, and even a concerted campaign by some left-leaning blacks to hector Obama, African-Americans still overwhelmingly approve his performance. And even those who raise some eyebrows that he’s not doing enough or could do more on black unemployment and poverty still stoutly defend him and blame GOP racists and obstructionists for sabotaging every initiative he puts forth and for creating massive political misery for his administration. They will not break ranks with him in 2012.
Cain will have to get massive doses of Super Pac and GOP National Committee fund raising dollars to stay close to Obama. But he will also have to get white votes, a clear majority of their votes. Polls show that he’s within striking distance. But those are early season polls, based more on name identification, fad, and frustration, than any indication of deep voter sentiment. At first glance, Cain seems to show that GOP conservatives, the Tea Party flock, and maybe even conservative independents will punch the Cain ticket. They’ve been the biggest reason for his poll surge to the top. But if he’s there in November will they really be there for him? A Yale study in 2006 found that a significant number of white Republicans and white independents did not support a black GOP candidate in past congressional races. But in the November 2010 mid-term elections Black GOP congressional candidates Allen West in Florida and Tim Scott in South Carolina got a majority of white votes and easily beat their Democratic opponents. But West and Scott won in lockdown GOP districts, and against weak, underfunded, Democratic opponents. Their wins were regional wins with absolutely no national implications.
Cain and Obama would be playing for the highest political stakes in the race to or back to the White House. This will take money, top endorsements, experience, a solid organization and most importantly the ability to instill confidence in a majority of voters that the winner can handle the towering problem of governance. An ideologically driven, ordained Baptist minister and businessman with no political office experience, as Cain is, against a sitting president, defies all political odds. But for now anyway an Obama-Cain match-up is not an unthinkable possibility.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Why Herman Cain Can Peddle the Delusion Racism is Dead

2011-10-11T07:28:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Herman Cain knew two things were certain to happen when he blathered that Racism doesn’t hold anybody back (though he added a tiny caveat “in a big way.” One it would get the media tongues wagging furiously. The second is that it would increase the rapture of ultra conservatives for him. He was right. But Herm also knows that the racism-is-no-big deal line is reinforced when a black president that reinforces the delusion that racism is still just a minor blip on the nation’s chart, and millions can take comfort that as Cain implies any failings by blacks to duplicate Cain’s fete and be the boss of a major corporation they have nothing and nobody to blame but themselves.

It’s easy to peddle that line when millions believe that decades of civil rights laws, court decisions and affirmative action programs have pretty much wiped the last vestiges of legal racial discrimination off the nation’s map. The line seems even more plausible when millions see blacks heading the nation’s top corporations and financial houses. They turn on the TV and they see packs of white news anchors, correspondents and commentators on all the major networks and cable stations. They see blacks at the top of the heap of the richest and most recognizable names in sports and entertainment. They see blacks living in every suburban neighborhood, sending their children to chic, pricey and trendy private schools. They live in cities that are run by black mayors, where blacks how power and sway on city councils, boards of education and often hold the top police and city department posts. They live in districts that are represented by a black state senator or congressional representative.

This progress is not an illusion. Some blacks like Cain have gotten a small piece of the economic pie, and have markedly increased their political reach and standing. This makes it even easier to buy Cain’s line and to get mad at those that don’t and accuse them of screaming racism whenever anything goes wrong. However, Cain knows but would never dare publicly admit the tormenting facts that countless studies, surveys, reports, and investigations, lawsuits, and court challenges, and the mountains of EEOC complaints have irrefutably documented.

Blacks are still two and three times more likely to be unemployed than whites, trapped in segregated neighborhoods, and that their kids will attend disgracefully failing, mostly segregated public schools. Young Black males and females are far more likely to be murdered, suffer HIV/AIDS affliction, to be racially-profiled by police, imprisoned, placed on probation or parole, permanently barred in many states from voting because of felony convictions, much more likely to receive the death penalty especially if their victims are white, and more likely to be victims of racially motivated violence than whites. Research studies that show that whites with a felony record are more likely to be hired in some places than college educated blacks.

Cain would never purse his lips to acknowledge the stark fact that middle-class blacks such as himself that reaped the biggest gains from the civil rights struggles often find the new suburban neighborhoods they move to are re-segregated and soon look like the old neighborhoods they fled. They are ignored by cab drivers, followed by clerks in stores, left fuming at restaurants because of poor or no service, find that more and more of their sons and daughters are cut out of scholarships and student support programs at universities because of the demolition of affirmative action, and denied bank loans for their businesses and homes.

Cain could easily find himself being by passed by a fearful cab driver who didn’t watch Fox News and know who he was while on his way to an important business meeting. In fact just a week before Cain cavalierly blew off the still corrosive chain of racism that still shackle millions of blacks as no big deal he huffed at the revelation of the “Niggerhead” rock on his GOP presidential rival Rick Perry’s property. Cain quickly corrected his memory lapse and got back on script and shrugged it off as much ado about nothing.

The fierce battles over affirmative action, police violence, the segregation laws still on the books in some Southern states, the nightmarish scenes of thousands of poor Blacks fleeing for their lives from the Katrina floodwaters in New Orleans, and the big fight over what if anything should be done about the plight of the black poor are further bitter reminders of the gaping economic and racial chasm in America. They are hardly things of a by-gone, forgotten past.

Cain’s record of achievement-- corporate head, head of the prestigious National Restaurant Assn., a stalwart military career, radio talk show host, syndicated columnist, and now GOP presidential candidate is the storybook dream and envy of millions and is commendable. Many other blacks can tell similar stories of their personal triumph. But their triumphs don’t cancel out the naked fact that the very barriers they overcame are still rigidly in place for millions, and if caught in the wrong place at the wrong time for them too. When that happens they rudely find that racism is anything but dead, and that can hold for Cain too.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

President Obama Doesn’t Deserve the Knock from Wall Street Occupiers

2011-10-07T21:16:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
The Wall Street occupiers withering knock at corporate and financial greed, manipulation and corruption is much deserved. Their knock at former President Bush and Congress for giving Wall Street financial houses the taxpayers open checkbook to bail them out with virtually no requirement that they in turn bail out distressed homeowners and struggling businesses is much deserved. Their knock at government regulators for not imposing new tough regulatory rules on Wall Street to end obscene CEO payouts and their manipulative, casino type investments and speculation and profiteering is much deserved.

Their knock at President Obama for somehow being complicit in Wall Street’s greed, recklessness and insensitivity is not deserved. Yet there were the shouts that Obama is Bush and the signs assailing him sprinkled throughout the throng that are battering Wall Street. The case against Obama for aiding and abetting Wall Street mostly hinges on the cast of administration officials surrounding him that have deep ties to Wall Street, his failure to push for a financial reform law with the sharpest teeth, and that he did not make like FDR and launch a massive reconstruction program to save homes and put millions of Americans back to work.

The plain and simple truth is that he did what he could within the tight constraints of the system, political reality and the times. The mild and admittedly compromised financial reform law was hectored, nitpicked, and watered down by the usual suspects, Wall Street lobbyists, paid flaks, conservative columnists, bloggers and talk radio hosts, GOP congressional leaders, and key Democrats. The votes and the sentiment within the power center of Congress for the type of hard-nosed financial reforms that are desperately needed, were initially proposed and fought for by Obama, weren’t there. The choice was get the best deal possible which included a first ever consumer watchdog agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or come away empty handed. This would have slammed the door tight on a renewed push for stronger reforms down the line. Despite its glaring shortcomings, the Dodd-Frank financial reform law at least opened the door for the future. Nothing remotely close to that would have been forthcoming without Obama’s handprint on it.

Expecting Obama to be the second coming of FDR ignores both the times and the forces arrayed against him. FDR was not relentlessly baited by a wide segment of Americans as a closet socialist and his economic policies lambasted as hamstringing and wrecking the private sector BEFORE he took office. Obama was pilloried, assailed, and harangued with that scare tactic and scare labels from the moment he declared that he was a presidential candidate. The hysteria that he got and still gets from GOP leaders, officials, voters and a significant number of conservative and even moderate independents would have been tame stuff compared to what he would have gotten if he vigorously pushed for a massive government spending program on jobs, small business loans and aid to distressed homeowners.

FDR took the reins when one out three Americans was unemployed, the stock market, the banks and major industry had collapsed. The GOP was ridiculed and discredited. The labor movement was on the ascendancy, the until then small and totally marginalized Communist Party was getting a hearing from many down and out unemployed workers. The major financiers and industrialists genuinely feared social upheaval, even revolution. The horror of creating deficits by government spending and a drumbeat media echo chamber to turn the airwaves, (there were no TV networks), into a electronic bully pulpit to badger, hector, harangue and pillory FDR at every turn for spending too much didn’t exist. There was an actual government surplus then, and no major debt. FDR in effect had a public and congressional mandate to take drastic action. Obama never had that luxury and all of the liabilities that FDR did not have.

The crisis of Wall Street greed and manipulation is a product of the rush to deregulate fine tuned and expanded by Republican and Democratic presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and of course George W. Bush, the lax to non-existent enforcement of the regulations on the book punishing fraud, manipulation and profiteering by the alphabet government regulatory agencies, a congress that received huge chunks of money from Wall Street and became a passionate watchdog protecting its interests, a media that routinely ignored, covered up, and apologized for the worst Wall Street abuses, and a complacent public that dozed while Wall Street took it to the cleaners.

To dump blame on Obama for not rising above the sordid history of Wall Street greed and abuse aided and abetted by successive presidents and Congress ignores, confuses, and disparages what Obama tried to do, what he was able to do, and what was impossible to do. Obama doesn’t deserve that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is the author of How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Palin No Longer GOP’s Worst Nightmare, and Obama Best Dream

2011-10-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari HutchinsonSarah Palin got it part right in her statement bowing out as a potential GOP presidential contender when she said that if she ran as an independent it would insure President Obama’s reelection. She could have added that she would have insured his reelection if she had grabbed the GOP presidential nomination. But that possibility was never in the cards and Palin had sense enough to know that even if a fawning, Palin manufactured news starved media and a few delusional Tea Party true believers didn’t. Palin hands down was the most polarizing Republican since Lincoln. And he had a defiant, secessionist, war mongering slaveholding South to deal with. Palin just had a storehouse full of gaffes, malapropisms, and brain numbing political inanities that made her a long running political and public joke. Polls consistently showed her approval ratings were dreadful, and the overwhelming majority of poll respondents just as consistently said that she was not fit to be president. That, of course, only made her even more bizarrely appealing, and a lot richer too courtesy of big payday book deals and ring orchestrated speaking gigs.
If Palin had ever been serious about a presidential run, the GOP pragmatists who control the money, media spin and party apparatus would have done everything they could to maneuver and massage the primaries and convention to ensure that the noise and mischief outsider Palin made would die a quick political death. The two clues to that was the mute silence from any of the GOP candidates about Palin and what if any role she would play in the election. They were totally mum on what impact if any she’d have if she barged into the race at the last minute. The other clue was how much was made of the much hoped for, and much implored by GOP political pundits candidacies of Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels and after he said a firm no, the even more hoped for candidacy of New Jersey governor Chris Christy. They were taken seriously as a real threat to Obama, something that Palin never was in the calculation of GOP leaders.

But in a screwy sort of way Palin for a time was the perfect every person's anti-candidate. GOP presidential contender John McCain certainly knew that. He gambled that her homespun, matronly stump style, and Bible spouting, gun toting appeal would be tonic for his sagging campaign with the religious conservatives. But those were the exact qualities that sent chills up the spines of the GOP mainstream politicians and made her in their eyes not just hopelessly unelectable but just as hopelessly unfit to be even considered for the GOP presidential nomination.
Palin on the loose in 2012 even if not as a stated candidate would have sent doubtful and even wavering progressives, liberal and moderate Democrats scurrying to the polls to vote for Obama. In fact, the mere mention of her as a possible candidate during the months when she coyly kept the media guessing about her plans was enough to terrorize disgusted Democrats out of their Obama inertia. The real damage that she would have done would have been to confuse, rile up, and split Republicans. Her support in the party might have translated out into legions of disgruntled, frustrated voters who would be sorely tempted to push, prod and hector the GOP to give Palin her due. Many would be just as sorely tempted to vote for Palin as a maverick candidate, or with her name not on any ballot, stay at home. That would be tantamount to a vote for Obama.
But Palin’s official departure from the GOP presidential candidate scene doesn’t mean that she will disappear totally from the political scene. She will be actively courted by which ever candidate emerges on top from the GOP presidential pack. And she will remain eminently quotable. The task for the GOP leadership is to find a spot for her that minimizes the damage from her loose cannon quips while at the same maximizing her value as a catalyst to rev up and motivate the formidable fringe wing of the GOP base who still are smitten by Palin and delight in her mindless broadsides against Obama. This may not be a hard task. They can have it both ways. Palin will remain a name GOP figure. But when she speaks it will be understood that she is speaking as her own person and in her own unscripted voice.
Palin, then, was the GOP's textbook Catch-22: if they had ever seriously considered her as a presidential candidate, Obama almost certainly would have sailed back into the White House. It would have blown to smithereens the GOP’s one and only goal from the moment that Obama took the oath of office and that’s to make him a one term president. They can now breathe a final sigh of relief at Palin’s anti-climatic announcement she won’t run. She is no longer the GOP's worst nightmare, and Obama’s best dream.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Rick Perry’s “Niggerhead” Rock No Aberration

2011-10-03T09:31:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

GOP Presidential candidate Rick Perry sweated bullets in issuing statement after statement claiming that he got rid of the offensive named “Niggerhead” rock on his family owned West Texas hunting lodge years ago. Though some say the name stayed on the rock for years after Perry frequented the lodge, Perry continued to insist that the racial epithet on the rock was blotted out years ago at his request and that he would not have personally condoned the vile word on any landmark on his property. But the “Niggerhead” rock revelation did two things. It loaded him up with another bag in the steadily growing locker room full of baggage Perry is lugging around about his past, his actions, , and even his fitness for the presidency.

The revelation about the pejorative scrawled rock also cast another ugly glare on America’s long and shameful penchant for slapping the N word on streets, places and things in all parts of the country. More than a half century ago, the NAACP campaigned hard to get a spot in Southern California that was branded “Nigger Grade” renamed.

It got the change but as it turned out that was only the tip of the racially defaming iceberg. More than a decade later, the United States Board on Geographic Names scoured the country and found nearly 150 places with “Nigger” in the name. It changed them to “Negro.” The Board was undoubtedly well-intentioned in trying to purge the word from everything or locale that carried it. But it didn’t seem to quite get the fact that simply trading the harsh “nigger” for the gentler Negro was still race coding. In this case, the coding still pinpointed blacks. There was no record of any wholesale coding of locales and things as “Caucasian” or “cracker” to demean whites. But the damage had been done. In 2004, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education found that more than 600 locales and geographical features were tagged with “Negro” in their names. Despite the federal government’s profuse assurance that no place in the country carries the “N word” in its name, the term still has a pesky way of repeatedly cropping up There was “N Pond” in Pennsylvania that after some protests a few years ago was changed to “Negro Pond.” There was “Nigger Jim Hammock Bridge” in Hendry County, Florida. It took a bill by state Senator Steven A. Geller last year that mandated the elimination of all racially offensive names from locales and structures in the state. The legislature unanimously passed the bill. Yet the nagging question was what took the state so long t act and how many legions of Florida residents and tourists tooled across the racist named bridge in the decades that it carried the epithet.

Then there is the road, a stream and lake in upstate New York that a regional environmental researcher discovered and told authorities about in 2009 that carried the “N word” slur. Despite the “revelation,” state officials didn’t take immediate action. The Department of Environmental Conservation finally scrubbed the word from its website. The agency said there was no public outrage over the slurs. But it blithely attributed that to public ignorance of the slurs on the road, stream and lake. This requires belief that few, if any persons, ever drove, crossed, or paddled around the lake the road, stream, and lake. The DEC can’t rename the entities. That’s strictly a local matter. This in effect means that the racist name of the entities still officially remains their name. There’s also the suspicion that the New York case is hardly an isolated case where racial slurs remain on landmarks. There may well be more roads, streams, rivers, lakes, and ridges, and hills in out of the way places that have the “N word” in their title or are privately referred to it with the term by the locales.

A case can be made that as vile and despicable as slapping the “N word” on anything that’s tied down is simply part of the nation’s past, though horrid and shameful, is still just that a part of the historic past. And like other shameful things in a nation’s history, shouldn’t be totally altered but rather learned from. However, that rule doesn’t apply to a would be presidential candidate. What Perry did or didn’t do when he saw the offensive named rock on family property is immaterial. The fact that it was even there and stayed there that long with no apparent objection from those in the region; a region that Perry delights in claiming as the region where his roots are, and a region that has a long and checkered history of racial segregation, exclusion, and naked bigotry, makes one wonder just how much of that bigotry Perry imbibed.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Does Cain’s Florida Win Prove the GOP Isn’t Racist?

