NAACP Still Hasn’t Atoned for Sherrod Blunder

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

NAACP president Ben Jealous caught holy hell from black bloggers for his astoundingly embarrassing rush to judgment applauding the curb toss of Shirley Sherrod. Jealous, of course, quickly reversed gear and admitted that he and the organization had been snookered by the rightwing attack hack Andrew Breitbart and Fox News.

But that begs the larger question, really two questions. Why was the NAACP snookered? And even after it realized it was conned, has it done enough to atone for its colossal blunder? The answers to both questions aren’t pretty. The group clearly had the tea party on its mind when it made the quick call on Sherrod. It did not want to be yelled at by tea party activists and the rightwing smear machine as hypocrites, for double dealing the race card, and for being soft on alleged black racism.

The NAACP’s knee jerk overreaction and appeasement had everything to do with timing, as it turned out bad timing. It came on the heels of the blowback that the NAACP got for its convention resolution a week earlier blasting racist elements in the tea party. Breitbart made no bones about why he trotted out the lying tape when he did. He said that he wanted to hit back at the NAACP. The NAACP could have easily ignored it, or taken a few moments to check it out, and found it to be the fraud that the world now knows it be. It didn’t and for that it took the deserved heat. The NAACP, though, has done too much, and is till to valued an organization to be endlessly beat up on for its act. Just don’t let it happen again. But the second question is still crucial and that’s has it really made up for its flub to the person hurt the most by its rash action, and that’s Sherrod.

The answer is no. Start with the retraction. The statement it issued was weak, tepid and non-committal. It did not call for an apology. It did not issue a ringing call to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to immediately and fully reinstate her to her position. It did not criticize Vilsack for making his bonehead decision to fire her. It did not promise to do an internal review and soul search within the organization to find out why it rushed to hail Sherrod’s firing and to insure that hasty decisions won’t be made again. It did not pound the tea party and the right wing attack machine. It covered itself by again repeating the patently unnecessary mea culpa that the NAACP has zero tolerance for discrimination. This is exactly the reason the organization gave for praising the swift kick to the curb of Sherrod. Unlike Vilsack and President Obama, it did not formally apologize to Sherrod for its act. It referred to the Sherrod debacle as the worn cliché teachable moment, but gave no hint that it learned the lesson, and that is to hit back and hit back hard against the right, and not just with a paper resolution. Finally, the NAACP has not even demanded that Breitbart remove the offending video (it’s still on his site) calling Sherrod a racist. The NAACP, Instead, has clamped a wall of silence on the sorry episode preferring to simply move on.

Unfortuately, Sherrod can’t. The NAACP hasn’t done much to see that she can.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He hosts a nationally broadcast political affairs radio talk show on Pacifica and KTYM Radio Los Angeles.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

President Obama Should Say Yes to the NAACP Convention

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

An Obama will again address the NAACP’s annual convention starting July 9 in Kansas City. It just won’t be President Obama. First Lady Michelle Obama will give a talk, and it’s not really billed as a key note talk, more an informal workshop type discussion on her signature issue, the campaign against childhood obesity. She’s not listed in the confab’s 10 page schedule of speakers, panels and workshops.
There are two thoughts about the president’s no show at the convention. One he’s adhering to his avowed, cautious, goal of doing and saying nothing that belies his race neutral stance as the president of all the people. An appearance or a message to the convention wouldn’t violate that. He appeared last year and there was no issue. And every Democratic and GOP president including Reagan and W. Bush has either spoke to the convention or delivered a message to the convention since there’s been an NAACP convention. With the exception of Bush, and only because he boycotted the convention for the first six years of his White House tenure, presidential addresses raise no eyebrows. The other thought is that Obama fears that an appearance before a racial advocacy group like the NAACP will give more ammunition to the Obama loathers, Palin and tea party activists. This is even less plausible. A no-show at the NAACP convention won’t do anything to stop their non-stop pound of his agenda and him. And he almost certainly knows that.

Obama did not give an official reason why he’s skipping the convention. But one can fill in the surface blank. His plate groans with Afghanistan funding and logistic problems, putting the finishing touches on the financial reform bill, the BP spill, and the looming fight over energy reform bill, stalled jobless funding bills, and the never ending press of requests to promote Democratic candidates. These are all plausible reasons for skipping the convention. But there are problems with his no show. He’ll be in Kansas City the day before the start of the convention to attend a fundraiser for Democratic Senate hopeful Robin Carnahan; so isn’t a schedule tweak possible? If not, a video message from Obama to the convention is certainly more than doable. An appearance or a message from him is the politically expedient, the practical and just simply the right thing to do.

The black vote has been the Democrats' trump card in every election for the past half century, win or lose. 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. The Through its voter education, vote awareness, and get out the vote campaigns, the NAACP played a colossal role in galvanizing and boosting the numbers of black voters, nearly all votes for Obama.