2011-09-26T08:50:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain’s wipe out of the GOP presidential field in the Florida straw poll got much attention partly because he was so far behind presumptive GOP Presidential front runners Mitt Romney and Rick Perry. But it also got attention because it seemed to refute the relentless charge that the GOP is racist. Cain is black, grew up poor, and did not shy away from talking about black issues during his stint as a radio broadcaster. Despite his unabashed, spout of ultra conservative views, he doesn’t shirk away from his blackness. His win in Florida, not a Northern state, among virtually a lily white slate of voters does seem to make a case that the knock of racism against the GOP is overblown.
It doesn’t. True, at times, straw polls provide some gauge of the support a presidential contender has among the general party electorate. Reagan in 1979, George H.W. Bush in 1987 and Bob Dole in 1995 won the Florida straw poll and went on to win the GOP presidential nomination. But they were seasoned, name recognizable, GOP stalwarts, and the clear front runners for the nomination. Cain could hardly be considered any of those things. And the slightly more than 2,500 voters that bothered to cast a ballot in the straw poll could hardly be considered a representative sample of the GOP electorate.
In any case straw poll votes are pure symbolism. More times than not the front running, that is electable, candidates, either spend little time, energy and resources bothering to court those likely to participate in a straw tally. Romney spent minimal time in the state, and Perry took it seriously only because as the new kid on the presidential block, and with dismal showings so far in the GOP presidential debates and mounting questions about his conservatism, Florida was his chance to get momentum going again in his campaign. That’s why Cain sneaked to the top. It was more a message to Perry that there are a lot of conservatives who have serious doubts about him and his candidacy. Cain was the perfect foil to register that doubt. The real name of the game is the primaries where GOP voters will turn out en masse and determine who will be their standard bearer.
Cain’s candidacy, race and win in Florida meant little because likely will not be around for the long gruel of the primaries or if he is will be a minor footnote on the ballot when the serious business of courting voters, state officials, and party leaders begins in Florida and the other key primary states. But let’s say that he’s still a viable candidate during the primary run, and has a real shot at being the GOP presidential choice, the evidence is strong that Cain wouldn’t get very far and the issue then would be his race.
In a 2006 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a Yale political economist found that white Republicans were 25 percentage points more likely to cross over and vote for a Democratic senatorial candidate against a black Republican foe. The study also found that in the near twenty year stretch from 1982 to 2000, when the GOP candidate was black, the greater majority of white independent voters backed the white candidate. In the November 2010 mid-term elections more than 30 black GOP candidates ran in congressional primaries. The majority of voters or a significant percent of the voters in these districts were white. The black GOP candidates all went down to crushing defeat with two exceptions.
The exceptions were congressional candidates Allen West in Florida and Tim Scott in South Carolina. Both got a majority of white votes and easily beat their Democratic opponents. But West and Scott won in lockdown GOP districts, and against weak, underfunded, Democratic opponents. Their wins were regional wins with absolutely no national implications.
Former three-term New Hampshire Governor John Sununu, one time chief of staff to President George H.W. Bush and previously chair of New Hampshire's GOP has his finger firmly on the inner pulse of the GOP conservative and mainstream. In an interview after hearing the candidate’s views in appearances earlier this year in the state told what Cain's likely fate would be among conservatives if he ever managed to get out the GOP presidential contender box. He said he was willing to listen to Cain but said that his pick for the GOP 2012 presidential contender would have to be the second coming of Ronald Reagan as well as a politician with experience.
There’s much hyperbole in the Reagan analogy. None of the current crop of GOP contenders will ever be mistaken for Reagan in style, charisma, appeal, and virtual party deification. But there’s truth to the Reagan analogy when it’s remembered that a big part of Reagan’s appeal was his racially coded pandering on states’ rights and his veiled anti-civil rights appeals. A black GOP candidate no matter how rabidly conservative would be unable to totally overcome let alone allay the racial antipathies and fears that always lurk among a large segment of conservative white voters, when the White House is at stake.
No matter how many meaningless straw polls Cain wins, he won’t be the GOP candidate to change that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Gutting Social Security Would Devastate Blacks and Hispanics

2011-09-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Two fresh dangers in the looming Social Security battleground confront blacks and Hispanics. The GOP presidential candidates posed one when they again called for partially privatizing social security in recent stump speeches and statements. The idea is nothing but a rehash of the idea floated by George W. Bush in 2005. Bush proposed giving younger workers the option of stashing some of their Social Security payments in private accounts. The idea mercifully went nowhere. And Bush dropped the idea. Most economists called it a prescription for financial disaster, the stock market crash in 2008 punctuated the dire warnings that if billions of middle and low income workers had put their Social Security savings in private accounts a lifetime of earnings would have been instantly wiped out. The economic misery and chaos would have been catastrophic. Those hurt the most would have been those least able to take the financial hit.
The other danger is the soaring poverty numbers. Social Security stands squarely in the middle of the two dangers. The recent census report found that the number of Americans in poverty has hit a near all time high. A disproportionate number of those are blacks and Hispanics. This is where privatizing or any tweak, reduction, or down size of Social Security would virtually guarantee that the economic pain to blacks and Hispanics would be unimaginable.
Nearly 40 percent of African-American recipients rely solely on a Social Security check for their income. One out of three African-Americans and Hispanics would sink below the official poverty line without their Social Security payout. The economic destitution for older African-Americans would be even worse. According to the National Committee to preserve Social Security and Medicare, the poverty rate would more than double for them. It’s not just older blacks that would suffer. Entire families would also be plunged even further to the financial bottom with any downsize tinkering in social security. More than one in five children depend heavily, many exclusively, on the benefits from Social Security payouts. The monies they receive are survivor benefits because blacks die earlier than whites after retirement. http://www.ncpssm.org/news/archive/vp_africanamericans/
The massive shrink in public worker employment, the assault on labor union protections, private sector outsourcing, and relentless rises in cost of living, have all sledge-hammered health and pension programs that traditionally were the primary income source for minorities and most workers. Social Security will have to fill even more of the plunging income void for them in the coming years.
GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry opened the door wide on the renewed debate and call by his GOP opponents to gut social security through partial privatization. But neither Perry nor the other GOP candidates have said where the money will come from to make up for the billions in the funding shortfall drained from the Social Security Trust Fund. Despite the doom and gloom predictions of the fund’s eminent collapse, it is solvent through 2036. It currently has a $2.6 trillion surplus. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/about-the-social-security-trust-fund/
But the GOP candidates really don’t have to lay out any plan to preserve the sustainable Social Security funding levels since many Americans are convinced that the system is perilously broken and will require drastic measures to fix it.
The absolute refusal of policy makers both Democrats and Republicans to even mention the word poverty, let alone come up with any tangible programs to deal with the escalating numbers of those in poverty further assure that there will be no effort made to spotlight the crucial role that Social Security plays in keeping down poverty. President Obama has gingerly moved around the issue for two reasons. One Social Security has been mistakenly branded an entitlement, and any talk of preserving an entitlement as a sacred cow is increasingly seen as a political albatross. It’s also regarded as a virtual political kiss of death to talk about anything other than finding ways to chop down government spending. And since Social Security and Medicare are by far the best known and most politically vulnerable government programs to target for change and cuts they have become the favored political whipping programs of both parties.
The Democrat’s caution on Social Security and the GOP presidential candidate’s increasingly bold attacks on it don’t change two facts about Social Security. It’s still the program that tens of millions rely on for a significant portion, or all, of their income, and without it they’d be in hopeless poverty. A disproportionate number of those are blacks and Hispanics. The other is that despite the drum beat attacks on it and relentless cry of wolf about its impending collapse, polls show that the overwhelming majority of voters, especially seniors, back Social Security as it is, and will punish any presidential candidate that makes calls for gutting Social Security a part of their campaign rhetoric. This is the saving grace for those who depend on it the most, at least for now.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst and Monday co-host of the Al Sharpton Show. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com

Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Asking White House about American Jobs Act on Twitter

2011-09-14T16:55:00.000-07:00

Written by VASS - political commentary

As of 7:00pm Stephanie Cutter, Assistant to President Obama, came onto Twitter to hold a live question and answer session on the American Jobs Act proposed by President Obama. This session is ongoin at #whchat on Twitter.

Though limited in the number of characters available, we asked the most simple and direct question about the the American Jobs Act of 2011.

@MVConsult - Michael Vass #whchat How is the spending on infrastructure any different than spending on Stimulus? Therefore how will the result be beneficial longterm?

The question is in reference to the approximately $140 billion proposed to be spent on roads and bridges, and other infrastructure, by the American Jobs Act.

We see this "investment" as it has been called, as exactly the same spending that was enacted by the Stimulus in 2009. The net result of that spending, the "shovel-ready jobs" that President Obama recently joked were not as ready as first envisioned, were fewer jobs as well as short-term jobs that did NOT improve the economy nor provide the improvement in unemployment that was promised. The Stimulus cost $814 billion by the last count and is increasing as waste and spending overtures are being added.

We are awaiting a response from the White House and will provide their VERBATIM response, if and when we receive it.

* Other notable questions we saw:

huladeb Debra If spending X didn't work to fix economy, why increase in the debt to roll the dice on spending 1/2 of X? #WHChat

wljames3 Bill James #whchat, how does the President intend to cut red tape to get teachers hired at the state level with all the stress in state budgets?

TLTownie Troy Townsend @WHLive #WHChat I heard there's a bit in there about auctioning off spectrum. What's that got to do with jobs? I love the plan though :)

seandhickey Sean D Hickey @WHLive @whitehouse #WHChat Where does the money come from to pay for this bill?

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Poverty is America’s Taboo Word

2011-09-14T10:03:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari HutchinsonThere are two new rituals about the yearly census reports on poverty in America. One is that the census figures show more Americans continue to sink into poverty. The poverty rate this year jumped to the highest level in nearly two decades. Those hardest hit remain the same. Blacks and Hispanic were nearly twice as likely as whites to be poor. But racial distinctions aside, the census figures showed that there were a lot of poor whites too, and what’s become an increasingly even more common trend many of those who tumbled into the poverty column are those who at one time were by all measures considered middle class.
The other ritual is that the news of rising poverty makes headlines one day. And the next it is forgotten. This year is no different. Not one of the GOP presidential candidates made mention of the poverty rate jump. The White House was equally mum on the report. Poverty remains the taboo word on the campaign stump, among lawmakers, the media, and the general public. It remains even a taboo word among many of the poor.
Political and public references to poverty virtually disappeared from the nation’s vocabulary by the end of the 1960s. The continued existence of so many poor people after a decade of civil rights gains, the rash of initiatives and programs to end poverty, and massive government spending on the poverty programs by President Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s, was ultimate proof to many that tossing money and programs at ending poverty was flawed, failed, and wasteful. It seemed to fly squarely in the face of the embedded laissez faire notion that the poor in America aren’t poor because of any failing of the system, but because of their personal failings. This is not just the hard bitten attitude of GOP free market conservatives. It is the attitude of the majority of Americans, including many of those who were poor. When poverty started to inch up in 2001, National Public Radio (NPR), the Kaiser Family Foundation, and Harvard University's Kennedy School, conducted a national poll to find out just what Americans attributed poverty in the nation too. The terms that were bandied about by many of the respondents no matter their background was that the poor were “unmotivated,” “lacked aspirations to get ahead,” and “didn’t work hard enough.” A majority believed America was a place where with hard work and determination anyone could succeed. In other words, the loud message was that if you’re poor, it’s your fault, don’t blame society, and especially don’t look to government to be the cure.
Democratic presidents and presidential contenders took this message to heart. Still reeling from the fierce conservative backlash to the perceived failure of Johnson’s war on poverty, they gingerly moved around making any public pronouncements about massive government spending hikes on welfare, income supplement, and health care programs for the next two decades. The Democrats trembled that such talk would only stir up white anger by reinforcing the old perception that Democrats tilt toward minorities, and especially blacks.
But the poor stubbornly refused to go away. There was some hope during the 2008 presidential campaign that Democrats might lift the taboo about talking about the plight of the poor. Democratic presidential contender John Edwards fueled that hope when he openly talked about poverty, and that he would the issue one of the centerpieces of his campaign. In a well publicized appearance, Edwards launched his presidential campaign in the front yard of a mangled brick house in New Orleans’s mostly black, Katrina and poverty devastated Upper Ninth Ward. He talked boldly about the need to crusade against poverty. Democratic presidential rivals Obama, and Hillary Clinton, not to be outdone, also gave speeches challenging the nation to do more to alleviate poverty. The talk didn’t last. With the exception of Edwards, whose candidacy quickly disintegrated after public revelations about his love tryst, the candidates didn’t utter another word about poverty during the rest of the campaign. The GOP presidential contender, John McCain, as expected, made no mention of poverty as a policy issue either.
The mantra for the GOP and many Democrats are deficit reduction, tax cuts, and measured, and narrow spending on infrastructure projects to jump start the economy. The widespread view that government should play a minimal role in assisting the poor has crept through in President Obama’s speeches and talks in which he touts personal responsibility as the key to uplift. It would be the height of political and fiscal incorrectness, even heresy, to expect that to change in Obama’s drive to keep and the GOP’s drive snatch back the White House.
The ritual census figures that show that the number of poor continue to grow with little end in sight to the rise hasn’t budged the nation to do anything about their plight. Poverty is the forbidden word that sadly is doomed for now to remain America’s taboo word.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Party Ending for the Tea Party?

2011-09-12T09:05:00.000-07:00

There are two things that have distinguished the tea party. With the help of an awestruck, fawning media, it has been able to harness public disaffection with Washington beltway politicians and a large segment of white conservative anger and loath of President Obama’s policies. The second thing is it has been able to con the same media and much of the public into thinking that it that had all the makings of a majority party that would permanently rearrange the political landscape. This was never the case. The August Gallup poll and other surveys that show that the tea party engenders far more negative feelings among Americans than positive feelings again confirm that. The tea party’s prime constituents have always been mostly Deep South, and Heartland, white middle to lower income voters. But this should never have surprised. The tea party demographic mimicked the GOP’s prime voter demographic in every election since 1980 that helped assure victory for Reagan, Bush Sr. and George W. Bush. Before that they were the anchor of Nixon’s Southern Strategy.

The tea party proved useful shock troops for mainstream GOP leaders after Obama’s smash win in 2008 to reenergize their traditional supporters and refocus the national debate on the GOP’s stock themes, fiscal austerity, damp down of government spending, and the continued rhetorical assault on the “liberal agenda.” The tea party did one more thing that GOP mainstream leaders could not do. And that was to inflame many whites with borderline and even open racial pitches, appeals, and code words. Obama’s race and perceived liberal to moderate pronouncements made him the perfect foil to be racially mocked, demeaned, ridiculed, and baited. The Gallup poll reconfirmed that blacks were far more hostile to the tea party than whites. But now that has changed with tea party support dipping to its all time low among all groups, again with the sole exception of the white South.
The soaring disaffection with the tea party among former sympathizers is a textbook case of a group badly overplaying an advantage. Polls repeatedly show that the majority of Americans want Congress and the Obama administration to work in tandem to solve the big ticket problems of the economy, joblessness, and debt reduction. But they want them to do it in a responsible way without the relentless carping, sniping, bickering, finger pointing and political gamesmanship that have been the trademark of the GOP egged on by the tea party. The same polls show that the majority of voters want the GOP and Obama to cooperate and hammer out an agreement on all or part of Obama’s jobs plan that will jumpstart a tattered economy.

The budget and deficit ceiling fight that fractured Congress for months, and the relentless threat to decimate legions of education, health, social service and law enforcement programs locally and nationally was the final straw that turned numbers of tea party sympathizers into opponents. Tea Party darlings Michelle Bachman and Texas Governor Rick Perry’s perceived threat to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has struck deep fear into millions who depend on and even cherish these programs. The low opinion they have of that was glaringly evident when Perry branded Social Security “a ponzi scheme.” The reaction was swift and angry. In a poll by the on line investment newsletter The Street the overwhelming majority of respondents flatly denounced the notion that Social Security was a rip-off. Perry and Bachman and tea party leader’s shouts about knocking down big government all of a sudden take on a different sound when it comes to these programs.
Even some tea party leaders realize they walk a fine and dangerous political line by continuing to over reach. Matt Kibbe, President of Freedom Works, on the eve of the joint CNN and Tea Party Express sponsored GOP presidential candidates debate in New Hampshire flatly warned that a hard line dig the heels in the sand position on political ideals could be the tea party's "Achilles heel" in the presidential election. This would totally alienate moderate to conservative independents that they got back in the GOP fold in the November midterm elections, and need to keep in the fold to have a fair chance at beating Obama in 2012.
It’s to soon to write an epitaph for the tea party. There are still millions that despite the consequences of line in the sand the tea party has drawn, still think the idea of smaller government, caps on spending, and debt reduction are noble goals that they’ll go to the barricades to fight for. Many others simply cannot under any circumstances stomach another four years of an Obama administration. But the polls are a telling warning that the days of being the centerpiece of the nation’s political party for the tea party are fast coming to a close.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Will Troy Davis Be Another Horrific Example of America Executing a Possibly Innocent Man?

2011-09-08T08:29:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Barring a last minute stay of execution by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles in a last ditch hearing scheduled for September 19, accused Savannah, Ga. cop killer Troy Anthony Davis will be executed. If the execution goes forth two compelling questions can never be answered. One is did Georgia execute an innocent man? The second is if it did, will Davis join the list of eight other inmates compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center that states have executed in the last two decades who like Davis might have been innocent?

Dead men literally tell no tales, and the guilt or possible innocence of Davis and the other eight go to the grave with them. The possible innocence of Davis and the other eight condemned and executed prisoners is hardly a stretch. More than a dozen death row inmates have been released in the past two decades as a result of DNA evidence. A legion of other death row inmates have been released because of prosecutorial misconduct that resulted in retrials and acquittals, or pardons after mountainous evidence was presented that cast major doubt on their guilt. The Davis case is a near textbook example of a death penalty case that reaches nowhere near the oft stated but much abused constitutional high bar of conviction, namely beyond a reasonable doubt.

The facts in his case are well-known. There was no murder weapon, physical evidence linking Davis to the murder, and a score of witnesses that originally implicated Davis as the shooter recanted their testimony. The witnesses as in most cases where defendants are convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony later claimed that they lied because they were scared stiff by police coercion, harassment and threats. Others cut deals with police and prosecutors to walk free or to get lighter sentences for their own crimes. And then others have long and dubious reputations as jail house snitches that prosecutor’s parade to the witness stand to finger a defendant, again in exchange for leniency. The Innocence Project has noted that overzealous and untruthful prosecutors have suppressed, fabricated, and destroyed evidence, employed lying jailhouse snitches, and untruthful witnesses. Many of the cases have been riddled with racial bias. The condemned killer was black or Latino and their alleged victim was White. Troy Anthony Davis is black. When defense attorneys appeal these tainted convictions, the courts almost always dismiss their appeals on the grounds that the prosecutor committed “harmless errors” that didn’t affect the outcome of the case. The Texas execution of Ruben Cantu in 1993 for a murder he allegedly committed as a teen was a classic case of how a possibly innocent man can be executed.

Davis has fought hard to prove that he was indeed the victim of a colossal frame-up. The best that he’s been able to do is to push back the date with the executioner. He’s had several stays and even a retrial. But it’s just bought time, precious time. Davis if it can be called that is lucky. His fight and the possibility of his innocence have made him a cause célèbre. All prison reform groups, the NAACP and notables from Jimmy Carter to Pope Benedict have spoken out against killing Davis. Many other prisoners that do not have the notoriety, draw press attention and acclaim, and the especially the money, and where there are serious questions even doubts about their guilt, languish on America’s death rows,

That’s not likely to change. In 1996, when Congress passed, and President Clinton signed legislation that toughened the death penalty to combat terrorist acts, it reduced appeals and made it harder to get new trials. The year before that Congress slashed millions in funds for post-conviction public interest, legal interest groups to help inmates such as Davis file appeals.

In every doubtful case, prosecutors hotly deny that any of the men executed are innocent. Despite the questionable executions, no prosecutor, or government official, has ever officially said that an innocent prisoner has been executed. The Chatham County prosecutors and the Georgia state Attorney General that prosecuted and have fought to execute Davis flatly say that Davis is a cop killer who deserves to die. But despite prosecutors vehement defense of themselves in these questionable cases some officials and judges have strongly hinted and warned that it is possible for an innocent person to be executed. In 1997, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee praised the system of legal checks and balances in place to insure that the rights of condemned killers are fully protected, but admitted that there was no ironclad guarantee that an innocent person could not be put to death.

That’s little consolation for Davis if indeed the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles turn thumbs down on his appeal for clemency. If Davis keeps his date this time with the executioner the question will always linger whether he was yet another horrific example of America possibly executing an innocent man.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

A Decade Later 9/11 Zany Conspiracy Theories Still Alive and Well

2011-09-06T08:18:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The decade since the hijacked 747s rammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon hasn’t changed one thing. Millions of Americans still fervently believe that the 9/11 terror attacks were part of a well conceived, well-planned diabolical staged act. A poll commissioned by the BBC found that one in seven Americans still think that 9/11 was a staged act. And even worrisome, one in four 16 to 24 year old thinks it was a plot. The disbelieve that 9/11 was the ghoulish handiwork of anti-American hate filled foreign terrorists has been fed by a loud and pesky pack of professional conspiracy theorists who perennially see a sinister government hand behind any and every assassination, terror attack, and even natural disaster.

The 9/11 attack, though, is the jewel in the crown for the conspiracy nuts. They’ve managed to convince the skeptics that the carnage was part of a Machiavellian plot by a parade of the usual suspects, George W. Bush, the GOP, the CIA, FBI and Justice Department to wipe out civil liberties protections, impose a national security state, create a pretext for the quagmires in Afghanistan and Iraq, terrorize the American people, and strengthen the hand of the pro Israeli lobby in U.S. politics. Some of the more wacked out theorists with an anti-Semitic bent even claim that the terror attack was part of a decades old web of intrigue woven by international Jewish groups to dominate global politics.
Conspiracy theorists allege that explosives were planted at the WTC, Jewish and Israeli Tower workers and occupants were warned the day before supposedly by Mossad (Israeli Intelligence) to stay away, a missile slammed into the Pentagon, the government hid the wreckage of the United Airlines plane that terrorists crashed in Pennsylvania. Every one of these theories has been debunked.

Yet as evidence by the BBC poll millions of Americans aren’t convinced. And that's easy to understand. The American woods swarm with groups that fervently believe that government, corporate, or international Zionist groups busily hatch secret plots, and concoct hidden plans to wreak havoc on their lives. The Manchurian Candidate syndrome popularized in books and countless movies and TV shows has firmly implanted the notion that shadowy, government groups routinely topple foreign governments, assassinate government leaders, and brainwash operatives to do dirty deeds.

9/11 conspiracy theories have so easily infected the popular imagination for two other undeniable reasons. Government agencies, such as the FBI, CIA, Army intelligence, with the connivance of presidents, have often played fast and loose with the law and the rules of democracy. They have spied on, harassed, and jailed thousands of Americans from Communists to anti-war activists. The biggest, juiciest and most relentless target for government spymasters during the past decades has been African-American political groups from the moderate NAACP to the radical Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam. A few years ago a fresh batch of publicly disclosed FBI documents showed that the agency waged a kinder, gentler, but no less illegal, spy campaign against Coretta Scott King. The sordid, relentless, and lethal campaign the FBI waged against her husband, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is well documented.

The other reason for the paranoia about 9/11 was the fury that many Americans had, and still have, toward Bush. Many Americans are still convinced the GOP hijacked the White House by rigging the votes in Florida in 2000, and repeated the ploy in Ohio in 2004. This makes it easy to believe that the government agencies will say and do anything to cover up, and shield wrongdoing, and misdirect Americans.

Bush, as other presidents that have got in hot water with the American people with their domestic and foreign policy fumbling, were hardly averse to beating the war drums and fanning national security jitters to boost their poll ratings, secure public allegiance, and increase their party's political standing. Bush at times did that with his well-timed, staged, and ultimately groundless incessant color-coded terror alerts. But bottom of the barrel poll ratings at the end of his term, the wholesale back turn millions of voters did on the GOP in the 2008 presidential election, the polls that show that a majority of Americans want out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and are squeamish over further erosion of civil liberties protections, are resounding proof that staging 9/11 to clamp a vise grip on power by Bush didn't work.

But, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 the conspiracy theorists will again busily spin their well-worn 9/11 conspiracy myths. They will fall on fertile ground again because of the government official’s long and at times disgraceful penchant for covering up and flat out lying to the public about their misdeeds, conduct and spying. This is enough to insure that 9/11 conspiracy fantasies remain alive and well today, and likely will remain alive for years to come.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

President Obama Caught Between the Left and Right on Jobs

2011-09-01T21:24:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Labor leaders, the Congressional Black Caucus, and many liberal Democrats hope Vice President Joe Biden is wrong. In an interview on the eve of President Obama’s much anticipated jobs proposals speech. Biden seemed to dash hopes that Obama will go big, and aggressive in promoting a jobs for all program. To them that means, spending billions more on repairing and building, roads, bridges, and schools, pumping up manufacturing with federal funds, arm twisting major corporations to spend more on job creation here and not in other countries, extending unemployment insurance benefits, and continuing to pound away on the rich to cough up more in tax revenues to bankroll a sweeping jobs program.
Any other time if he went’ big on jobs he’d be wildly applauded by the majority of Americans, and garner broad support from Congress. But this isn’t that time. And Biden well knows the political constraints that hem in Obama. That’s painfully evident with the dozens of employment creation related bills the Congressional Black Caucus has proposed. All are deep frozen in congressional committees. The Caucus members lashed out hard at Obama to do and say more about black joblessness, but Obama is powerless to do anything about their bills which would actually do something about the Great Depression rates of unemployment in poor black communities. He’s powerless for the same reason the Caucus is.
Millions of Americans chant the tea party and GOP congressional mantra that the country is hopelessly awash in red ink, and that it would be economic and fiscal suicide to spend billions more on public job creation projects. Even if Obama were willing to risk the firestorm of protest, and thumb his nose at the GOP, there's little chance that he'd get even a handful of Senate Democrats to back a massive government job creation program. This doesn’t even take in the hysterical vitriol that would be hurled at him from millions more goaded by the professional Obama loathers among the pack of bloggers, web sites, and rightwing talk show hosts tea party members. They have whipped up the crowd to fervently believe that Obama's a closet socialist and his economic policies have straight jacketed private business and Wall Street. Obama’s stimulus 1 package is still being relentlessly denounced by conservatives as deficit busting, wasteful, and ineffectual. They rail at it as naked big government expansion, and reckless spending by a liberal Democratic president.
But Obama’s trademark caution, conciliation, and firm emphasis on bipartisanship, or simply repeating the standard call for tax cuts and more corporate giveaways, will fly squarely in the face of the demand by the Congressional Black Caucus, labor, and liberals for a bold approach on jobs. That poses a far greater political risk to him than incurring the wrath of conservatives ready to finger point him as a reckless big spending Democrat. Polls show that the three major GOP presidential candidates are either neck and neck with him, or close enough to make his reelection bid anything but a shoo-in. He will need every vote he can get from his base. But he will also need their passion, energy, and legs to get out and pound the pavement, people the phone banks and work the social media and networks as they did in 2008.
This won’t happen if there’s even the slightest sense among his core constituency that he fumbled the ball in being bold and assertive on his jobs proposals, and hitting back hard at the GOP for doing everything it can to stymie his proposals. The grumbles, and growls of discontent and impatience that Obama has heard loudly the past few weeks could quickly turn into passivity, disinterest or even active hostility among number of the millions that he will need to hold off the GOP voter onslaught in 2012.

In 2010 the GOP took the House and a good chunk of the Senate back, Obama read the political tea leaves and concluded that it was pointless to call for more federal initiatives that require massive amounts of federal dollars. But that was then, and in the months since then, the job situation has deteriorated, the frustration of millions of job seekers has grown, and the GOP has not relented one bit in its drumbeat blame of him for the apparent crisis. This should be ample reason to take off the gloves, plop on the table a comprehensive federally driven job and stimulus program, and then when it crashes against the inevitable GOP wall rip the party for keeping millions in economic misery. This is the political game plan that the left wants and the right anticipates from Obama. Now it’s up to him not to disappoint either one.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Is the American Diabetes Association Research Foundation Excluding HBCU’s From Research?

2011-08-29T16:37:00.000-07:00

AAP says: It's a shame the the American Diabetes Association refuses to award research grants to HBCU's, when 3.7 Million African American have Diabetes. I always thought they were a good organization, until I dug deep into their finances. Check out the article posted in the Atlanta Post

Is the American Diabetes Association Research Foundation Excluding HBCU’s From Research?

by L.N. Rock

Source: Atlanta Post

According to the American Diabetes Association, African Americans are disproportionately affected by diabetes as 3.7 million or 14.7 percent of all African Americans aged 20 years or older have diabetes. In addition:

-African Americans are 1.8 times more likely to have diabetes as non Hispanic whites

-25 percent of African Americans between the ages of 65 and 74 have diabetes.

-1 in 4 African American women over 55 years of age has diabetes.

The American Diabetes Association (the Association) is a not-for-profit voluntary health agency that works to prevent and cure diabetes and to improve the lives of all people affected by diabetes. In October 1994, the Association’s Board of Directors established the American Diabetes Association Research Foundation, Inc. (the Foundation), as a subsidiary of the Association. The objective of the Foundation is to fund diabetes-related research leading to the prevention and cure of diabetes, the prevention and cure of the complications of diabetes, and new and improved therapies for individuals affected by diabetes.

Get this, the Foundation is exempt from income taxes under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (the Code) and charitable contributions to the Foundation qualify for charitable tax deductions as described in the code. The Foundation has been classified as an organization that is not a private foundation under Section 509(a) of the code. Even though they appear to have a bias against HBCU’s and black researchers. More on this later…

Research grants awarded by the Foundation generally extend over a period of one to three years, subject to renewal on an annual basis.

Upon investigation and review of the financial reports and records, this writer has found that Historically Black Colleges and Universities have been totally left out of the American Diabetes Association Research Foundation, Inc award process as selected grantees.

Compared to the general population, African American researchers and HBCU’s are not receiving grant research dollars from the American Diabetes Association Research Foundation.

As an example, the Foundation provided over $33 million in research grants in 2010 without one gong to a HBCU. If one looks at their annual reports for ADA 2009 Research Foundation Financials and 2009 IRS Form 990 you will see the same challenge in the 2008 IRS Form 990, (check out the grantee database for information on ADA-funded research grant awardees), 2007 IRS Form 990 and 2006 IRS Form 990, no black awardees, no HBCU's researchers. Read the full article, Is the American Diabetes Association Research Foundation Excluding HBCU’s From Research?

L. N. Rock is a management consultant, Democratic strategist, and 2008 credentialed blogger at the Democratic National Convention. He blogs at African American Pundit

President Obama’s Continuing White Problem

2011-08-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Democratic presidential candidate Obama faced the problem. President Obama faces the problem. And now President Obama in his re-election bid faces the problem. The majority of whites still will not accept his presidency. The latest Associated Press-GfK polls once again told in stark numbers that the racial gap is just as big and daunting for Obama. The overwhelming majority of white independent voters say he does not deserve to be reelected. An equally large majority of whites say they don’t like the job that he’s doing, especially on the economy. And overall, nearly sixty percent of whites will not support his reelection. The hopeful news is this could change in the more than a year run-up to the November 2012 presidential election with the constant shifts and swings in voter attitudes, perceptions, and events. In any other election cycle and with any other president and presidential candidate, this pattern would hold true. The brutal fact is that the resistance to candidate Obama and President Obama from the majority of whites has been constant and unyielding.

This seems tough to believe, and even tougher to accept for several reasons. The myth that Obama made a major and lasting breakthrough in getting millions of whites to vote for him replaced the brutal fact that the majority of whites did not support him. In 2008, GOP Presidential candidate John McCain got nearly sixty percent of the white vote. Though this represented a significant inroad for Obama in that that he did better than Democratic presidential contenders Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004, but McCain’s getting the majority white vote still was enough to keep him relatively competitive.

The first warning sign that Obama’s white support has been shaky, tenuous, and iffy cropped up not with McCain but with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton during the Democratic presidential primaries. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, Clinton drubbed Obama with the white vote. Many white Democratic blue collar voters openly said that they would not vote for Obama not because of any great love for Clinton, but because he was black. It took a near holy crusade turnout by black voters in both states to seal Obama’s win in the two key states and ultimately the White House.

The monumental GOP sex and corruption scandals, the towering domestic and foreign policy blunders of Bush, a collapsed economy, two costly and unpopular wars, and a laughingstock GOP VP candidate still were not enough to decisively reverse the trend that a majority of whites, especially white males, will not back a Democrat, in this case a black Democrat.

The shaky ground that Obama’s white voter support rested on eroded quickly at the first hint of trouble. The faint grumbles that Obama was too nice, too conciliatory, too indecisive and had no plan on the economy fanned by the borderline racist taunts of the Tea Party members, the pack of right wing professional Obama baiters on blogs, websites and radio talk shows grew quickly to crescendo pitch.

A Pew Research Center survey in April backed that up. White males still by big margins either disapproved or strongly disapproved of the president’s job performance. The continued high disapproval ratings among this group was even more glaring since it came at the point where more Americans than in the past year said they liked the job Obama’s doing. Even then that did not include a majority of white males.

President Obama can’t much more to ease the doubts and fears of many whites that he meant his oft repeated vow that to fulfill his duty as president of all the people, and do the best job he can on legislation and public policy to serve the needs of all constituencies. He has even repeatedly drawn the wrath of the Congressional Black Caucus publicly resisting their loud appeals to do and say more about the crisis of black joblessness and poverty. He’s paid a price for that as his approval ratings have dropped among blacks. But his unswerving race neutral, low keyed, scrupulously non-confrontational, approach to presidential governance has meant absolutely nothing when it comes to changing the attitudes of many white voters. It’s in part the ancient mix of white suspicions and doubts about black competence, intelligence and ability, pure blind, naked bigotry, and unease with an African-American holding the world’s most visible and important political power position.

The GOP has played hard on the anger, frustration, and hatred that many males harbor toward government and their swoon over military toughness. And for four decades before that it has been the trump card for winning GOP presidents and even losing GOP presidential candidates, like McCain.

It’s paying dividends again. Despite deep doubts among voters about the competence, credibility and even electability of the crop of GOP presidential candidates, polls show they are still in a neck to neck race with Obama. Race is not the only explanation for this, but it can never be discounted as a factor as long as Obama’s white problem exists.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Janeane Garafalo - the definitive source on what is Black

2011-08-23T17:05:00.001-07:00

Written by VASS - political commentary

If those on the far-left have any question on why so many find their positions obnoxious, and their rhetoric silly, they only have to look to Janeane Garafalo.

Oppressors? Racists? An organization that seeks to marginalize people of color, for the sole purpose of advancing an agenda. These are the words of Garafalo. A White woman, who has never spent a moment being Black let alone having lived through the Civil Rights Movement nor had to endure the difficulty of advancing in business as a person of color.

Is this the voice that leads the Black community? Is her view the consensus? Is it even accurate?

According to Garafalo, and former President Carter, opposition to Obama Administration policies are racist and perhaps a form of dementia

These are their words. They claim to speak on behalf of people of color. They claim to know what is best for people of color. They have identified opposition to President Obama as definitively wrong and vile.

So what do they have to say about Rep. Maxine Waters of the Congressional Black Caucus?

Ms. Garafalo, and other members of the far-left, is Rep. Waters a racist? Is she suffering from Stockholm Syndrome from being in the Congressional Black Caucus? Is she being paid to say she, and the entire Congressional Black Caucus, are ready to unleash on President Obama for his failures?

Why is it that when people like Janaeane Garafalo and President Carter tell us what Black people should and should not be, it brings up thoughts of plantations and slavery? Why is it when serious questions are presented to President Obama, any person of color asking the question is brushed off as insane? Why is it that White members of the far-left are adamant on how EVERY person of color should act and react?

Is it not racist to assume that EVERY person of color in the nation must think as as few White liberals think they should? Is it not racist to demean someone simply based on the color of their skin and the choice they make? Is it not racist to isloate people of color simply because they don't agree with what a few rich, White, elites decide is best?

The reality is that African Americans are suffering worse than the general population of America in the current, continuing downturn. Thats through the promised yet never actualize promises of the Obama Stimulus, the Health Care Reform, the control of the House Senate and Presidency by Democrats in a supermajority that ensured passage of ANYTHING they wished. But to say that, with all the results, is abysmal and detrimental is racist - according to the all knowing and definitive decree of far-left liberals like Janeane Garafalo - is what is absurd.