This is not old history. The 2010 mid-term elections are fast approaching. Political analysts, pundits, and even Democratic consultants are near unanimous that the Democrats will lose seats in Congress to Republicans. The only real question is how bad the political hemorrhaging will be. A solid and united GOP, and droves of independents who are disillusioned, disgusted and even hostile toward Obama, should make the black vote loom even bigger in Obama's calculus. There's little margin of error with this vote. He needs a reasonable facsimile of the November 2008 black vote outpour to save as many Democratic seats as possible, and serve as a partial shield against the withering non-stop assault from the GOP leaders, tea party activists, Palin, and Limbaugh on his agenda and his person.

It’s the right thing to do. For the past half century, the NAACP has fought tough battles in the courts and the streets for voting rights, affirmative action, school integration and an end to housing and job discrimination. The group still accurately captures the mood of fear and hostility the majority of blacks feel toward the Republicans, and the chronic Obama bashers. Whether Obama appears, sends a message, or simply comes and quickly departs Kansas City the day before the convention, the NAACP will still exhort, implore, and cajole blacks to vote, which again means votes for Democrats. The aim is to insure maximum support for Obama’s agenda and to do damage control against GOP attacks.

Obama needs the NAACP and the NAACP needs Obama. He’s still their best hope to hold the line against the GOP assault on job, education and health care spending and programs, as well as the fight for immigration reform, and the always crucial Supreme Court appointments. These are bread and butter issues and concerns for Obama and the NAACP. President Obama should say yes to the NAACP convention.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press).
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson

McCain’s NAACP Appearance Is Not a Lose Lose
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Republican presidential contender John McCain learned a lesson from G. W. Bush. That is from GOP presidential candidate Bush, not president Bush. In 2000, Bush braved the political chill and addressed the NAACP’s annual confab. There was absolutely no possibility that Bush would get anything more than a polite listen from the convention goers. They were nearly all generic Democrats, and would give Democratic presidential rival Al Gore the ritual ninety percent of the black vote. But Bush wasn’t trying to win friends at the convention he was trying not to make enemies. The last thing that he wanted was for blacks to see him as a white Southern, fundamentalist bible thumping, anti civil rights hard line conservative, but rather a racial moderate, and a compassionate conservative. If blacks saw him as a hard liner, it would virtually guarantee that they would treat the presidential campaign not as a campaign but a crusade and stampede the polls in big numbers to vote against him.
McCain’s foray to the NAACP is designed to do pretty much the same thing. He, of course, has got a far tougher act to follow with his Democratic rival Barack Obama than Bush had with rival Gore. The passion, even sheer thrill that blacks feel at the chance to back the first black presidential candidate with a legitimate shot at winning the White House is off the charts. Black voters have flooded the polls in near record numbers in some states to back Obama. Many were unabashed in saying in exit polls that race was the big reason they turned out. That feeling was very much in evidence when Obama preceded McCain to speak at the convention. Many gushed that Obama embodied what the NAACP’s near century struggle for racial parity was all about. That is to make it possible for an African-American to attain the top elected spot in the land.
But McCain’s point in appearing at the convention was still the same and that was not to antagonize blacks, and maybe, if he was lucky his and the GOP’s pet minority vote issues, school choice, business supports, faith based programs, increased HIV/AIDS funding might have resonance with some independent and conservative leaning black voters.
Still it seems a steep uphill for McCain to get even minimal traction among black voters. A May 30 Gallup Poll found that McCain’s unfavorable rating among blacks has leaped more than 25 percentage points since last June. But poll numbers in and of themselves don’t tell the whole story about how elections are won or lost.
The more important thing is whether a GOP candidate can get a small percentage of the black vote in the must win battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. In his two general election victories, Bush didn’t need to get a major bump up in black support to win, he just needed a marginal increase in the key swing states. He got the few percentage points he needed in those states and that made a difference in his wins.
McCain starts with something that Bush never had among black voters, and that’s a much higher favorability rating. The Gallup poll that showed McCain‘s unfavorable rating jump also showed a slight uptick in his favorability rating among blacks. It isn’t much, but it’s just enough for McCain to bet that by spending some time and resources in courting the black vote he could do what appears to be the impossible and actually win a small but significant percentage of their vote in some key states to make a difference.
McCain made that bet last September. He was the only major GOP candidate to agree to participate in a GOP presidential candidate’s debate on race and urban issues. He ultimately backed out but only after the other major candidates also declined to appear. Since then, McCain braved boos of the crowd at the fortieth anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. commemoration in Memphis in April, and even managed to turn the boos into applause when he did a public mea culpa for opposing a state holiday for King in Arizona. He then traveled to Selma to speak at the Edmund Pettis Bridge where civil rights marchers were mauled by police in 1965 to commemorate the Voting Rights.

The black vote in every election since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory over Goldwater in 1964 has not been in play for any GOP presidential candidate. That’s because with the arguable exception of Bush in 2004 they haven’t done anything to get it. McCain says this time he will. He won’t shake their massive support for Obama, but he doesn’t have to. He just needs a few more black votes in the right places to make the difference. The NAACP convention was one of those places.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is The Ethnic Presidency: How Race Decides the Race to the White House (Middle Passage Press, February 2008).