The definition of what is Black is anything but definitive. There is no cookie-cutter mold for being Black, or a person of color. Just as there is no list of prerequisites for being White, or Asian, or anything else. Only the most obnoxious, meglomaniacal, and racist person would assume that they know what is best for a race of people that they know nothing about being.

We present an open invitation to Janeane Garafalo to speak with M V Consulting president Michael Vass, any day in any forum, on what it is to be Black or a person of color. We give an open invitation to Ms. Garafalo to debate her credentials on knowing what is best for all African Americans and people of color. We offer the open invitation to discuss if it is racist to hold an opinion, or to be lead by a leash by a miniority of elistist rich Whites.

We dare her to take us up on this.

Only your support allows us to provide election coverage, political event coverage, and our political commentary. Visit Alchemy at World of VASS, and/or World of Vass - help keep us going. We appreciate your support.

The GOP’s Phony “Plantationism” Charge Against Democrats

2011-08-21T11:59:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Florida GOP Congressman Allen West in his trademark shoot from the lip style made brief news recently when he dredged out the worn term” plantationism” to describe the alleged relationship between blacks and Democrats. The slave inference translated into modern day political vernacular is that the Democrats for the past near six decades have promised blacks everything, and delivered almost nothing. Blacks still have the highest failed public schools, unemployment, poverty, and mortality, incarceration rates. Yet despite the alleged failure to deliver on their promises, blacks still slavishly give the Democrats 80 to 90 percent of their vote.
West’s “plantationism” broadside against the Democrats was quickly and eagerly picked up by a legion of conservative talk show hosts and bloggers. A few Democrats were rocked back on defense and forced to parry the attack. An arguable case can be made that Democratic presidential candidates in the past two decades have shifted political gears and deliberately downplayed explicit appeals to black voters on expanded civil rights protections, criminal justice reform, ramped up spending on education and jobs programs, and in some cases out GOPed the GOP in rushing to hack away at welfare, income support, and affirmative action programs. Some have pushed tax cuts for the corporate rich, and been hawkish in rubber stamping Bush’s costly war ramp up in Iraq and Afghanistan. Former President Bill Clinton’s election blueprint virtually directed top Democrats to appeal more to the white middle class with tax cuts and decreased government spending to dispel the notion that the Democrats inherently tilt toward minorities at the expense of whites. President Obama repeatedly gets an earful from the Congressional Black Caucus and other blacks for allegedly not doing enough to explicitly tackle the crisis of jobs and poverty among African-Americans.
This all feeds into West and the GOP’s crack about “plantationism.” The inference is that it’s time for blacks to wise up and cease their knee jerk hostility to the GOP. There was some hope in the run-up to last’s November mid-term elections that blacks might get that message. Black Republicans peddled the fantasy that would make history and elect a record number of black Republicans to Congress. More than a dozen black GOP candidates tried. With the exception of West and South Carolina Congressman Tim Scott, they all failed miserably. Scott and West won with white votes, and represent predominantly white districts. They have no political traction among blacks.
The rock solid loyalty of blacks to the Democrats is based on elementary pragmatism. Despite the shots they take at the Democrats for taking them and their vote for granted. Most blacks still look to them to fight the tough battles for health care, greater funding for education and jobs, voting rights protections, affirmative action, and against racial discrimination. Civil rights organizations were the only groups that consistently fought back against Reagan, Bush Sr., and W. Bush's draconian cuts in job, education, social service, funding and programs, their retrograde nominees to the Supreme Court appointments that would roll back the civil rights clock, and their peck away at affirmative action, civil rights and civil liberties protections.

This alone might not be cause enough for blacks en masse to repeatedly give their firm backing to the Democrats, especially when the Democrats compromise, conciliate, and flat out fumble the ball when it comes to caving to the GOP in fighting for increased funding and initiatives that help the urban poor. But the real kicker has been the GOP. West, Scott and black Republicans delude themselves that the GOP is a party that has something to offer blacks and delude themselves further in implying that the party has put out the welcome mat for blacks.
The GOP’s long, blatant, and infuriating history of racial exclusion, neglect and race baiting, and polarization is smoking gun proof of that. The endless foot in the mouth, racially insulting gaffes, racially loaded campaign ads by Republican officials and politicians, and the refusal by mainstream GOP leaders to loudly condemn them, ignore, downplay, or worse defend them hasn’t helped. The endless racist taunts, mockery, depictions, and ridicule of President Obama has been a textbook example of how a party that claims to want to break the grip that the Democrats have on the black vote does everything to insure that the Democratic grip is even tighter. This further confirms black suspicions that the GOP is chock full of bigots.
Tea Party leaders have done even more to heighten that suspicion. They loudly protest that blacks should not judge them as racists based on the lunacy of a few bigots and race baiters among their ranks. Yet their movement is regarded as the shock troops of the GOP and the fact that with few exceptions Tea Party leaders have not drummed the bigots and race baiters out of the movement speaks for itself.
The GOP presidential contenders and other GOP candidates in 2012 will occasionally try to look and sound like they want to get a few more black votes. But it will take a lot more than slapping at the Democrats with a racially loaded comparison to slavery to convince anyone that they’re really going to do anything to get those votes.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

President Obama’s Black Jobs Dilemma

2011-08-19T07:33:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Congresswoman Maxine Waters minced no words when she said that members of the Congressional Black Caucus are “frustrated” and impatient that President Obama is not doing enough to tackle the crisis problem of black unemployment. This is hardly the first time that Waters and other members of the Caucus have gently chided Obama on the jobs issue. But this time their criticism has taken on even greater angst, with a tinge of antagonism to boot. The unemployment lines have gotten longer, the time that the unemployed have been unemployed has stretched out from weeks to months with little end in sight, and many major businesses have flatly said they’re not hiring. Worst of all, Congress has made it even clearer that it will pinch pennies even tighter, and that means even less likelihood for increased federal spending on job creation initiatives. This drastically narrows the president’s options, and even though he’ll propose a jobs bill in September, almost certainly it will have little chance of getting around the Scrooge mindset in Congress. And it’s equally certain that his proposals will be race neutral and not specifically single out blacks for special spending initiatives and programs. This is in keeping with his firm position that spending more on jobs for all will help blacks, since they are the neediest and the hardest hit among the jobless.
This line won’t fly with many in the Congressional Black Caucus and many blacks who demanded that Obama roll his job tour buses and economic forums through the poorest of the poor black neighborhoods in Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and other hard hit inner cities neighborhoods. But there was never much likelihood of that. Obama’s eye is firmly set on re-election. And he can’t and won’t publicly at least depart from the race neutral formula that got him into the White House. He’s walking too fine a line to take that chance. Obama operates on the same principle that Democratic presidential candidates and presidents have operated on for the last three decades and that is to avoid like the plague the perception that Democrats inherently tilt toward the poor and minorities, but especially minorities, on policies and initiatives. This political cross weighs even heavier on Obama. He would have had no hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, let alone the presidency, if there had been any sense among white independents that he embraced the alleged race-tinged politics of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. His campaign would have been marginalized and compartmentalized as merely the politics of racial symbolism.
Polls continually show that he’s lost major support among white voters, and the sharpest drop has been among moderate and conservative white independent voters. They provided his margin for victory in 2008. No Democratic President, in this case him, or GOP presidential challenger can win without significant backing from them. The slightest hint that Obama is tilting toward African-American voters with a big, bold and aggressive jobs plan, or other special programs that primarily target blacks would likely blow any chance that he had of winning a significant number of independents back in 2012. It’s just too risky.
Even if Obama were willing to take the gloves off and specifically turn part of the battle for increased job spending into a battle explicitly to help the black poor, there would be little political gain. There is absolutely no chance that black voters will desert him in 2012. They are Democrats en masse, and will give any Democratic president, or presidential candidate, a lock down 85 to 90 percent of their vote. The top GOP contenders offer the worst choice of any GOP presidential candidate that has come down the political pike in ages as an alternative to him. Their set in stone, laissez faire business friendly, slash and burn of government services and programs, and silence or outright hostility to expansive civil rights and civil liberties protections, positions has sent massive chill through the black electorate. Their frustration, discontent and grumbles with and about Obama won’t move their vote dial even a tiny tick toward a GOP candidate. This would be tantamount to political suicide. This especially includes the Congressional Black Caucus. With one exception, they owe their offices, position, authority, patronage, perks, and total allegiance to the Democratic Party. They will hector Obama to do more on jobs and poverty for blacks. But in 2012 they will be in full throttle on the circuit campaigning for the president. They have no choice. Still, it would have been nice for Obama to direct his bus driver on a detour through a few desperately needy and job starved black neighborhoods.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Rick Perry’s Texas Miracle Con Job

2011-08-12T12:32:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Texas governor and reported GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry is the nation’s greatest political con artist. His so called Texas Miracle has been totally debunked as a fraud. Yet, Perry with generous help from conservative business leaders, tea party acolytes, and suddenly revved up evangelicals will keep the con very much alive. The so-called miracle that Perry and his backers peddle is of course that Texas is the runaway national model for how to create lots of private sector jobs, with minimal government red tape, and with a pittance of taxes. It’s the state where the good times are supposedly rolling for everyone, while the bad times are piling up for everyone in every other state.

Debunking Perry’s con is easy. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics found that Texas’ jobless rate has steadily crept up in recent months not plunged to zero as Perry would have the nation believe. Unemployment was over 8 percent in June. New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Wisconsin, and a slew of other states beat Texas on the employment numbers. And New York and several other states that outshined Texas did it without gutting environmental and labor regulations, slashing taxes, and with bare boned spending on education, housing, unemployment benefits and health services, as in Texas.

Even the 8 percent plus figure on Teas unemployment, though below the national jobless figure, is horribly misleading. In the state’s big cities, such as Houston, the jobless rate matches the national figure, and in rural, impoverished areas, the jobless rate soars to double digit figures. This means only one thing. More and more people in the state have sunk into or never risen out of poverty. The quality of life indexes on Texas amply confirm that. And an increase in the number of poor people invariably translate out to more children in poverty, greater income disparities, a dearth in quality prenatal care, and higher teen birth rates. Texas ranks in the bottom ten in every one of these areas and is a rock bottom number 50 among the nation’s 50 states in the number who graduate from high school by age 25.

Then there are the types of jobs that have been created. Perry has little to say about them. And there’s a good reason. Nearly forty percent of them are bottom rung, minimum wage retail and service industry jobs. This high figure makes Texas, along with Mississippi, one of the two hands down state leaders in the number of minimum wage workers. There’s a good reason for that too. Texas, like most Southern and Southwest states, is a rock solid right to work state. Unions are treated as virtual pariahs by Perry and GOP state officials. The result is minimal to nonexistent labor protections, and pension benefits. The same holds for health care. Texas is again the national leader in having the highest number of residents without health insurance. Only slightly more than half of the state’s construction workers that are exposed to the industry’s high hazards and incur the highest rate of injuries and fatalities, is covered by workers compensation.

There’s virtually no chance any of this will change soon, and the reasons again aren’t hard to find. The state makes bare minimum investment in graduate and higher education for professional and job skills training. The state is in the bottom tier in the percentage of jobs that require a college education or degree. Yet, the state official’s penny pinching on education, health care, and professional job investment hasn’t made for a bulging state treasury. The legislature had to scramble to close a $4 billion deficit in the current year’s budget. Texas officials did the one thing that officials everywhere are adept at doing when faced with budget deficits. They make even more slash and burn cuts in the favorite targets, education and health care, always at the expense of the poorest and neediest, and continue their all out assault on state workers. Here is one glaring example. State officials axed funding for pre-kindergarten programs that served about 100,000 low income children.

The biggest reason, though, there being little likelihood of change is who runs the state. Democrats hold majorities in a few Texas big cities, but they are an endangered species in Texas state government. The executive is run by Perry, and the state legislature is under lock down GOP control. In the 2010 elections the GOP took a supermajority in the state’s house and even managed to capture two Hispanic-Majority seats in south Texas.

Labor hostility, laissez faire tax and business friendliness, and the scoff at regulations, are virtually the sacrosanct Holy Grail in the state legislature and Perry’s state house. Perry genuflects before the Grail deeper than nearly all the current crop of GOP presidential candidates. Now that he’s in the presidential race, he’ll take his Texas miracle con job to the nation. The terrifying prospect is more than a few just might buy it.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Knock Off the Run Hillary Run Clamor

2011-08-11T09:20:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

This has become a virtual ritual. Just about every month, or more like after each new fresh crisis that President Obama has to ward off, the chant begins “Run Hillary Run.” The chant goes up because so the argument goes, Obama is too weak, vacillating, and conciliatory to the GOP. He broke every campaign pledge that he made on everything from a swift Iraq war withdrawal to caving into to Wall Street, the banks, and major corporations. He’s bungled the economy. His approval ratings totter near the danger zone for presidents in their reelection bid.
Clinton supposedly is tougher, more politically savvy, and will go toe to toe with the GOP in fighting for Democratic Party ideals. Hillary was the more popular Democrat of presidential choice during the Democratic primary slugfest with Obama in 2008 with moderate and conservative independents, blue collar whites, and women. And that if she hadn’t run out of money and organization she would have entered and won more primary states than Obama, it would have been enough to make her not Obama the Democratic presidential nominee. The spate of editorial and articles, not to mention grumbles and rumbles from within and without the Democratic Party supposedly confirm the widespread disgust with Obama and the fervent belief that Hillary is the party and the nation’s savior.
This is nothing but fanciful, desperate, and even delusionary prattle. Hillary will not challenge Obama in a Democratic primary. And not just because she’s part of Obama’s administration team. She is the consummate Democratic Party loyalist. She will do whatever it takes to keep Democrats in all offices, and that most importantly, means the presidency. She will be a fixture on the campaign trail in 2012 for Obama, and she’ll deliver impassioned appeals for his reelection, and loudly warn of the mortal danger of an Obama defeat for the country.
The pining for Hillary to displace Obama ignores another hard political reality. Hillary holds no political office. When she did hold one, there was no tea party that had an iron-clad lock on the House fashioned a hard line, take no prisoners, political agenda based on pure ideology, and that made compromise and conciliation, dirty words, and that has declared virtual civil war on not just Obama, but liberal and moderate Democrats. The GOP’s goal is not solely to drive Obama from office. The war would have been waged against Hillary or any other Democrat that won the presidency, but especially Hillary with the same down and dirty vehemence that they have waged it against Obama. The only thing different about Obama from Hillary is that he's African-American and that opened the racial floodgate to hector, harass, and pillory demean him. The GOP war is about regaining power, control, political dominance, protecting its corporate and financial interests, its strict construction definition and enforcement of the laws, and more broadly the imposing its philosophical view of how government should be run. The presidency is the grand prize that pulls the political, economic and philosophical threads on how government and power will be exercised together for the GOP.

The Tea Party's relentless rage and hounding of Obama is not fueled by insecurity over bloated government spending, failed wars, or that the government is in hopeless hock to the Chinese, Japanese and Europeans. It's fueled by race and shrewd media and political manipulation. America has been in the era of economic uncertainty, foreign competition, and military shrinkage, for the past two decades. If America's domestic and foreign slide alone was a reason to scream for Hillary to oust Obama that the scream for an alternative should have been made in 2004 to find an alternative to W. Bush.

There were, of course, no loud cries, endless polls, and legions of pundits hinting or outright calling for Bush to step down. And that if he did, it would somehow reverse America's slide, or at least let him off the hook for it. That's what the Hillary clamor to confront Obama implies.

The thinking that Obama can lose, or even will lose, his bid for reelection makes absolutely no sense at this stage of the political game, but defies presidential political history. A majority in a Gallup poll in 1982 fed the rampant talk that Reagan should not run for re-election because of political failures and public disgust. His approval numbers were in the tank. The president the majority in the poll said was that Reagan was damaged political goods because of high unemployment, double digit inflation, and even inexperience in dealing with these problems. Reagan, of course, won a smash reelection victory in 1984. Sitting presidents from Truman to Clinton have all heard the dreaded three words, "one-term president" said about them after popularity plunges, legislative reversals, or midterm party losses.

With three exceptions in all those, Bush Sr., Carter, and Ford, they all won reelection. They won without facing any challenges from someone in their party, and with no clamor for anyone within their party to challenge them. It should be the same with Obama. In other words, knock off the run Hillary run clamor.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

GOP Would Love Nader’s Fantasy of a Party Challenge to Obama

2011-08-08T19:04:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Ralph Nader is a predictable as the sun rising in the Sahara in July. He wasted no time in jumping all over President Obama following the debt ceiling deal. He made his by now standard plea for someone to challenge Obama in a Democratic primary campaign or better still from his view a third party challenge to Obama. Nader promised with smug assuredness that the chances of such a challenge are near “100 percent.” Nader, as in the past, when he begged for an Obama challenger quickly added that the pined for challenger wouldn’t be him. That’s charitable. It couldn’t be him. He’s not that delusionary. He's had his moments in the political sun, and the combination of age (he's 77), the still heavy historical cross he'll always bear as the "spoiler" who tipped the election to George W. Bush in 2000, and his virtual disappearance from the media scene except for the occasional outbursts at Obama, make him a political anachronism, and to most, a pariah.
There will be no challenge to Obama in the Democratic primary. There’s not even much assurance that there will be a third party ticket of any note from the left. States have made it even more difficult for third parties to get on ballots. The crushing requirements of exorbitant ballot fees, a massive numbers of signatures required, and astronomical costs of running even a local office campaign, and the total media blackout for any third party candidate for any office have made third parties virtual museum pieces. No Democratic ex-senator or ex-governor as Nader claims will toss his or her name into the challenge column for several compelling reasons. Many still harbor political aspirations and an intra-party challenge would be a virtual kiss of death for their getting future Democratic Party political patronage, favors, positions, contracts, and other perks that party affiliation and loyalty rigidly demand. All Democrats still have the horrific memory of Ronald Reagan’s challenge to President Gerald Ford in 1976, and Senator Ted Kennedy’s challenge to President Jimmy Carter in 1980 Their challenges weakened both presidents, divided the party, and ultimately helped make possible Carter’s win over Ford, and Reagan’s win over Carter. Many Democrats still have nightmarish memories of Nader too. Though there’s still much debate over how much Nader actually did contribute to Bush’s win, the undeniable fact is that when Nader ran in 2000 he had vast name recognition, respect and admiration from a wide body of independent, liberal Democrats, and progressives, and he had by third party standards a virtual king’s ransom to run a vigorous multi-state national campaign. He may not have helped elect Bush. But the certainty is that he didn’t help Gore.
This just pecks around the edges at why there will be no third party or Democratic primary challenge to Obama. The political danger is just too great. Gore and Bush were not sitting presidents. Neither faced a financially well-oiled, organized, relentless, foe hell bent on running either one of them out of political life. Obama is a sitting president facing that kind of foe. And neither Gore or Bush had the burden of having to spend every waking and sleeping moment being blamed for the economic woes of the country, with the absolute knowledge that history has shown presidencies rise and fall on one thing, and one thing only, the reality and perception among voters that the economy is either hopelessly sick or comfortably well-off. Challengers don’t get blamed for the real or imagined shortcomings of an incumbent president in dealing with the economy; the incumbent president does. This burden on an incumbent president is terrible, unfair, but real, and that’s what Obama must contend with. With an approval rating barring any spectacular uptick in the economy that is likely next year to still be razor thin between what’s needed to eke out a victory or tottering perilously close to a defeat, he will have virtually no margin for error to ward off the distraction of a spirited challenge from inside the Democratic party. This would be manna from Heaven for the GOP. And every Democrat party leader, official, or name figure member knows that.
Nader then is just blowing smoke when he claims that Obama will be challenged by some unnamed intra-party opponent. But then again Nader can always be depended on to take a swipe at Obama when there's a touchy issue on the nation's political table that puts Obama on the spot. He gets some press ink attention because there are many who still like and admire him, and even more like his anti-corporate, tweaking of the two parties. They fervently believe there is no substantive difference between the Democrats and Republicans. They don't see Obama as a real change guy but rather another deal making Beltway insider who has betrayed his hope and change promise.
That’s just enough to make Nader’s fantasy about a possible Democratic primary challenge to Obama media quotable. The GOP for its part though would love nothing better than for Nader’s fantasy be more than quotable but a reality.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Writing the Tea Party Epitaph is Not Just Premature but Absurd

2011-08-04T21:28:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Moments after President Obama put his John Hancock on the debt ceiling deal, a Northern California tea party member claimed that when he proudly wore his tea party tee shirt to his local grocery store a half dozen persons immediately asked him how to join. If one believes the legion of pundits that claim with smug assurance that the tea party and by extension the GOP cut its political throat by holding the White House, Congress and the nation hostage for weeks until it got its way on the debt deal, the tea party booster is either the biggest liar on the planet, or suffers from advanced political dyslexia. Unfortunately, there’s really no reason to think anything of the sort. A quick look at the checklist of what Congress gave up tells why.
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block. No extension of unemployment insurance benefits. No tax loopholes closed. No new tax and funding revenue hikes approved. No guarantee that any substantial military spending will be cut. A so-called super-committee that can virtually unilaterally chop off billions more in spending from vital education, health, transportation, and infrastructure development programs that Congress is powerless to do nothing more than take it or leave it. No spending authorization to create jobs. And worst of all the real possibility that within a few months Congress and the White House will be locked arms again in another round of fiscal sumo wrestling.
The manufacture of the phony debt ceiling and fiscal crisis, the gut of federal spending and by extension the government, the mocking of the political process to engage in this financial charade, was the fine handiwork of the tea party; a party that didn’t exist three years ago, yet in that short time played the nation, the White House, Congress, and the media like a finely tuned Stradivarius. The tea party marvelously hijacked the political process with one goal in mind, a goal that it never bothered to hide. And that goal is to hector, harass, embarrass, and ultimately insure that President Obama is a one term president.
The seeds of the tea party Congressional budget hijack were planted the instant President Obama took the oath of office. Tea party leaders shrewdly reached back three decades and revived a simple theme that was struck during the Reagan years. Liberal Democrats had constructed an ogre in a wasteful, out of spending control, and inefficient big government that had bloated the budget with deficit crushing spending on education, health, and infrastructure programs. The underlying hint was that the spending was lavished almost exclusively on minorities, and the poor. And the ones forced to bear the cost for the alleged Democrat’s big government spending spree were the hard pressed, overburdened, over taxed white middle and working class. This was of course pure financial mythmaking. The Congressional Budget Office put debt and debt servicing costs at less than 2 percent of America’s economic output. That figure is lower than at any point since the 1970s. The payments on federal debt under Regan Bush Sr., and Bill Clinton presidencies were above 3 percent of the GDP. Under GW Bush that figured dropped.
There was no talk of a federal debt collapse in those years. But within one Obama year, that changed, and now the US instantly faced financial Armageddon if trillions weren’t hacked from the budget. This, of course, again, was almost exclusively the talk of the tea party and they made their talk the talk of Congress and the nation, with only scattered dissent from a handful in Congress. The tea party got its way not solely because it adroitly waylaid an issue to politically sabotage a president. But because it out screamed, out marched, and out organized Democrats and its own GOP mainstream.
A recent Pew Research Center poll found that tea party adherents were twice as likely to be engaged in the debate over the budget, and a greater number said they blitzed their elected representatives with faxes, emails, and phones pounding them to stand firm on the budget. By a near two to one margin, tea party backers more intently followed the news about the budget deliberations than those who opposed the tea party.
Yet despite the tea party's obvious budget triumph some foolishly crow that this marks the demise of the tea party. That's the kind of demise that established political parties would salivate over. No, far from writing the epitaph for the tea party, the tea party has forced the White House, and Congress and a nation to look over its shoulder in nervous jitters at every overblown, clownish, and destructive scheme that the tea party decides to dump on the nation's plate. And make no mistake; there are more, many more of those schemes to come.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Why President Obama Can’t Make Like FDR on Jobs

2011-07-26T21:46:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama can probably recite this line in his sleep. Be bold, and rip a page from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal playbook institute crash Works Project Administration and Civilian Conservation Corp. type programs. They would put tens of thousands of jobless back to work, pump up consumer spending, stave off a deeper recession, and trump the GOP mantra that only private industry can create jobs and boost the economy. It’s a good line, and if 1933 America could be reprised again, putting government directly in the business of job creation would not only work, but be a necessity.
This isn’t 1933. And President Obama can’t make like FDR for several compelling reasons. The nation was flat on its back. One in three Americans were unemployed. The stock market, the banks and major industry had collapsed. The GOP was ridiculed and discredited. The labor movement was on the ascendancy, the until then small and totally marginalized Communist Party was getting a hearing from more and more down and out unemployed workers. The major financiers and industrialists genuinely feared social upheaval, even revolution. The horror of creating deficits by government spending and a drumbeat media echo chamber to turn the airwaves, (there were no TV networks), into a electronic bully pulpit to badger, hector, harangue and pillory FDR at every turn for spending too much didn’t exist. There was an actual government surplus then, and no major debt.
FDR in effect had carte blanche to do something and do something drastic and fast. The dizzying array of alphabet New Deal programs government job creation programs were applauded by a majority of Americans, and effectively dampened the simmering sparks of rebellion.
President Obama has none of the luxuries FDR had and all of the liabilities that FDR did not have. One need not speculate about the wrath that he’d incur from millions who passionately believe that he’s a closet socialist and his economic policies have doused the private sector if he advocated government job programs. The reaction to the stimulus package stirred hysteria among most GOP leaders, officials, voters and a significant number of conservative and even moderate independents. They railed at it as naked big government expansion, and reckless spending by a liberal Democratic president. The public vilification, political opposition, and conservative media pounding that Obama would take if he tried the FDR approach to jobs would be titanic.
The valid fiscal and economic argument that government job creation will put dollars in more consumers pockets, boost consumer spending, jumpstart small and medium sized business hiring, and increase business and personal income tax revenues would be drowned out in the harangue that a WPA style program would be too expensive and too wasteful. Even if Obama was willing to risk the firestorm of protest, and thumb his nose at the GOP, there’s little chance that he’d get even a handful of Senate Democrats to back a government job creation program.
Let’s turn back the clock again to the 1930s to get a better picture of what Obama would face if he tried to make like FDR and create government jobs. FDR won a landslide reelection in 1936. But two years later in the 1938 midterm elections, a resurgent GOP dumped dozens of Democrats from the Senate and the House. The issue that the GOP latched onto to ramp up their numbers is pretty much the same issue the GOP uses to sledgehammer Obama, and that’s his alleged failures on the economy.
The economy had taken another nose dive after 1936, and unemployment crept up higher from its still double digit numbers. The GOP played hard on the feeling that the New Deal wasn't working. That it had run out of steam and that the real answer to the nation's economic crisis was to turn things back over to big business and let it run the economic ship without the Roosevelt and New Deal governmental restraints, agencies, tampering and meddling.
Roosevelt ignored the administration baiters and moved left. In a fireside chat, FDR talked bluntly with the American people immediately after the 1938 election and made it clear he would not reverse course and that he'd do everything he could to "create an economic upturn" by keeping the government firmly in the business of creating jobs and economic security for the millions still suffering from the Depression. He could do that and make it work because he still had the broad support of by now a powerful union movement and his intact electoral coalition of farmers, urban ethnics, and African-American voters behind him.
In 2010 the GOP took the House and a good chunk of the Senate back and it promptly followed the 1938 script with FDR. It claimed the near sweep was a total rejection of the Obama administration's program on health care, financial reform, and stimulus spending, and claim that Americans loudly clamor for a return to fiscal conservatism, permanent tax cuts for the super rich, and a dash backward on expanding government programs in education, housing, and highway and urban infrastructure construction and reconstruction.
Obama had no choice but to read the political leafs and conclude that though jobs was the real need of Americans and the only real way to ignite and stimulate a floundering economy, there was no political possibility to get even a tepid version of FDR’s WPA program in place. The clamor for Obama to make like FDR ignores that this is 2011 not 1933. To think that Obama can make like FDR in these times is fantasy.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

The race of President Obama - pro or con, it still amounts to nothing

2011-07-26T00:04:00.000-07:00

Written by VASS - political commentary

Recently, we received a comment on a post that irked us. Not because of what was being said, or who was saying it, but what was implied.

The exact words were

"I'm tired of the raciest overtones and I believe that the GOP will not be happy until they bring this country down."

It doesn't matter who said it or in reply to on what article. The though is the key. A theme that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee recently spouted on the floor of the House. A theme that is a constant among many of the most extreme of Liberals.

"…I do not understand what I think is the maligning and maliciousness of this president. Why is he different? And in my community, that is the question that we raise. In the minority community that is the question that is being raised."

The implication is

If you say you disagree with President Obama, It is because you must be a racist.

The theme is ridiculous. But even Democrats like former President Carter have uttered words that evoke that message. The major media has largely run with that message on almost every opposition to President Obama since before he took office.

But let's stop to think about this for a moment. Is it racist to disagree with President Obama? Is there really no other logical reason to oppose some of his political positions than the fact he has a permanent tan? Even when such opposition comes from people equally of color?

So, under that logic, every Person of Color that opposed President Bush did so because they were racist? The same is true of President Clinton. And President Carter. That is the implication. That the ONLY reason anyone could oppose a sitting President is because they hate the color of skin of whomever holds the office. Oh, and as for say President Ronald Reagan, well opposiition from other Whites MUST be because they hate their own race and are sellouts. Or how about the implication made by President Carter, that the people who carried around signs depicting President Bush as Hitler, and protesting his policies, are just racists? Is there a Democrat, elected or not, that is willing to stand by that statement? Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, any comment?

When you interject other Presidents into the same line of reasoning, suddenly it becomes clear how lopsided and ignorant such an implication is.

In fact, one of the best ways we have ever learned to explain racism are by examples, and reversing the color or those involved in the example. Maybe one of the best examples of this is depicted in the movie A Time To Kill

Now imagine she is White. The men that would do such a thing are animals. Their skin color is irrelevant to what they did, the attrocity of it. But take that same kind of reasoning and now apply it to President Obama, or President Bush.

Is President Obama being opposed because he is Black, or because he is the President? Was President Bush opposed because he was White, or because he was President? Both Presidents have had opponents mock them. Both have had the small-minded spitefully ridicule them and their actions. Both men have had pundits and elected officials oppose their ideals and political actions. Where does race apply?

Do you recall the images of President Bush as the Joker? Do you recall the delight of the media when a shoe was thrown at the President of the United States? Do you think there would have been the same glee if President Obama has a shoe thrown at him? Do you think comedians would have laughed and mocked the scene? Why is it different then?

America is in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya. We still use and buy oil, as much as before. We still have a massive army, and live a better quality of life than 95% of the world. Fanatical Islamists still want ALL of America to be wiped of the face of the Earth. Nations across the globe still denounce every action, or inaction, that we take.

At home, a majority of Americans oppose many of the policies of President Obama, just like President Bush at times. In fact, just like most Presidents since Nixon - at least part of the time of their Presidency. Where is this different? Where is this a "unique" event based on the color of skin of the President?

If we are honest, and set aside political preferences, then we all realize that race is not important when discussing President Obama. His race does not make the Health Care Reform better or worse. His skin tone does not influence the number of people unemployed. His permanent tan does not alter the number of people that have had their homes foreclosed. His birthright of color has not stopped a bullet fired at a single soldier, nor altered the increase in food prices due to ethanol production. The Blackness (or Whiteness as he is bi-racial lest we forget) of President Obama has not removed a single dollar from the interest of the debt that is being accumulated right now.

The issue of race is a distraction from the reality. A way to enflame emotions. A way to stop people from thinking about the facts as they exist. The use of race is, in this application, a means of buying votes on the cheap.

To use my example, reverse the color of President Obama. He is as White as former President Clinton. Or Carter. He has followed the exact same policies. What changes? What is different because of his skin tone?

Nothing.

Therefore opposing the policies of President Obama is not about race. We dare any Democrat, elected or not, to provide 1 law or proposal that was not passed, or even opposed, because of the skin color of President Obama and not his political beliefs.

We ask each of you, think about it. Name 1 thing that is political that President Obama has done that was opposed ONLY because of his race. Even secondarily, even denarily. We are beyond sure, that it cannot be done. Because while it may sell newspapers, draw a television audience, or pack a comedy club it isn't real.

Fingering Alleged Right Winger in Norway Shooting Didn’t Stop the Muslim Bashing

2011-07-24T08:05:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The speedy apprehension, public identification and incriminating right wing, white supremacist rants of alleged Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik partially doused the red hot fire building to launch yet another anti-Muslim witch hunt. The operative word is partially, because despite the steadily mounting evidence that Breivik’s anti-Muslim hatred was a prime motive for the rampage, it didn’t stop the avalanche of chatter on blogs, websites, and reader comments, that there had to be a tie somewhere with Islamic terrorism. This has been the reliable code word for fanning anti-Muslim hysteria. The pattern has been well established since the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing in 1996.
At the time, then President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno had the good sense not rush to judgment and scapegoat Muslims. The swift arrest of McVeigh squelched the building mob mania against them. But it didn't squelch public suspicions that all Muslims were potential terrorists. The federal building bombing propelled Clinton's 1996 Antiterrorism Act through Congress. Civil rights and civil liberties groups had waged a protracted battle against the bill. The law gave the FBI broad power to infiltrate groups, quash fundraising by foreigners, monitor airline travel, and seize motel and hotel records and trash due process by permitting the admission of secret evidence to expel immigrants. The implication was that present and future attacks would likely be launched by those with an Arab name and face rather than by men like McVeigh, or in the case of the alleged Norway terrorist, Breivik.
President Bush, as Clinton, took the high ground after the 911 attack. He did not reflexively finger-point Muslims. The Bush administration publicly assured that profiling was reprehensible and violated legal and constitutional principles, and that it would not be done. But the attack stirred tremors among Muslims that they would routinely be targeted, subject to search and surveillance, and profiled at airports.
The profiling alarm bells went off again after a soldier with a Muslim name Major Nidal Malik Hasan shot up the military base at Ft. Hood in November 2009. The Council on American-Islamic Relations wasted no time and issued a loud and vigorous denunciation of the mass killing. That didn't stop the pack of Fox Network commentators, conservative radio talk show hosts, writers, and some officials from again openly shouting for even tighter scrutiny of Muslim groups.
The scrutiny has taken two major forms. One is the persistent clamor to profile Muslims, those with Muslim sounding names, or those who appear to fit the stereotypical type of what a Muslim supposedly looks like. More than a few congressman led most notably by New York Congressman Pete King and GOP presidential candidate Michelle Bachman have openly called for profiling of Muslims or strongly hinted that there should be special attention given to them at airports, train, and bus stations.
The second major hit against Muslims has been the indelible stamp in the public mind that Al Qaeda, or other assorted, unnamed Muslim terror organizations or individuals perpetrate every act of mass violence in the world. The Norway massacre was a textbook example of how deep and dangerous the Muslim equals terrorist thinking is buried in the public consciousness. There was absolutely no reason to instantly finger-point Al Qaeda for the bombing of the government buildings or shooting up the summer camp. At peak Norway had 400 troops in Afghanistan as part of a UN mandated peacekeeping mission. It pulled the relative handful of troops it had in Iraq out years ago. It has passed no restrictive laws or actions as in Germany or France against Muslims. The closest it came was the revoke of a ruling in 2009 that permitted a Norwegian Muslim woman to wear her hijab, the traditional head covering for Muslim women, as part of her police uniform.
Norway’s benign foreign and domestic policy, and its non-military involvement in the Middle East still stirred mounting fear and hatred among many Norwegians toward Muslims, They brand it the sneak Islamization of the country.
The Progress Party has been especially strident in demanding tougher immigration laws and enforcement, and has criticized government leaders for a too tolerant attitude toward Islamic law. A poll in 2009 found the percent of the public that backed the Progress Party had skyrocketed to more than thirty percent of the respondents. At the same time, the Labor, Socialist Left, and Center Party, support had dropped. Breivik was a Progress Party member.
Breivik may be every bit the whacked out, maniacal nut job he has been characterized as. But that doesn’t change two things. One is that his deranged, horrific hate driven act of mass carnage was a grotesque aberration, but the hate and fear that drove him to it is not. And if Breivik hadn’t been quickly fingered as the culprit, his mayhem would have fanned yet another full blown Muslim witch hunt. Even so it still was enough to get and keep the anti-Muslim tongues wagging.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Democrats Hung Obama Out on the GOP Limb

2011-07-22T12:57:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
The script is well worn. President Obama floats a proposal on the debt ceiling and the budget that appears to give away too much to the GOP. The Democrats howl that Obama is betraying principles to get the GOP to make a deal. Then when the GOP predictably says “no” to the alleged White House’s betrayal concessions, the Democrats howl even louder that the president is hurting himself, the party, and worst of all minorities and the poor that will suffer the most from the meat ax hacking away of spending on vital programs.
Obama’s plop on the bargaining table of formula changes for Social Security, Medicare hikes, and reported willingness to defer tax and revenue increases to get a deal loudly set off the alarm bells. Obama quickly scrambled to assure Democrats that he would continue to hold the line as best as he could against the GOP obstructionists. But the Democrats are disingenuous at best and hypocrites at worst for taking no blame for any cave to the GOP that they accuse Obama of.
The Democrats had an iron-clad majority in the House and senate for nearly two years after his election. A majority of voters demanded more not les spending on jobs, infrastructure projects, urban investment, housing foreclosure relief, the tightest possible clamps on Wall Street casino speculating, a wind up of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the end of the Bush tax cuts for the rich. A serious effort to cut spending on the wasteful wars and tax cuts and prime the economy would have made a major dent in the debt and deficit load, boosted the economy, and hiked revenue. If the Democrats had fought a hard and relentless fight for any one of these reforms, much of the pounding that Obama is now forced to take for trying to get the best deal he can out of a GOP that is using the debt fight as a cover to dump him in 2012 would have been rendered moot. This didn’t happen. And the GOP quickly sniffed political blood in the Democrat's step back from Obama at every critical point.

Democrats now make the case that they are fighting to stiffen Obama’s spine against the GOP and that Republicans stepped back from Bush when it was clear to many that he and his presidency were miserable failures. The analogy won’t fly. Bush was discredited and loathed. The public blamed him and the GOP for two failed, flawed, costly wars, for making a shambles of an economy, the endless chain of sex and corruption scandals, and an unprecedented giveaway to Wall Street. It took nearly eight years and two terms for Republicans up for reelection to figure out that Bush was a political plague to be avoided at all costs. Unlike Bush, Obama has a string of impressive economic and legislative initiative accomplishments that have been impressive, even more in that they came in the teeth of the most vicious and vile opposition from a GOP that has made it clear in word and action that their sole goal is to make Obama a one term president.
The compromises that Obama has been forced to make to get any kind of budget deal says less about Obama's political worth than that of many Democrats. The health care reform gave warning of that. Democrats endlessly ticked off the ways that health care reform could help poor, working class and middle class by the elimination of pre-existing conditions, subsidies for the poor, broader coverage options, and coverage for millions of children into adulthood, and cost containment measures. Then when Obama to get a health care reform deal through made crucial compromises, they accused him of gutting health care reform. Then there was the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. Democrats again endlessly ticked off the ways that they benefited a handful of taxpayers that hardly need the savings, don't spend it anyway, has been a major deficit booster, and a tax giveaway to the wealthy elite that did not appreciably hike demand, business or job expansion.
Then when the GOP turned the issue around and threatened to block Obama’s initiative to fund unemployment insurance extension, funding of some education programs, if he didn’t agree to maintain the cuts, many House Democrats again accused him of caving to the GOP. When Obama had the temerity to take Democrats to task for wanting perfect instead of what was political doable, he was again roundly raked over the coals.
It's charitable to chalk the Democrats oft times cut and run from the president up to their political rage at his insistence on getting what he can squeeze out of an implacable foe bound and determined on his political destruction. But when far too many Democrats have consistently cowered at, and conciliated the GOP, while repeatedly second guessing the White House, then it’s no wonder that Obama has been hung out on a GOP limb. And worse has to take Democratic heat for it.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Drop the Ethics Case against Waters

2011-07-19T08:21:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
The revelation that two former House Ethics Committee staffers secretly leaked materials to Republicans on the Committee and possibly outside the Committee to hammer California Congresswoman Maxine Waters and New York Congressman Charles Rangel is a near textbook example of how politics doesn’t just taint congressional ethics cases, but makes them a bitter joke. The two former top staffers leak of the confidential documents to the Republicans on the panel blatantly violated the standard of confidentiality that’s the cornerstone of any legal proceeding. In a criminal case the taint would have resulted in an instant dismissal of the charges against the accused. But this isn’t a criminal case, and Congress is not a court of law, but a perennial nest of political infighting, backbiting, one-upmanship and cut throat intrigue between and among Democrats and Republicans. Waters was the perfect fall woman for their political intriguing.
Waters was accused nearly two years ago of influence peddling in an alleged scheme to get millions in TARP bailout money for a bank in which her husband had stock. The House Ethics Committee, then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Congressional Black Caucus, and in fact all House Democrats reported and hashed over the allegations against her at the time and found no smoking gun proof that Waters did anything wrong. But that didn’t stop Ethics Committee members from blaring the charges to the press and public that Waters was a graft ridden, conniving Democratic politician that deserved to have the ethics book thrown at her .
It was no accident that Waters was plopped on the political hot seat three months before the 2010 mid-term elections. House Democrats were scared stiff that the GOP would erase their majority. What better way for them to prove that they could police their own, and make good on Pelosi's oft quoted vow to cleanse the swamp in Congress than to make sacrificial lambs out of a handful of wayward Democrats. The choice of Waters had little to do with the actual charges and their alleged transgressions, or even whether they had merit or not. It was grimy politics, pure and simple.
Waters was not merely a rank and file Democrat. She is one of the highest profile, nationally known Democrats, and an African-American. This gave even greater veneer of credence to Pelosi and ranking Democrats contention that they will go after any Democrats no matter their party rank and stature that cross the ethics line. The ploy didn’t work. The GOP still turned the November 2010 mid-term elections into a Democratic rout. That meant near total domination of committee chairs, and they determine what gets voted up or down, and when it comes alleged ethics violations who gets investigated and who gets a pass. Partisan politics again can’t be separated from the political mix. With Waters, the damage was done. She was firmly imprinted in the media and public mind as the poster politician for congressional corruption.
The revelations of the improper leaks of the Waters ethics probe documents by the former committee staffers to Republicans was no surprise. This probably happens more often than not when partisan party committee members or staffers decide to take political license to go after a perceived vulnerable member of the opposing party. It was just as predictable that when the revelations of misconduct by the former staffer’s first surfaced back in March that Ethics Committee chair Alabama Republican Jo Bonner moved quickly to put out the fire. He claimed that the committee members had acted with the “the highest ethical standards.” This was beyond laughable. The reputation of Waters had been thoroughly dragged through the public and media mud by then and there was little sign of a public pushback by House Democrats against the committee probe.
The Democrats inaction on this was no surprise given their timid, club footed response to GOP initiatives that have kept them rocked back on their heels since November. The revelation of the leaks, though, are as close to iron clad proof that the Democrats will ever get of wrong doing by former Ethics Committee staffers. They had a clear political agenda and that was to discredit Waters, and further bludgeon the Democrats into political submission.
There have been calls for a special prosecutor to look into the leaks. But that would drag out the process against Waters even longer. The non-case against Waters has meandered off and on for far too long for anyone to take the probe or for that matter the ethics committee that’s supposedly probing her seriously. The Democrats response should be quick and decisive to the Ethics Committee muddle. The response should be too loudly demand that the charges against Waters be dropped. Anything less reaffirms the terrible message that an Ethics Committee that is sworn to police wayward House members is nothing more than a shill and a sham that bends, twists, and mangles its own procedures for cheap partisan gain.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Letter to Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Rep. Maurice Hinchey on debt ceiling

2011-07-13T13:59:00.000-07:00

Written by VASS - Political commentary

Senator Charles Schumer
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
Rep. Maurice Hinchey

As a constituent and member of the press I would like to ask you about the current situation of the national debt ceiling. It is obviously a matter that affects every American, potentially for decades to come. A well thought out solution to the problem is undeniably critical.

Therefore I have the following questions, based in part from the questions of my viewership, as well as my comcerns as your constiuent.

1) Have you consulted with the President, and/or the rest of the Democrat leadership, to ensure that Treasury Secretary Geithner - asuming the debt ceiling is not passed - makes paying the SSI, disability, veterans, and other critical needs individuals a priority for the funds that will be available on August 3rd?

2) What have you advised the Democrat leadership, in regard to tax increases as well as spending cuts, to make a deal on the debt ceiling possible? Based on those recommendations, how will your constituents be affected?

3) Have you highlighted your experience that tax increases, by themselves, will not resolve the debt issue - as it has not resolved the issue for New York State, even as we are one of the highest taxed States in the nation for a prolonged period now.

4) Looking forward, with the understanding that the U.S. credit rating is poised to be downgraded which would lead to dramatic changes in the economy and hamper the ability of many Americans and your constituents to maintain their current lifestyle, what do you propose for future spending cuts, and/or changes in Government programs? How will those future proposals, if enacted, affect your constituents in New York State?

5) Are you willing to vote for a debt ceiling increase? Are you willing to do so only if tax increases are attached? Are you willing to do so if tax increases are NOT included but spending cuts are included?

As a constituent, small business owner, and a member of the press, these questions are of the utmost concern to voters and my readership. As always, I will provide a VERBATIM copy of whatever you state in response, such that your constituents will have a clear understanding of your efforts in this matter, in your own words.

If you would like to further clarify your positions, or otherwise speak to my readers on this matter or any other, I invite you to contact M V Consulting, Inc. so that we may set up an interview via phone, email, or in person as best fits your schedule.

As a constituent of New York State, and a member of the press, I thank you for your time and attention on this matter. I look forward to your response.

Sincerely

Michael Vass
President - M V Consulting, Inc.
info@vassconsult.com

Sent on 7/13/11 to:

Senator Charles Schumer - https://schumer.senate.gov/Contact/contact_chuck.cfm
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand - http://gillibrand.senate.gov/contact/
Representative Maurice Hinchey - https://forms.house.gov/hinchey/webforms/zip_auth.shtm

The GOP’s Debt Ceiling War Not About Debt But About Obama

2011-07-12T16:29:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The GOP’s war over America’s debt ceiling war is not about America’s debt, it’s about President Obama. The debt ceiling debate can’t be separated from the GOP’s never-ending hunt for any issue that can taint, embarrass, and ultimately weaken the Obama presidency. The GOP’s goal is as it always been to make Obama a one term president. The issue of whether America can pay its bills or not, or reneges on its financial obligations, which would be the catastrophe that would result from failing to raise the ceiling, is secondary to the GOP’s cynical political ploy.
The proof is how the debt ceiling jumped to center stage in political debate and the public’s awareness of it. The debt ceiling was an absolute non-issue during George W. Bush White House tenure. It was raised ten times in those years with barely a peep that the U.S. was in mortal danger of a fiscal crash and burn under its great weight of debt. This debt was incurred almost exclusively by Bush’s two wildly costly and wasteful wars, his two behemoth tax cut giveaways to the rich, a relentless gut of regulations that made banks and corporations tax liability fall to historic low levels, and then capped by a taxpayer giveaway to Wall Street banks and financial houses. The debt that would be hiked to near astronomical proportions if Congress ever approved the House GOP's budget plan, drafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, which would add $6 trillion in to the national debt over a decade. Strangely, there’s no debt ceiling squawk from the GOP on this horrific prospect.

But the GOP didn’t acquiesce in turning the debt into a non-issue solely to appease a GOP president. Congress jumped the debt ceiling 64 times since 1962 before Bush took office for Democratic and Republican presidents alike. The ceiling was raised even in election years without any public fanfare.
But when polls showed that a majority of Americans were concerned about mounting debt, and that a sizeable number of Americans wanted to rein in spending, the debt ceiling instantly became a fresh weapon for the GOP to barrage Obama. They calculate they can score three political pluses on the cheap. They can further tar Obama and the Democrats as reckless spendthrifts that want to run the country and the economy into the ground. They can wrap themselves even more snugly in the cloak of the defenders of fiscal prudence and responsibility with the solemn mission of guarding the nation’s taxpayer’s purse. They can drive a wedge between Obama and Congressional Democrats by forcing him to make concessions for a budget deal that will draw howls from Democrats. The concessions are of course, putting the Democrat’s two sacred cow programs, Medicare and Social Security, on the chopping block.
The GOP ploy played out to predictable perfection. The instant word leaked out that Obama had offered to make a tweak in the cost of living formula for Social Security and raise the age limit on Medicare recipients; a legion of Congressional Democrats screamed betrayal and warned that any such deal on the two vital programs would have damaging consequences for Democrats in 2012. They are right. That was the whole point of the GOP forcing Obama to take the drastic steps of offering up Social Security and Medicare as bargaining chips to put him at odds with other Democrats and cause jitters among the Democratic voter base.
Democratic House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer glimpsed that this was indeed a calculated maneuver by the GOP and openly groused that the GOP could politicize the debt ceiling debate. But Hoyer was being far too cautious and generous in saying “could” about the ploy. The only way to make any sense out of the GOP’s waging a World War II proportion battle out of something that had been as pro forma as the changing seasons for a half century was politics. The GOP leaders will eventually approve a deal on the budget and that will include raising the debt ceiling for the 75th time. But the GOP won’t cut the deal without one more go at scoring a couple more political brownie points at Obama’s expense.
They’ll loudly proclaim that by waging the fight over the ceiling they thwarted the Democrats from continuing to bloat spending, held the line against any tax increases, and that this in effect prevented retarding the dubious recovery. And if in the process they’ve managed to sow enough ill will and division among Democrats then this is all the better in improving the prospects of whatever GOP presidential hopeful eventually emerges from the pack to challenge Obama.
President Obama almost certainly had the GOP’s cynical scenario in mind when he blasted “professional politicians” for holding the government hostage while they jockey for partisan political gain. This shot at the GOP will fall on deaf ears precisely because the debt ceiling fight was never about debt but about Obama.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Casey Anthony is Not OJ in White Female Face

2011-07-06T08:43:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Casey Anthony is not O.J. Simpson in white female face. The only real reason that Anthony is even mentioned in the same breath as O.J. is because she was acquitted of first degree murder. And many of those that bothered to pay any attention to the case fervently believed she was guilty and expected her to be convicted. The resemblance ends abruptly there. The hard fact of the Anthony case and verdict is that other than what the media tried to make of it, this was never more than a case of an over reaching District Attorney trying to squeeze a first degree murder conviction out of what by all evidence was arguably at best a case of parental criminal neglect and lying. But the media in the usual clinical search for anything that smacks of a scintilla of salacious sensationalism moved heaven and earth to blow it into the second coming of the O,J, case dubbed crime and trial of the century.
Nearly sixteen years after the O.J. acquittal it’s worth taking a look back to see exactly why a young, irresponsible, impoverished no-name white woman, could suddenly should never be talked of in the same breath as O.J. and the real trial of the century. In fact, the very starting point for debunking the Anthony-O.J. comparison is the very fact that it’s even made in the first place. That is prima facie proof that a decade and a half later O.J. still gets tongues furiously wagging at the mention of the murders, and the name of the man accused of committing them, O.J. Simpson. That will not be said sixteen years or even sixteen days after the Anthony acquittal.
The reasons are simple. The O.J. case was the complete social, racial, celebrity, gender, and tabloid package. The murders of Brown and Goldman heightened racial tensions, as well as public awareness about domestic violence. They stirred rage against the double standard of wealth and celebrity privilege in the legal system, and elevated celebrity murder cases to media tabloid sensationalism.
Those were the gripping elements that made millions in the U.S. and globally gawk in awe and fascination for seemingly endless months at the often mundane and drab proceedings in the Simpson trial courtroom. This was the first real glimpse that these countless millions had of the inner workings of the court system. But that wouldn’t have kept them glued to the TV set if the key player hadn’t been one of America’s most indulged, dashing, and famed celebrity-athletes who was cooed and fawned over by advertisers, Hollywood paparazzi, and had a beautiful and young white wife. O.J. was the American Dream personified. He was an African-American who rose to the top of celebrity pyramid and had true cross-over appeal to whites. But what truly made the O.J. case the lasting talk of the town was race, or rather the term that quickly crept into the American lexicon, the “racial divide.”
In countless polls before, during and after the trial the majority of whites was absolutely convince that Simpson committed the murders and evaded justice, while a majority of blacks said he was innocent and that the verdict was a just one.
Prosecutors in the trial skillfully painted Simpson as an irresponsible, abusive and violent husband. This portrayal shoved the issue of spousal abuse and domestic violence into the public view. A number of states passed stiff laws mandating arrest and jail sentences for domestic assaults. Police, district attorneys and judges nationwide promised to arrest, prosecute and sentence domestic batterers.
The horde of Simpson media commentators, legal experts and politicians who branded the legal system corrupt also fueled public belief that justice is for sale. Simpson’s acquittal seemed to confirm that the rich, famous and powerful have the deep pockets to hire high-priced, high-profile attorneys, experts and investigators who routinely enable their well-heeled clients to weasel out of punishment.
Then there was the media which struck pay dirt with Simpson.
The Simpson case turned the slow drift of much of the mainstream media toward tabloid sleaze sensationalism and a headlong rush into celebrity trials. Staid mainstream publications that in times past would have back-paged a murder case, even a celebrity case, morphed into the National Enquirer, Star and the legion of other tabloids. A gaggle of daytime gossipy talk shows have since successfully parlayed innuendo, rumor, half-truths and outright lies into hugely profitable empires and ratings bonanzas.
In the decade since Simpson’s acquittal, newspapers and the TV networks have force-fed the public a bloated diet of Simpson-style sensationalism in the form of the Beltway sniper, Laci Peterson, Robert Blake, Phil Spector and other highly publicized murder cases. The Anthony case was only the latest in the sordid train of tabloid made court cases. The system worked the way it’s supposed to work in the Anthony case. Jurors looked at the evidence and found simply that the prosecution did not prove Anthony committed first degree murder “beyond a reasonable doubt. The jurors did the same in the Simpson case. But that’s the only thing about the Anthony case that remotely resembles O.J.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst and Monday co-host of the Al Sharpton Show. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

If Obama is Playing Politics with the Afghan Troop Removal Then It’s the Right Kind of Politics

2011-06-23T16:56:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney wasted no time in intimating that it was politics more than necessity that prompted President Obama’s cautious phased drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan. Romney’s gentle knock that it was politics not pragmatism of Obama was tame compared to other GOP critics who accused the president of playing politics with American lives in Afghanistan, compromising the security of American forces there, and subverting the training and security capacity of the Afghan police and military to maintain order in the country. And worst of all asserting that the troop reduction emboldened the Taliban to step up its war against US forces. The criticism is as wrongheaded as the insidious political motives of Romney and the GOP critics for making the criticism.
Obama is the last one that the GOP could gripe about when it comes to the willingness to use American might in Afghanistan. He has never shirked from that. Just ask Obama’s Democratic critics. For the past year they have loudly demanded that Obama get the troops out and get them out fast from Afghanistan. They have penned countless resolutions, declarations, statements, and convened party confabs, all hammering Obama on the Afghan build-up and continued bankroll of billions for a war whose aim of total victory is still mushy, unattainable, and a massive drain on the budget and the economy.
Polls consistently show that a majority of Americans also consider the war endless, futile and a massive drain on the economy. So the criticism that Obama is playing politics with his modest withdrawal of troops, or that he’s not getting the troops out fast enough seems even more far-fetched. The premise of both the GOP and the Democratic critics is that politics is the driving force behind Obama’s resolve to press the war.
Long before Obama won the White House he made it clear that he thought the Afghan war was the right war, in the right place at the right time. That was in stark contrast to his view of the Iraq war. He clearly saw waging war in Afghanistan as of critical importance to U.S. security.
In an August 2007 speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, D.C., Obama left no doubt that Afghanistan would be his number one priority. He made an impassioned promise to wage what he dubbed the war that had to be won.
Spelling out in minute detail his plan of attack, Obama vowed to drastically increase troop strength; ramp up spending on an array of military-related programs, such as mobile special-forces, pacification teams and intelligence operations; and to beef up military aid to Pakistan. He vowed to take the war to the Taliban in Northwest Pakistan. In a CBS Face the Nation interview the same year, he promised to "finish the job" in Afghanistan.
Even as he promised to set a firm timetable for eventual withdrawal from Iraq, he gave no timetable for a similar withdrawal from Afghanistan. He did just the opposite. He vowed to end corruption, hold free elections, bolster Afghan security forces, boost intelligence gathering and monitoring, beef up Afghan security forces, and ensure a stable government in Afghanistan.
He took much heat for it then and the temperature level went up even higher after he upped the ante in the number of ground forces in the country his first year in office. Obama heard and ignored the Democrats that pounded him even harder for his decision to escalate. The killing of bin Laden didn’t change Obama’s view that the war still had to be prosecuted for all of the strategic reasons that he has repeatedly talked about for the past three years.
Given Obama’s unrelenting commitment to the war and its aims, as problematic as it is of completely achieving those aims, his withdrawal of troops, any troops, from the country has to be considered a move in the right direction. It shows that he is willing to buck hard line conservatives and many in the military that scream that any drawdown of troops is a prescription for defeat. It also finally puts him firmly on the path to doing what Democrats insist that he do and that he bring the war to a final close.
Obama understood that the Iraq war was an ugly and shameful page in U.S. history and that millions of Americans were furious and frustrated by it. The same can be said of the Afghan war. And there have been no shortage of Obama war critics to make that point. Now they’re at least getting him to take the first step that they wanted and that’s begin the troop withdrawal. If that’s what’s considered playing politics with the war, then it’s the right kind of politics.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Commentary - Turn Right USA racist political video in California 36th Congressional district special election

2011-06-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

It is difficult to be a Black Conservative/Republican. There is no end to the stereotypes and accusations that are made to any African American known to be of such a political influence. But some days it's far harder than others based on the comments and/or actions of individual politicians and organizations (though such a liability is never shared among Black Democrats for the equally offensive actions of their Party). Today though I am enraged.

In California, there is a special election taking place in the 36th Congressional District. The candidates are Janice Hahn, a LA Democrat Councilwoman, and Craig Huey, a Republican and Tea Party member. I know nothing about either of these candidates before today, and nothing of the special election. But what I have learned is more than enough to turn my stomach.

The race is about to get a lot of attention. Not because of the quality of the candidates, or the message they are giving to their constituents. Simply because of racial and gender bias - which isn't coming from either candidate.

The source of the problem is the Turn Right USA PAC. An independent organization, created 6/13, that will raise fiunds and promote Republican candidates in whatever manner and priority they deem appropriate. This is normal for a PAC, both Democrat and Republican. Turn Right USA directly states they have no connection with any candidate or political party. But what Turn Right USA has done is beyond the pale of bad taste, disrespect, and prejudice.

To give the full story and context, several years ago a gang intervention task force was created to improve releations between police and the Watts community in an effort to reduce gang violence. That task force was created by Councilwoman Hahn, and she actively worked with the group.

2 police officers, Ryan Moreno and Chuck Garcia, were initially part of that task force. They were later reassigned due to multiple complaints of abuse of authority, which the officers felt were untrue and fabricated. Councilwoman Hahn did not agree, nor did the officers superiors. The reassignment was stated as having no connection to Hahn.

This connection further lead to questions if active gang memebers and a rapist were being paid, via the task force and Jim Brown's Amer-I-Can organization. Such allegations were never found to have validation, and the police officers (who sued due to the reassignment) lost their court case.

All that leads to today. The issue of gang members receiving payment and favors from Councilwoman Hahn have continued to dog her. It is an issue in the 36th Congressional District special election. Turn Right USA used this issue to create a political video attacking Hahn.

The video dredges the worst of stereotypes against African Americans. It has a White woman at a stripper pole (supposedly Hahn) that suggestively shakes her ass (in daisy duke shorts) at 2 Black men throughout the video. The 2 men, carrying AK-47's, dressed in popular ghettofabulous clothing, go through a rap that is demeaning to say or hear while they remove dollars from the shorts of the woman.

It is blatantly racist. I expect the NAACP will agree. I have no doubt every women's organization will denounce the portrayal of Councilwoman Hahn (even NOW which has been itching to have someone to condemn since they have been silent against Rep. Anthony Wiener). After much debate, we will show you the video so you can see what we mean.

California Republican Party spokesperson Mark Standriff stated,

"The video in question is highly offensive and totally inappropriate, and has no connection whatsoever to the Huey campaign or the California Republican Party."

We should hope the California Republican Party, the people of California, and every American across the nation would find this beyond offensive. Obviously, at least 1 woman, 2 Black men, and Ladd Ehlinger Jr who produced the video defy our hope. Either that, or they have a moral compass that can be swayed easily by cash, it would seem.

Ladd Ehlinger Jr. defended himself as follows

"The DCCC and Janice Hahn demand that the video come down and that I apologize!

My answer: No! I didn't kill anyone. I didn't even enable anyone to kill anyone. And... oh yeah: suck it! The ad's funny. It makes me laugh. So if, for some reason, it's pulled by youTube, a thousand will be launched in its place all over Algorez' Internetz. Because you're only drawing more attention to your past of supporting criminals, Janice, and forcing policemen out of their jobs for doing their duty. So there you go. Claim victimhood all you like, but how many people were victimized by your coddling? There's a reason Mayor Villaraigosa took the program away from you. He's a Democrat. So are you. Think about it."

...Before you charge racism at the ad, consider her one line in the video: "It takes a different kind of person to speak the language." By that she means, it takes black people to talk to black people. It takes gang members to talk to gang members. They have their own language, we should coddle them. They're not responsible for their actions if they murder someone, rape someone. They're a minority."

So in conclusion I come to this:

The gang intervention task force may or may not be a good idea, I have no way of knowing across the country and the case to prove the allegations is never made. Councilwoman Janice Hahn apparently has no credible proof connecting her to any of the allegations made. BUT even if both those things were true, the video above would still not be validated.

This is not funny. On any level, to anyone that has enough intelligence (in my opinion) to understand Sesame Street. It is vulgar, demeaning, and stereotypical in the very lowest manner.

As for calling this racist, it is. One partial sentence, without context, always looks bad. Perhaps the meaning is what Ladd infers, which would not be good. But again, it DOES NOT validate the video. It does NOT make the video less racist.

I am a Black Puerto Rican Conservative and Republican. I am passionate about the issues facing the nation. I have written about them for years, and actively been involved in politics on a national and local level.

So I have no doubt in saying that if Turn RIGHT USA believe this video statement helps anyone except racists seeking validation for their views, I am unaware of how. I have no doubt in saying that this does NOT promote Republican views or values. I have no doubt in saying that politically this is a benefit to Councilwoman Hahn, and a detriment to Graig Huey. And I believe that Huey should immediately denounce the video and remain distanced from Turn Right USA.

In fact I believe every Republican should avoid the Turn Right USA PAC like the plague.

America does not need racist, demeaning, accusatory political videos to enflame the public and mislead voters. America needs voters to be informed and involved. Political party preferences do not change any of that.

Only your support allows us to provide election coverage, political event coverage, and our political commentary. Visit Alchemy at World of VASS, and/or World of Vass - help keep us going. We appreciate your support.

Florida must be proud of Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz

2011-06-08T16:08:00.000-07:00

Written by Michael Vass

Something that might have been missed as the attention of the nation has been fixed upon Rep. Anthony Weiner is a comment by the head of the Democrat National Comittee (DNC), Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D - Florida 20th congressional district). The shame is that such a racially tinged comment deserved to have light shed upon it, even though the media tends to avoid showing Democrats in such a negative manner. Even when it is deserved.

Rep. Wasserman Schultz was on TV One, and a discussion of voter identification was underway. That was when she decided to make a nonsensical, fear-mongering, inaccurate, and insulting statement. Here is the video:

She has since offered this feeble explaination

"Jim Crow was the wrong analogy to use. But I don't regret calling attention to the efforts in a number of states with Republican dominated legislatures, including Florida, to restrict access to the ballot box for all kinds of voters, but particularly young voters, African Americans and Hispanic Americans."

Let's start this with a bit of history, which it seems Rep. Wasserman-Schultz slept through in school.

Jim Crow laws were created in 1876, lasting until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, by Democrats.

Voter fraud, and attempts to prevent it, are hardly the equivalent of segregation

That said let's think about today. Identification is required for a multitude of reasons.

Valid ID is required to get a Driver's License, Government aid, a job, entering a Government building, even making a purchase of cigarettes, beer, and/or using a credit card.

Does Rep. Wasserman-Schultz think it is racist to be asked for ID if you are Black and buying cigarettes? Is it racist for the Government to require ID to provide minorities unemployment checks?

Exactly where does race come into the process of verifying who you are before you vote? Or is the DNC so desperate to paint Republicans as racists, and therefore shore up votes for President Obama in 2012, that they will reach for any and every situation under the sun?

Worse yet, does Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz think that minorities and younger Americans are without the capability to get and maintain identification? The comment seems to imply that minorities, and the young voters, are so helpless and unintelligent as to require special help - that only Democrats can muster. Even in the explaination after the comments.

Comments are coming from all sides on this. Joe Hicks of PJTV has said

"As someone who grew up during the last years of Jim Crow discrimination laws and who later headed the western regional office of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, my remembrance of that awful era tells me that the new chair of the DNC is a woman who is historically ignorant, racially insulting, and incredibly arrogant. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has chosen to act as the attack dog for Barack Obama, and it appears that crass race-baiting will play a large role in the strategy to keep blacks chained deep inside the Democrat's racial reservation..."

Kevin Martin of Project 21 (a conservative Black organization sponsored by the National Center for Public Policy Research) said

"Progressives such as Debbie Wasserman Schultz are in full panic mode as more and more Americans sour on their brand of politics. The fact of the matter is that the progressive brand failed because the poor and working class as well as the minorities that progressives claim to empower are bearing the brunt of their failed policies."

What has the NAACP said of the comment? The same thing as the Rev. Al Shrpton, Rev. Jesse Jackson, and every other "Black Leader" or pro-Democrat organization that we could see in searches for comment said - nothing. They are silent.

Funny how when it's a Democrat using race to promote a political agenda, the media gets silent. Not like there is a precedence, especially in dealing with voter fraud/intimidation/verification. Say like the Black Panther intimidation case that was won by the Bush Administration and dismissed by the Obama Administration. Or say the multiple, multi-state voting registration violations by ACORN (who registered Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck - in Florida), which voter ID would prevent.

Truely, the voters (all of them, not just the minorities and youth vote) of the Florida 20th Congressional district must be proud that they have an official representing them that is so uneducated, opinionated, and willing to use racially incendiary comments to promote a political agenda that she was promoted to head the DNC.

Quinnipac Poll sheds light on potential of Presidients of color after Obama

2011-06-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

Written by VASS - political commentary

For those that follow or are involved with politics, polls are akin to sports stats. This is never more true than as an election cycle is underway. But no matter how early in a race, nor how unimportant the subject may seem, there is critical data to be found in the best of the polling organizations. The recent Quinnipac Poll proves this.

Of course we could go over the results that most of the major media is reporting - that Mitt Romney is almost in a statistical dead heat with President Obama for the 2012 election (41% loss vs. 47% re-election for Obama with a 2.2% margin). Good news for Romney supporters and conservatives that want to see a change in the leadership of the nation. But that is not what caught our attention.

A more subtle issue, one that is more close to home for minorities, was revealed in the Quinnipac Poll. The question of race and the Presidency.

If we are honest, it is well known that the majority of people of color over the age of 35 did not expect to see a President that was a person of color in their lifetime. When President Obama rose in popularity, part of the appeal was the fact that this was the first legitimate chance for a person of color to attain the Presidency - no disrespect to Rev. Jesse Jackson. Thus, like with most Black movies and other products, support in the minority community was rallied. Because it is almost blasphemy to not support another minority in whatever endeavour - even if it is a miserable choice to make.

The reasoning on this goes back to the culture in America overall. Few African Americans have had the chance to be successful outside of entertainment. Even in that industry, the opportunities are highly limited. Roughly 7% of all people employed in the entertainment industry (in front of and behind the cameras) are people of color. In sports there are several major successes, yet how many people of color have EVER been able to reach the goal of ownership? In the business world the total number of CEO's that are people of color can be counted almost on 2 hands. In politics there are still areas of the nation, and positions of authority in Government, where a person of color has never been able to break thru the glass ceiling.

Thus, when the opportunity arises support tends to follow. The fear is that if the chance isn't taken, there many not be another to come.

So President Obama won the 2008 election with a support of minorities that was unprecedented. The need to break the glass ceiling was so extreme that such universal support will likely never again occur. But that leads to another fear.

President Obama MUST be exceptional. It is not enough that he is President, he has to be historical and great. Anything less infers that everyone else after him shares every flaw and mistake that he dislplayed. Any failure means that another person of color will have that albatross around their neck, above and beyond anything they themselves have to offer.

It is one of the reasons that so many pundits and individual people of color refuse to acknowledge any shortcomings of the Obama Administration. Why every excuse and substitution of blame is afforded to President Obama. For many older people of color the need to ignore the reality that for any other President they would be critical of is ingrained and subliminal.

So in looking over the Quinnipac Poll, the data on President Obama's approval rating and the more general question about an African American President in the future is very important.

The Quinnipac Poll found that :

9. Looking ahead to the 2012 election for President...Do you feel that Barack Obama deserves to be reelected, or do you feel that he does not deserve to be reelected?

Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Wht Blk

Yes/Deserves 46% 9% 84% 46% 42% 49% 38% 90%
No/Does not 48 88 11 45 50 45 56 8
DK/NA 6 3 5 9 8 5 6 3

AGE IN YRS....... INCOME............. POL PHIL.........
18-34 35-54 55+ <50 50-100 >100K Lib Mod Con

Yes/Deserves 48% 49% 43% 51% 45% 42% 82% 56% 18%
No/Does not 45 46 50 43 50 54 13 36 78
DK/NA 7 5 7 6 6 4 5 8 4

EDUCATION....

Union NoColl Coll

HsHlds Degree Degree

Yes/Deserves 56% 45% 48%

No/Does not 39 49 45

DK/NA 5 6 7

Overall, since March 2010, President Obama has been floundering between 40% and 46% that believe he should be re-elected. The trend against has remained fairly consistent at about 48% that think he should not be re-elected, the difference being the fluctuation of those that are unsure.

This is hardly exceptional. It presents the worst case scenario for people of color culturally - a person that has not lived up to expectations, and potentially means the doom of any future individual of color that might try after President Obama is gone. It may well spell one reason why the minority support of President Obama remains so high, nearly matched only by the Liberal ideology (itself a minority in political terms).

Given this data, the fear of there never, or more realistically not for decades, being another President of color seems to take hold. Considering the continued prevelance of a lack of people of color in positions of authority across the country, in business, and Government, the situation looks dire.

But then another piece of the poll data we reviewed caught us.

24f. If you honestly assessed yourself, thinking in general about - an African American president of the United States, is that something you'd be entirely comfortable with, somewhat comfortable, somewhat uncomfortable or entirely uncomfortable with?
Tot Rep Dem Ind Men Wom Wht Blk

Entirely Comfortable 76% 70% 81% 79% 76% 77% 77% 79%
Smwht Comfortable 14 18 13 14 14 15 15 14
Smwht Uncomfortable 3 5 2 3 3 4 3 3
Entirely Uncomfortbl 2 3 1 2 3 2 3 -
DK/NA 4 4 2 2 4 3 3 4

AGE IN YRS....... INCOME...........
18-34 35-54 55+ <50 50-100 >100K

Entirely Comfortable 77% 81% 72% 73% 79% 85%
Smwht Comfortable 15 12 17 16 12 11
Smwht Uncomfortable 2 3 4 4 3 2
Entirely Uncomfortbl 2 2 3 3 2 1
DK/NA 3 3 4 4 4 1

POL PHIL.......
Lib Mod Con
Entirely Comfortable 91% 78% 69%
Smwht Comfortable 6 16 17
Smwht Uncomfortable 1 2 6
Entirely Uncomfortbl 1 1 4
DK/NA 1 3 4

Across the board, in every category, there was overwhelming support for a person of color as President (the numbers were somewhat lower for a Hispanic, but still were at or above 53% in each category).

Thus we wonder, has President Obama decisively broken the glass ceiling? Has he ushered into the mindset of American society the realization that color of skin is NOT a factor in the quality and capabilities of the person? Could this lead to a more permenant change in society, and not just the trend of television commercials?

Is it possible that another person of color might be elected after the Obama Administration finishes it's run? Can the next potential person of color for President not be weighed down by the gaffes, broken promises, and missteps of the first Black President?

Only time will tell. But we believe that if society has made the turn past stereotyping, and sees each candidate as an individual with seperate strengths and weaknesses, then that is a problem for President Obama. It will mean that the block of support he has garnered, subliminal or not, because of his skin will break - weakening his chance at re-election.

Of course, if this is accurate, and the result is a loss due to the acceptance of society that people of color are as qualified for the Presidency, and as likely to succeed or fail, as anyone else - then President Obama has earned a place in history alongside Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Such a seachange in attitudes is well past due, and a loss of the Presidency is well worth such a far reaching gain.

But that is what we gleaned from the Quinipac Poll. Time will tell how close we are to reality.

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“President” Romney’s White (Male) House

2011-06-05T11:16:00.000-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
GOP Presidential nominee Mitt Romney was asked during the 2008 GOP presidential primary campaign what he thought about diversity. He gave the stock answer that he supported it in government and corporations. A little later Jay Leno in a late night interview asked him whether his administration would be truly inclusive. Romney tossed out the pithy one liner that he believed discrimination is wrong.

Romney managed to answer the question that has nagged every GOP presidential candidate (and president) since Nixon without saying anything. But it’s not a politician’s words that count. It’s their action and public record. Bush managed to blunt the hard criticism that a GOP White House is almost always a virtually an exclusive white, rich, male, clubby preserve with his arguably breakthrough appointments of Coin Powell, Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and Alberto Gonzalez, Attorney General.

But a Romney White House almost certainly could roll back the Bush clock. Start with his record on diversity as Massachusetts governor. When it came to appointing minorities and women to judicial posts his record was atrocious. The Massachusetts Women's Bar Association repeatedly lambasted him for his near exclusive white male state house. Romney partly in response to the public pounding, and partly with an eye on a presidential run where he knew his state record on diversity would be closely scrutinized made a slew of appointments of minorities and women to the state bench in his last year in office.

Romney's successor Deval Patrick, a Democrat, and the state's first African-American governor, wasted no time in knocking Romney for his blatant race and gender blind spot on appointments. In his inaugural address he made it clear that he would make diversity and inclusion a huge part of his administration. Romney, not surprisingly, did not attend Patrick's inaugural.

Romney now that he’s the declared GOP presidential candidate and the presumptive front-runner for the nomination can’t duck the diversity issue. The parade of Romney race tinged gaffes that include the metaphorical reference to hanging Obama, a joke about Obama’s birth certificate, using the racially offensive word “tar baby” to describe a public works project, and an animal reference in a pose with an African-American doesn’t tag Romney as a racist. He apologized or pleaded ignorance in every case. But it does touch off warning bells on race.
Then there are the questions about Romney's faith. The Mormons at one time clung tightly to a well-documented, race-tinged dogma for more than a century that blacks were an inferior race, could not be priests, serve on missions or be married in the Temple. Mormons were hardly the only religious group that hid behind the Old Testament curse of Ham as a cover for their blatant racial bigotry. Many evangelical fundamentalists did the same. The Mormons scrapped it only after church leaders said they got a revelation from God in 1978. That was a decade and a half after the great civil rights battles of the 1960s.

The Mormon leaders claim that they have convincingly junked their racist past, and tout their much-publicized genealogical research on African-American families, their aggressive missions in Africa, and the handful of blacks that serve in the important church body known as the Quorums of the Seventy to proof it. But Mormon leaders have also have rejected calls for the church to apologize for its century plus defense of that past.

Mormon change efforts are certainly commendable, but that doesn't lessen suspicion that the attitudes of rank and file Mormons toward race and gender issues aren't still frozen in time. The inherent social conservatism in the Mormon faith and practices further deepens the suspicion that a Mormon in the White House would hardly be prone to make diversity the watchword of their administration.

In opinion polls nearly half of all Americans have an unfavorable view of Mormons. They still see the faith as clannish, cultish, polygamy practicing, and far out of the mainstream of American religious traditions. They are rightly troubled that Romney's faith and conservative politics may be so meshed that a Mormon could not keep church and state matters separate.

Romney bristles at this notion. In a speech in December, 2007 he tried to put the fears to rest that his faith would not be an issue in his governing. Romney's right that his faith shouldn't be the determining issue in whether he's fit to be president. And an irony is that in some polls African-American Protestants are actually less hostile to Mormons than hard line white evangelicals. Still, Romney’s actions, not his words or poll numbers, on diversity are and should be a determining issue whether Romney is fit to be president. His record and words are anything but promising on this. And that’s more than simply a matter of faith.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Palin Presidential Scam Stays in High Gear

2011-05-31T08:09:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Sarah Palin has no chance at winning the presidency. And that’s what makes Palin’s incessant presidential scam intriguing and amusing. It’s intriguing because she gets away with, and amusing because most in the media and the GOP know it’s a scam but go along with it for sheer thrill, titillation, and even chuckles. The latest to feed the Palin presidential scam is the man who foisted Palin on the nation, John McCain. He told an interviewer with tongue probably wrapped way back in his cheek that Palin could beat President Obama. McCain didn’t really mean that. But as with much of the Palin presidential scam, he knew that uttering such nonsense was sure to snatch a headline. It was no accident that he uttered the inanity during the Memorial Day holiday weekend, a notoriously slow news time that further insured that this inanity would be hungrily snapped up by the press.
Palin dutifully did her part to feed the scam by tossing out an equally trite cliché that she had the fire in the belly for the presidential run. This stirred a few pundits to trot out the tired reasons why Palin could get the GOP nomination. She’s got hordes of screaming, panting aroused Tea Party activists behind her who’ll do anything to stop Mitt Romney from getting the nomination. She’s got instant name identification. The GOP field apart from Romney is a weak, motley crew of retreads, and hacks, with lousy or no name, no money, no traction, and that stirs no enthusiasm from GOP voters. The conventional wisdom is that Palin could get the nod by default.
It doesn’t work that way. It takes a sound, well-oiled, professional organization, painstaking delegate and caucus courting and support building, the ability to tap the corporate money spigot, and get the imprimatur of the party regulars to have any shot at the presidential nomination. Palin has none of that and has absolutely no intention of doing the work it takes to transform herself from a TV grasping mouthpiece into a serious GOP presidential candidate.
The man, outside of McCain, that did more than anyone else to create the Palin as presidential timber hype and hustle, Fox Network news boss Roger Ailes, said as much when he allegedly told an informant for New Yorker Magazine that he thought Palin was stupid and that she hadn’t done anything to elevate the conservative movement. But Ailes is in the business of news hucksterism, and he knows that Palin was never and could never string together a credible and coherent set of ideas let alone program that could boost legitimate conservatism. But Ailes got one thing wrong about her. Palin’s aim is and always has been to boost conservatism, as long as that conservatism is spelled PALIN.

Palin, though, continues to have shelf life, despite her plummet from popularity, for the same reason that she was foisted on the public in the first place: She is a virtual Hollywood casting-call prop for a media that routinely pawns off fluff for substance, and a public that grabs at it. Palin had plenty of the required fluff and that makes her even more of a serviceable attraction. She is Hollywood Stars, Jeopardy, American Idol and the Big Spin all rolled into one. She is crass entertainment and provides prurient relief from the traditional, staid, scripted way politicians say and do things. Her inanities have the faint ring of truth and light to them, and for many represent a frontal challenge to the established order. Being a “she,” with a pretty face to some, and a folksy, home-schooling mom demeanor made her a sure thing for a media starved for ratings, viewership and ad dollars. When she spoke, it was lights, camera and action. Palin, in short, was a media cash cow.

For a time, she even had some value for the GOP. She could say what GOP mainstream political leaders couldn’t, and say it in a way that would get the hoots and whistles from the millions that wanted the GOP to get down-and-dirty and call Obama out. A too- loose cannon running around, whipping up the mob frenzy against Obama, though, posed the danger that some of that frenzy might turn against GOP politicians for not being tough enough in standing up to Obama. The GOP walked a fine line with Palin.

In the wake of Obama’s take down of Bin laden, his triumphant, statesmanlike series of speeches and meetings with European heads of state and with G-8 leaders, his land on the right side of the Arab Spring, and daring for trying to break the logjam on the Middle-East conflict, and touting immigration reform, and his dash to disaster scenes, his stock has climbed higher. Meanwhile with the GOP shooting itself in the foot with threats to hack up Medicare and Social Security, the party is in an even crazier search for someone to at least look like if not be competitive with Obama.
Palin isn’t that one, But as long as she can keep her scam going that she just might be the one, the Palin presidential scam will stay in high gear.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Herman Cain and GOP Presidential Nomination is an Oxymoron

2011-05-24T21:01:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
The name Herman Cain and the words GOP presidential nominee is a pitiable oxymoron. But the irrepressible talk show host and former Godfather Pizza CEO still thinks that he can stand the GOP on its head and get it to nominate him, an African-American, as its 2012 presidential standard bearer. Cain certainly has the right stuff to be considered a serious contender. He’s articulate, passionate, and spouts the hardcore conservative line backing draconian immigration crackdowns, opposing abortion, and gay marriage, backing a muscular military, repeal of the health care reform law, a wildly regressive national sales tax to replace income taxes, and scaling government to the bare bone.

Cain has consistently scored at the top or near the top in straw polls by Tea Party activists and leaders as their choice to carry water for the party. And judging from the mostly white crowds that Cain has whipped into a frenzy when he lambasts Obama and big government, Cain has effectively trumped race. Or has he? It’s one thing to shout the right buzz words to a crowd that’s in lock step with the candidate in beliefs, but it’s quite another thing to get those same voters to punch the ticket for an African-American, no matter how conservative, in the primaries. Cain banks that they will do precisely that because many white Democrats pushed race aside and backed Obama in 2008. But what Cain forgets is that many didn’t. And it was based purely on race.
That was evident in Obama’s bruising primary battles with Hillary Clinton in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Texas when Clinton got a majority of white Democratic votes. A 2006 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a Yale political economist found that in 2006 House races; Democrats were nearly 40 percent less likely to back a black Democratic candidate than a white Democrat. Two years later, that changed somewhat in part due to Obama’s race neutral campaign, absolute voter disgust with the GOP corruption, and scandals, Bush’s domestic and foreign policy fumbles and bumbles, a lackluster GOP presidential contender and a laughingstock GOP VP contender, and a tanked economy.
Cain is also buoyed by the Congressional wins of black GOP candidates Allan West in Florida and Tim Scott in South Carolina in 2010. But West and Scott won in rock solid GOP districts, against weak, underfunded Democratic foes. Their wins were regional wins with absolutely no national implications, or for that matter any real influence in Congress. They are just two of hundreds of GOP congresspersons, and they are in no position to make, shape, or dictate policy whether in Congress or the party.
The GOP presidential standard bearer is a different matter. He is more than just Party’s most important political standard bearer. He is the standard by which the party is judged and gauged by voters. And that doesn’t just mean his philosophy, positions, style, and vision of governance. It means his visibility, and race does matter. If Obama had a tough sell with many white Democrats at least initially, Cain has an impossible sell with the broad rank and file in the GOP.
The same 2006 Yale study also found that white Republicans were 25 percentage points more likely to cross over and vote for a Democratic senatorial candidate against a black Republican foe. The study also found that in the near twenty year stretch from 1982 to 2000, when the GOP candidate was black, the greater majority of white independent voters backed the white candidate.
Elections are usually won by candidates with a solid and impassioned core of bloc voters. White males, particularly older white males, vote consistently and faithfully. GOP leaders have long known that blue-collar, white male voters can easily be aroused to vote and shout loudly on the emotional wedge issues: abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and tax cuts. For 14 months, the Republicans whipped up their hysteria and borderline racism against health care reform. These are the very voters that GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked on to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance.

The GOP’s “Win with the White Vote” strategy failed in 2008 only because of the frantic desire of millions of voters for change and the massive outpouring of support for Obama from black and Latino and young voters. An Obama Cain isn’t. And even if he were, the GOP’s Deep South and narrow Heartland, rural and non-college educated blue-collar whites, make up a huge, powerful and core GOP voting bloc. If the Party’s past and present racial history, is any gauge, Cain won’t do much to get them to pull the lever en masse for him. Cain will get his headlines, and win a straw poll here and there, but when it comes to GOP voters pulling the lever for a black man for president, the name Cain and the words GOP presidential nominee will remain an oxymoron.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

Why West’s Slur of President Obama Got a Headline

2011-05-21T09:53:00.001-07:00

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Princeton University professor Cornell West’s silly, shoot-from the lip slur of President Obama as a black puppet predictably got the headline that he knew it would for two reasons. The first is that the slur came not from the professional Obama baiters, Sarah Palin, Limbaugh, and Michelle Bachman, Tea Party leaders and activists, the shrill pack of rightwing talk show jocks, bloggers and websites. It came from West, a mediagenic, leftist black academic. Even that might not have drawn mention since West has repeatedly hectored, harangued, and tweaked Obama as a sell-out to corporate interests and for allegedly saying and doing nothing to alleviate black suffering. The strong language West used calling Obama a “black puppet” guaranteed the momentary tantalizing headline.
But West’s slur got traction for another reason. It came close on the heels of a recent Gallup poll that showed that Obama’s approval rating had taken a dip among blacks. It’s still high, but a dip nonetheless. The question then is did the president’s approval ratings drop among blacks because of the disaffection, unease, impatience that an increasing number of blacks feel toward Obama? Probably, and the chill toward Obama is based on a grossly inflated, wildly unrealistic expectation of what Obama could and can do in the White House, and has done.
The Congressional Black Caucus was the first to signal impatience with Obama last year after when they publicly demanded that he spend more money and initiate special programs to reduce the near Great Depression levels of joblessness in poor black communities. There was even some talk that Caucus members would vote against his financial reform bill if he didn’t kick in more funds for job programs for blacks. It was just talk. But the empty threat got some attention, and was the first sign that the near solid black support Obama had enjoyed during and after his election win was fraying at the edges.
But Obama has never deviated from the line that he virtually set in stone

the first day of his presidential campaign. In his candidate declaration speech in Springfield, Illinois in February 2007, he made only the barest mention of race. He had little choice. Obama would have had no hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, let alone the presidency, if there had been any hint that he embraced the race-tinged politics of Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. His campaign would have been marginalized and compartmentalized as merely the politics of racial symbolism. The month after he got in the White House he mildly chided Attorney General Eric Holder for calling Americans cowards for not candidly talking about race.

However, this was not to cold shoulder talk of race, the plight of the poor, the crisis of unemployment, education and the criminal justice reform, and the staggering health care crisis that slams poor blacks. It’s just a matter of style, timing and nuance. The string of Obama initiatives on health care reform, increased funding for education, a tough consumer protection agency, a nod toward drug law reform, the appointments of legions of African-Americans to agency and sub cabinet posts have been Obama’s way to deal with the special needs and chronic problems that confront blacks. At the same time he walks a fine line. He knows that he’s being watched hawk like by his powerful political foes for even the faintest sign that he’s tilting toward blacks. This would be ammunition to turn the low intensity war they wage against his initiatives into a full blown racial counter attack against him.
This would fatally type him and his administration as anything but a race neutral president and insure that his legislation and initiatives would be twisted, tied-up, and straight-jacketed. It would also stir a push back among some within his party. His administration would be hopelessly hamstrung. His 2012 re-election bid would instantly be transformed from a tough but eminently winnable race, into a hard, time consuming uphill war.
Then there’s the nature of what the presidency is and entails.
Obama, as all presidents, is tugged hard by corporate and defense industry lobbyists, the oil and nuclear power industry, government regulators, environmental watchdog groups, conservative family values groups, conservative GOP senators and house members, foreign diplomats and leaders. They all have their priorities and agendas and all vie hard to get White House support for their pet legislation, or to kill or cripple legislation that threatens their interests. The presidency by definition is a series of deft political compromises, conciliation, give and take, trade-offs, quid-pro-quos, and straight out horse trading. Presidents must navigate through the treacherous shoals of the myriad special interests that routinely dominate beltway politics. This is the price that all presidents must pay to achieve pragmatic, effective White House governance. He’s done that as well as the better presidents. To call Obama a black puppet tells more about the name caller than the president. But it still got the predictable headline.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson