Obama Still Must Tread Carefully on Immigration Reform

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama is walking a slender tightrope on what’s still the most volatile, contentious, and potentially politically life threatening issue to Democrats. That’s immigration reform. At first glance, the political stars seemed to be aligned for him to do what Bush failed twice at and that’s get a deal on immigration reform.
The light trial balloon that he floated on reform punched the right buttons. He has respected GOP South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham on board and working on a reform package with key Senate Democrats. This drew barely a ripple of comment and ignited no loud denunciations from anti-immigration foes. The Federation for American Immigration Reform which whipped anti-immigration sentiment up to a fever pitch three years ago barely mentioned the Obama proposal on its website. The group issued no impassioned action alerts demanding that the immigration talks be stopped in their tracks. The Minuteman groups that made a clownish spectacle of themselves with their gun toting antics at the Mexican border are long gone.

There is no visible organized Senate opposition. The majority of Democrats in Congress backed reform bills in 2006 and 2007 and will back an Obama immigration reform bill again. The Latino vote is big, vocal, active, and getting antsy that no progress has been made on immigration reform. Latino leaders repeatedly demand that Obama back up his campaign pledge to push a reform bill through. They’ve also saber rattled Republicans that they can again kiss Latino vote’s good-bye if they dig in their heels and stonewall reform again.

The guest worker plan that infuriated anti-immigration activists in the previous failed bills was yanked from the current proposed bill. Obama and the Democrats have gone even further and given the GOP senators pretty much what they demand as the price for getting a bill through. Undocumented workers must pay hefty penalties, pay all taxes, learn English, and wait for an extended time before attaining citizenship. Obama must also assure that any bill mandate failure to comply could result in deportation. Obama must also pledge to hermetically seal the border to stop the flow of immigrants.
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A December America’s Voice poll found that a majority of voters and that includes Independents and Republicans, back comprehensive immigration reform. The number who said that undocumented workers should get the summary boot from the country has plunged. But there was a cautionary note in the poll, as with other similar polls. A majority are just as adamant that undocumented workers should not be given an easy stroll down the pathway to citizenship. They also demand strict enforcement of the provisions that undocumented workers pay taxes, and a penalty, be English proficient, patiently wait for approval, and that the borders be secured.
There’s also much devil in the details in the plan Graham and New York Democrat Charles Schumer have outlined so far. It’s the vagueness in those details that can be twisted and mangled by immigration reform foes to again try and torpedo reform. The foes have not totally disappeared. There’s still the loose network of anti-immigration organizations, and the legions of right wing talk jocks, tea baggers, and Fox News Network talking heads who can stir the troops to oppose any reform. The far right Christian Life and Liberty Net sent out a panicked alert mocking Graham as Grahamnesty and railed against him for backing amnesty for illegal aliens. The stock attack charge that any immigration reform bill is a de facto reward for breaking the law still stirs anger and passion in many Americans.
The loss of thousands of jobs, with official unemployment still nudging double digit, and with low wage American workers bearing the brunt of the downturn also presents a wedge for immigration foes. They almost certainly will again hammer that undocumented workers snatch jobs from needy American workers. The charge has been totally debunked but it still touches a raw nerve.
Immigration reform can’t be separated from partisan politics. The November mid-term elections are months away and Democrats have already suffered three hammer blows in losing a revered Senate seat in Massachusetts, and governorships in Virginia and New Jersey. Many Democrats will be squeamish about the risk of more losses if immigration opponents gather steam and again turn immigration into a finger-pointing, contentious, and polarizing issue.
Obama still has a major fight on his hands to get a health care reform bill passed. The bill is not on life support, but there’s still no guarantee despite the towering concessions Obama and Senate Democrats have made to get a bill, any bill, passed that that will happen. To risk stoking the same voter fury over immigration as health care has would be political folly.

Obama gave immigration reform short shrift in his State of the Union. But he’s put it back on the nation’s table. That’s a good thing. Now that he has the watch is on to see how hard or light he’ll tread on the issue.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles, Fridays 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles, Saturdays Noon PST.

Good Reason Blacks Give Obama A Racial Pass

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The undeniable fact is that President Obama has gotten a racial pass from blacks. This tormenting fact ignited brief finger pointing between the Reverend Al Sharpton and talk show host Tavis Smiley. It’s hardly the first time that blacks publicly and more often privately have wrung their hands over Obama’s absolute unwillingness to say and do more for blacks. This prompts even more hand wringing over why blacks still give him an irrevocable pass. The hand wringing is as pointless as the demand for Obama to embrace a black agenda. It’s not going to happen, in fact it can’t happen.
Obama etched that in stone from 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. The focus was on change, change for everyone. He had little choice. The institution of the presidency, and what it takes to get it, demands that racial typecasting be scrapped. 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 Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. His campaign would have been marginalized and compartmentalized as merely the politics of racial symbolism.

Obama will cling tightly to the centrist blueprint Bill Clinton laid out for a Democratic presidential candidate to win elections, and to govern after he won. The blueprint requires that the Democratic presidential candidate tout a strong defense, the war against terrorism, a vague plan for winding down the Iraq War, while escalating the Afghan conflict, mild proposals to control greenhouse emissions, limited tax reform for the middle class, a cautious plan for affordable health care, pro business solutions to joblessness, and make only the most genteel reproach of Wall Street, and then stick to this script once in the Oval Office. Race talk is nowhere to be found on a Democratic president’s must list. The only time that changed was midway through Clinton’s second term. With no reelection cares, Clinton made a mild, tepid, public relations glossed stab at setting up a race panel to talk about the plight of black America. The panel talked, and talked and talked some more, made a few half hearted recommendations for change, and then promptly forgot about them.

But that didn’t matter. Blacks still swooned, gushed, and reveled in the Clinton magic and mystique. In polls, he ranked even higher than Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan as the “black” leader blacks most liked. It’s no different with Obama. He’s a Democrat. For the past half century a Democratic presidential candidate has been guaranteed an automatic 85 to 90 percent of the black vote. Blacks have been the party’s loyalist foot soldiers even as blue collar whites, and a significant number of Latinos, and Asians defected to the GOP. The withering assault from assorted racists, kooks, cranks, zanies, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, tea baggers, and GOP ultra conservatives further guarantees that blacks fear if they utter the most bland and meek criticism it will give aid and comfort to the enemy, and earn a slap as a race traitor.

But Blacks also sincerely want him to succeed. That’s not solely out of a mix of race pride, the eternal thirst for positive black male role models, and his eloquence. They’re fervently convinced that he truly has their interests at heart, and even though he can’t spout a “black agenda” he’ll work hard, quietly, behind the scenes to improve conditions for the black poor and needy. Then there’s the horrific alternative of a GOP takeover. Blacks are in stark terror that a resurgent GOP will mean a sink back to greater impoverishment, political disempowerment, racial polarization, and even racial violence.

Obama has repeatedly protested to the black critics that he’s not the black president, but the president. He’s pulled and 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.
If he gives the company store to Wall Street, waters down health care reform, and further bloats a bloated military, that’s the price anyone who sits behind the desk in the Oval Office, must pay to govern. The rules of presidential governance demand no less. Sharpton, the NAACP, Urban League, and the Congressional Black Caucus, have at times lightly chided Obama to do and say more for blacks, but they’re also realists. They’ll push him to work through the back door to increase spending and expand education, health care, and job creation programs for blacks. That’s more than enough reason they and most other blacks are willing to give him a racial pass.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His nationally heard talk show is on KTYM-AM 1460 AM Los Angeles, Fridays 9:30 AM and KPFK Pacifica Radio 90.7 Los Angeles, Saturdays Noon PST.

Blowing off Tea Baggers as Racist Misses the Point

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The new political article of faith is that tea baggers are blatant or closet racists. MSNBC’s Keith Olberman, Meghan McCain, and Captain Marvel Comics Captain America and his black sidekick Falcon, are the latest to poke fun at and pick a fight with the tea baggers over their alleged serial racism. Although it’s worth noting, Marvel Comics had a second thought about it and promptly apologized for the slam.

It’s true, that the very thought of a black man in the White House turns the stomachs of many tea baggers and they make no bones about that. The cameras caught a few ranting at the tea party convention, their signs, banners, Joker posters, confederate flags, Texas lone star flags, and crude borderline bigoted race baiting misspelled scrawls on signs and posters at their marches and rallies are ample evidence of that. They deserve to be mocked and dismissed as the loony, bigoted, paranoid cranks they are. The endless pack of conservative bloggers, talk show gabbers, websites, and web chat rooms that have made Obama bashing a lucrative growth industry with their endless knocks, crude racist digs, slurs, cartoon depictions have been wildly effective in working up some tea baggers into a fever pitch against Obama.

But the race rap against the tea baggers misses a big point, in fact several points that tell much about why they’ve roared on the scene seemingly from nowhere. And why they’ve caught the fancy of the public and media, triggered a nervous twitch among Democrats and send terror through the GOP mainstream.

Nearly two decades ago the GOP found that the always volatile mix of big government and economics could whip frustrated, rebellious, angry whites (and more than a few non-whites) into a tizzy far better than crude race baiting. Many blue collar white males were losing ground to minorities and women in the workplace, schools, and in society. The trend toward white male poverty and alienation became more evident in the early 1980s when nearly 10 million Americans were added to the poverty rolls; more than half were from white, male-headed families. Two decades later, the number of white men in poverty or among lower income wage earners continued to expand. The estimate was that more a significant percent of white males who voted in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections made less than $45,000 in household income.

The finger point was at the big, intrusive federal government that tilted unfairly in spending priorities toward social programs that benefited minorities at the expense of hard working whites. This is exactly how hate groups, the anti-Obama web sites and bloggers, and talk jocks craft the reason for the anger and alienation that many white males feel toward health care and by extension Obama. This easily translates out to even more fear, rage and distrust of big government. The vintage blend of anti-government politics, calls defending personal freedom, and was the neo libertarian war cry at the Conservative Political Action Convention and the tea party convention. The neo libertarian big government cry dwarfed the subtle and overt race bait appeals that were seen and heard at both conventions.
Tea baggers rail at Obama, the Democrats, and big government, the elites, and Wall Street. Yet, the baggers also grouse about abortion, family values, gay marriage and rights, and tax cuts, and not race.

Rightwing populism with its mix of xenophobia, loath of government as too liberal, too tax and spend, and too permissive, and a killer of personal freedom and choice has been the engine that powered two Reagan and Bush White House wins. Scores of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons have twisted and massaged wedge issues to win and hold office and to maintain regional and national political dominance. The GOP grassroots brand of populism has stirred millions operating outside the confines of the GOP mainstream. In 2008 many of these voters stayed home. Even Palin wasn't enough to budge them. Their defection was more a personal and visceral reaction to the bumbles of Bush than a radical and permanent sea change in overall white voter sentiment about Obama, the Democrats, and the GOP. They were ripe for the tea party movement, or any movement that keyed their anger and frustration into action.
The supposed prima facie proof that tea party movement is loaded with unreconstructed bigots and driven by race frenzy is that tea bag leaders won’t denounce the racists in their ranks. But that stamps no racial carbon print on tea baggers either. The movement would have to be structured, layered, and regimented with a unitary agenda and program for that to be the case. The all over the map views spouted at the Nashville convention should have exploded that myth. The disparate, disjointed, and scrambled, headless amoeba like character of the tea party movement gives it wallop, and makes it even more dangerous. Blowing off the tea baggers as bunch of closet hooded rednecks misses this point, too.

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).

Lots of Cooks Prepared the Compton Cookout Racial Insult Stew

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

University of California, San Diego chancellor Marye Anne Fox, the president of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity, UCSD student leaders, and a bevy of civil rights leaders, and black and minority California lawmakers leaped over each other to lambaste the now infamous Compton Cookout at UCSD as racially insulting, insensitive, and demeaning. On February 24, days after the furor broke, UCSD officials held a campus racial sensitivity teach-in to quell racial tensions on the campus.

The Compton cookout, of course, was the bone headed stunt by a handful of white and non white students at an off campus to mock, poke fun at, and revel in what’s presumed to be the sway and swagger of ghetto life. There’s a problem, actually, two problems with this. The air head students couldn’t conjure this up from whole cloth. They aren’t that imaginative. They lifted the wording for the invitation for the cookout from the online urbandictionary web site. The site has parlayed an online commercial empire out of irreverent lampooning of slang words and phrases, and then hustling some slang laced products at a pretty penny. There are nine Compton cookout mugs, banners, tee shirts and mouse pads scrawled with inscriptions and jive talk on the items, some with a hefty price tag. There’s also evidence that the UCSD racial spoofery is not isolated, that students at other campuses have had their own versions of Compton Cookouts.
“Naw, `hoe’ is short for honey.” (Dr. Dre, “Housewife”)

That’s the minor problem. The bigger problem is that urbandictionary, as the UCSD students, couldn’t conjure up the Compton Cookout inanity from whole cloth either. They’ve had overgenerous help from the endless parade of gangster rappers, some black filmmakers, and comedians continue to routinely reduce young black women to “stuff,” “bitches” and “hoes.” Their contempt reinforces the slut image of black women and sends the message that violence, mistreatment and verbal abuse of black women are socially acceptable. Despite lawsuits, protests and boycotts by women’s groups, gangster-themed films and rap music still top the popularity charts. Hollywood and music companies rake in small fortunes off them, and so do a few rappers.
“Bitch choose with me” (50 Cent, “P.I.M.P”)
The verbal demeaning of black women and the pile on of stereotypes of young black males as gang bangers, drive by shooters and dope dealers has made them the scapegoats for many of the crisis social problems in American society.
Some blacks cite a litany of excuses, such as poverty, broken homes and abuse, to excuse the sexual abuse and violence (both physical and rhetorical) by top black male artists. These explanations for the misdeeds of rappers and singers are phony and self-serving. The ones who have landed hard on a court docket are anything but hard-core, dysfunctional, poverty types. The daunting puzzle, then, remains why so many blacks storm the barricades in fury against a handful of harebrained students at a college, but are stone silent, or utter only the feeblest of protests, when blacks bash and trash. Or even worse, tacitly condone their verbal abuse. There are two reasons for that.
“Watch Your Bitches” (Beanie Sigel “The Reason”)

Blacks have been the ancient target of racial stereotypes, negative typecasting, and mockery. This has made them hypersensitive to any real or perceived racial slight from whites. That’s totally understandable, and civil-rights leaders are right to criticize the Don Imus’s, the Rush Limbaughs, and the legion of celebrities, politicians and public figures for their racial gaffes, slips or broadsides.
But many also fear that to publicly criticize other blacks for their racial attitudes, such disagreements will be gleefully twisted, mangled and distorted into a fresh round of black-bashing by whites. This is a lame reason for not speaking out, and speaking out loudly, against blacks who either out of ignorance or for profit, or both, routinely commercialize racial and gender trash talk.
Such failure fuels the suspicion that blacks, and especially black leaders, are more than willing to play the race card, and call white people bigots, when it serves their interests, but will circle the wagons and defend any black who comes under fire for bigotry—or anything else, for that matter.
“Can U Control Yo Hoe” ( Snoop Dogg, “R&G: Rhythm and Gangsta: The Masterpiece”)

The same standard of racial accountability must apply whether the racial and gender offender is a Snoop Dog or UCSD students. When it doesn’t, that’s a double standard, and that always translates into hypocrisy. The UCSD officials, lawmakers, and civil rights leaders were right to condemn the students for their blatant racial insult. However, be mindful that urbandictionary and the offending UCSD students aren’t the only cooks who prepared the Compton cookout racial insult stew.

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).

Tiger Digs a Deeper Hole

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Nice try Tiger but it won’t work. Simply gazing into the eye of a lone camera, taking no questions from reporters, and then making a terse plea for privacy, a promise to be a better Tiger, and dropping a hint that he’ll return to golf, won’t buy forgiveness or peace. It will do just the opposite. By saying so little, it still gives the legion of Tiger loathers plenty more ammunition to gossip, speculate, bad mouth and character assassinate. The record of course still reads that the only bodily damage done from his ill fated car crash was to himself, an agreed rupture with his wife, the flight of some top dollar sponsors, and the obliteration of his fraudulent, manufactured Wheaties Box All-American image. The injuries have healed, the wife has split, the sponsors remain in flight, and his made-up image is unsalvageable. But then again, it probably wouldn’t make much difference if Tiger prostrates himself in front of Barbara Walters or Katie Couric with millions watching, flagellates himself with horsehairs, and blabs about every sordid detail in his alleged trail of pay for sex play romps.

It matters little not because a sex, celebrity gossip, rumor and innuendo starved and obsessed mainstream media, and an equally sex, celebrity, rumor and innuendo gossip starved and obsessed public salivates at the prospect of scandal and titillation at the mishaps of celebrities. Nor because his repeated pleading that his personal life is his business, and his alone.

The hole that Tiger dug deeper with his self-interview was dug years ago. The whispers, innuendoes, and back biting began the instant that he exploded on the golf scene. He wasn't black enough. He was too black. He was too arrogant. He was too aloof. He was too selfish. The more Masters Tournament winner’s jackets that he draped on his torso and king’s ransom riches he piled up from tournaments won, the undertow of carping about him roared unabated. There were the personal and race tinged digs and cracks that golfer Fuzzy Zoeller (“fried chicken”) and Golf Channel's Kelly Tilghman (“lynch him”) made about him.

Woods graciously and diplomatically shrugged off the inanities and kept doing what he does best and that's win tournaments. It didn't stop the gossip mongers. Woods was simply too big, too good, and too rich for the tastes of a wide swath of the public and the celebrity crazed media.

Despite Woods careful and cautious downplay of race, for another swath of the public he was still a black sports icon who dominated what for decades was a gentlemanly, high brow, near sport of kings, white man's game. The price a black sports icon, even one that flees that straightjacket designation as Woods did, pays for resting on that high perch can be steep. One misstep and he or she can become the instant poster child for all that's allegedly wrong with celebrity, sport and society.
The oft repeated argument in Tiger’s defense is that he didn’t do anything more or less sordid than other celebrated, revered, and just as hypocritical sports icons have done and probably still do, and then tossing out a few names of some big name golfers to prove the point, cuts no ice. They aren’t gatekeepers for the storehouse of fantasies and delusions of a sports crazed public as well as advertisers, sportswriters, and TV executives in desperate need of vicarious escape, titillation, excitement, and profits. Woods was. Many of Woods’ golf competitors, who have demons and goblins in their past and present lives, wasted little time in taking their own pot shots at Woods for supposedly disgracing the game.

Woods got the rap from his golf buddies not because he was golf’s marquee name celebrity. He was also a bigger than life human being to them too. This carries the bigger the life responsibility and the even bigger than life special burden to please all and be all things to all people at all times on and off the links.

It’s not clear why Woods agreed to interview himself at this juncture in his personal and image rehab. It’s unclear whether the idea to face a lone camera was his idea or it was foisted on him by an image remake agency or his handlers. All that counts for the moment is that millions will see Woods’ mug again on their screens. This will be more than enough to set the tongues wagging furiously again. All Woods wants is to get back on the circuit with as little fanfare as possible and to bury the past. The problem is that most of the tongues that will wag about the self-interview won’t have much good to say about him. The moral of all this for Tiger is forget the apologies, just play golf and let it go at that.

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).

Palin is Obama’s Secret Weapon

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Sarah Palin may turn out to be Obama’s greatest political asset. Polls show that Obama is the most polarizing Democrat since Truman. Palin, in turn, is the most polarizing Republican since Lincoln. That makes her the perfect distraction, foil, and ultimately, perfect perverse Obama ally. Palin’s inanities, idiocies, and cartoonish utterances are now legendary. She is the butt of SNL laugh lines, giddily mocked and ridiculed by Democrats and the pundits, groaned at by the GOP regulars, and shunned by the man who plucked her out of the Arctic tundra and made her a household name, John McCain. Polls show that her approval ratings are dreadful, and the overwhelming majority of poll respondents say that she’s not fit to be president. But this only makes her even more bizarrely appealing.
She sells papers like crazy, and a Palin piece on web sites invokes pages of comments. She jumped Oprah’s rating to the highest in two years when she appeared on her show to hawk her book. The crowds that wildly cheered her during the presidential campaign and just as enthusiastically cheer her on her self-promotion jaunts around the country haven’t slacked up one bit. The networks stumbled over each other to cover her tea party convention speech. CNN, especially, sniffed a ratings bonanza in Palin and dispatched an 11 person crew to the convention, and then carried her mostly canned, standard bromide laced speech live.

The GOP regulars sneer and pretend to shun her. Democrats mock and poke fun at her. But in a year when the party pols are about as popular as the mumps, and Obama’s approval numbers have plummeted faster than the Hindenburg, Palin is the perfect every person’s anti-candidate. McCain certainly knew that. He gambled that her homespun matronly stump style, Down Syndrome challenged son, and Bible spouting, gun toting appeal would be tonic for his sagging campaign. Since winning elections is still as much about which candidate can win the hearts not the heads of the voters, Palin was the one to tug at the religious conservative’s heart strings.
If McCain had played it close to the vest and picked say Mitt Romney as his VP mate, it would have left him wide open to the rap that the best the GOP could do was put up two aging, multimillionaire white party warhorses. With the financial meltdown and public rage over Wall Street conniving and manipulation, along with the Bush administration's bailout plan that thumbed a nose at desperate homeowners, cash strapped small businesses, and down on their luck workers, Obama almost certainly would have routed that pair on Election Day.

Palin was the only possible antidote to that. She sent the signal for McCain that his administration would not simply be a recycled four more years of Bush policies. Few bought that, but with the deck seemingly stacked hopelessly against him anyway, Palin did just enough to make the final popular vote respectable for him.
Palin on the loose in 2012 would potentially render the same aid to Obama. Progressives, liberal and moderate Democrats will dutifully vote for Obama, vote unenthusiastically for him, or pay some lip service to Third Party challenges, and then grumble as they pull the lever for him. Palin poses absolutely no threat to his solid or lukewarm Democratic base. The mere mention of her as a possible candidate will terrorize disgusted Democrats out of their Obama inertia. The real damage that she can do will be to confuse, rile up, and split Republicans. Polls show that while voters in general say Palin’s not presidential timber, a huge minority of Republicans say that she is. That could translate out into millions 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 if her name is not on any ballot, stay at home. This would be tantamount to a vote for Obama.

Palin’s strength is playing on and stoking popular rage and frustration with tin ear politicians who’ve turned voters into invisible men and women. But much, of course, can change in the next two years. A sharp upturn in the economy, the disappearance of the much loathed by Palin’s cheerleaders of Obama’s health care reform package, the fade in public fury over Wall Street’s free booting wheeling and dealing, a wind down in the Iraq War, and the semblance of stability in Afghanistan, would make Palin an amusing, if not regrettable trivia question. For now, a mesmerized media, titillated public, and legions of Palin loathers, have made Palin the talk of the land. That talk is just fine for Obama.

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).

Why Obama Won’t Pardon Jack Johnson

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The head of USA Boxing recently announced that its centennial anniversary celebration of the famed Jack Johnson and James Jeffries fight in July, 1910 will be a national extravaganza. It will feature showings of the fight film, tours of the fight site and training camps, appearances by past heavyweight champions and live boxing. The centerpiece of the gala will be their "Jack Johnson Pardon Dinner. At the dinner, the promoters hope to announce that President Obama will grant a posthumous pardon to Johnson. At least, that’s the hope.

The Johnson-Jeffries fight is firmly etched in history as the fight that stood sport and race relations in America on its head. The brash, outspoken black champs thrashing of white contender Jeffries ignited nationwide racist panic and hysteria, and loud calls to prosecute Johnson for violating the Mann Act. The law made it illegal to transport women across state lines for immoral purposes. Many contend passing the act was a thinly veiled effort to nail Johnson for cavorting with white women. The anti-Johnson throng got their wish. In 1913, he was imprisoned for violating the Mann Act. To right the blatant racial wrong against Johnson, Republican Sen. John McCain and House Rep. Peter King last year pushed a resolution through the Senate and House of Representatives urging Obama to pardon Johnson.

The Justice Department quickly said no, saying that it does not traditionally pardon the deceased and that the president’s focus should be to pardon persons "who can truly benefit" from it. Obama can ignore the Justice Department and pardon Johnson but the odds he won’t. Presidential pardons for the dead are virtually unknown. Bill Clinton and George Bush are the only presidents who ever granted one. In 1999 Clinton pardoned Henry O. Flipper, the first black graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Flipper was wrongly accused of embezzling commissary funds. In 2008 Bush pardoned Charlie Winters for illegally selling decommissioned bombers to Israel during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Winters was convicted and served 18 months in prison. He died in 1984. Obama has yet to grant a pardon or commute the sentence of anyone living. He’s been one the slowest presidents ever to grant clemency.

Though the racial controversy that ensnared Johnson is a century old, and Johnson’s been dead more than a half century, a pardon for him is still a racial and political minefield for Obama. McCain and King don’t face that risk. They are white, conservative, Republican, and do not occupy the White House. Even if Obama quietly pardoned Johnson, he would likely not be hailed for righting a historic wrong but for playing race with a deceased black man who in his day flaunted the law and the moral code of society. Race and politics simply can’t be separated even when the recipient of justice is a dead man.

Obama acknowledged the peril of race in December when the Congressional Black Caucus saber rattled him to take special action to help chronically jobless young blacks and financially strapped minority businesses. Obama made it clear that he couldn’t and wouldn't do anything special for blacks.

The president’s bluntness on race was no surprise. In his candidate declaration speech in Springfield, Illinois in February 2007, he made only the barest mention of race. Obama talked about change, but change for everyone. He had little choice. The institution of the presidency, and what it takes to get it, demands that racial typecasting be scrapped. Obama got a bitter taste of the misery that race can cause a president him when in an unscripted moment he spoke his mind and blasted a Cambridge cop for cuffing and manhandling Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates. The loud squeals that he was a bigot, racist and anti police for siding with Gates bounced off the Oval Office walls. A chagrined Obama back pedaled fast and asked all for forgiveness.

Obama’s tight adherence to a race neutral script is not unique. Bill Clinton in the White House and Al Gore and John Kerry on the presidential campaign trail in 2000 and 2004 followed the same script to the letter. The script requires a Democratic presidential candidate to win elections, and if they win to formulate a moderate agenda on civil rights, poverty, failing inner city public schools, the HIV-AIDS crisis, and the racially skewed criminal justice system in written policy statements. And then say little, and do even less about them in the White House. If Gore or Kerry had won the White House, the likelihood is they would not have made these problems priority items in their White House.

Johnson tragically was a victim of American racial hysteria. His hounding and imprisonment was a grave historical wrong; a historical wrong that still screams to be righted. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely it will come with a White House pardon.

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).

Bail out Could Cost Taxpayers Thirty Times more than Reported

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


In 2008 and 2009, 50 separate Federal programs offered $23 trillion in loans, grants, or asset guarantees to the financial sector. Huh! This item was buried in paragraph 11 of 12 paragraphs in a joint statement that California Senator Barbara Boxer and Virginia Senator Jim Webb issued demanding taxing TARP monies executives used to compensate themselves. That’s more than 30 times more than the official $700 billion that Congress authorized to bail out the big banks and failed Wall Street financial houses. The $700 billion figure tossed out quickly became etched in financial stone. Then President Bush, President Obama, Congress, and the Wall Street and banking industry and every financial pundit cited the $700 billion payout as the maximum that taxpayers would be stuck with. Now almost as an afterthought, Webb and Boxer casually toss out the $23 trillion number.

Boxer and Webb made mention of it in a press statement to bolster their call for passage of the Taxpayer Fairness Act. This would levy a one time 50 percent surtax on bonuses on amounts over $400,000 in compensation and bonuses that the big banks and firms ladled out to their executives. Don’t hold your breath on this one, though. Boxer, Webb and the Senate was unwilling to impose this tax on the obscene bonuses that the big bank execs paid each other as a condition of getting the TARP money. The only thing that’s changed since then is that public fury at the non-stop record bonuses they pay each other has risen to fever pitch. And even if there was a congressional epiphany and payment required, the big banks that got the taxpayer cash will argue as they have every time a squawk is made about their obscene money that they’ve paid the money back.
Boxer and Webb’s move smacks of yet another empty gesture by two Senators feeling election heat to tap into popular rage at the bankers by appearing to be anti-Wall Street crusaders.
The outrage, though, should be over whether Boxer, Webb, the White House and Congress have come clean over how much the banks and financial houses dinged taxpayers for. One, two, or three federal agencies involved in the fed giveaway is one thing but fifty different agencies is another. The agencies that may have shoved more money to the banks and houses were known as early as April, 2009. In testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Tarp’s Inspector General listed the agencies and the projected dollar amounts.

Federal Reserve 6.8 trillion
Treasury –Non-Tarp 4.4 trillion
National Credit Union, Veterans Affairs, the Government National Mortgage Assn, the Federal Housing Administration, Federal Housing Finance Agency
7.2 trillion
Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) 2.3 Trillion
US Treasury 7.4 trillion

Several house reps screamed loud then that the treasury was mute silent or had stonewalled every effort made to find out exactly how much of the cash that the treasury actually doled out to the banks and financial houses. Nearly a year later they still really don’t know. The issue from the beginning has been transparency or the absence of it by the treasury. Congress has failed to force the federal agencies to tell what they have spent, and how they spent it. At the time of his congressional testimony last April, the Tarp inspector general had 35 criminal and civil investigations of banks and financial houses for accounting fraud, securities fraud, insider trading, mortgage service misconduct, mortgage fraud and public corruption false statement and tax investigations going. This wasn’t enough to trigger bells and whistles that treasury had grossly low balled the figures on the bailout.

Boxer and Webb had ample opportunity to demand and fight that the treasury and other federal agencies fully open their books on the amounts that were being spent. The White House and Congress have repeatedly publicly assured that bail out money ladled out came in way under the official $700 billion that Congress authorized, and that much of the money has been repaid. That still doesn’t tell what other help the big banks and financial houses got in the form of loans, grants, insurance or asset guarantees, and what federal agencies were involved. Boxer and Webb haven’t told us that either.

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).

Matthews May Have Almost Forgot Obama Was Black But Many Others Haven’t

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Chris Matthews got a mini-version of the Harry Reid treatment for his honest slip that he almost forgot Obama was black when he watched him during the State of the Union Speech. Matthew’s operative word is not black but “almost.” But it really wouldn’t have made much difference if Matthews had dropped the almost. The meaning, or at least the thought behind it, would still have been the same. Matthews just couldn’t stop thinking about race when Obama spoke.

Can’t be too hard on him, though, for his foot-in-the mouth blurt. Matthews, as Reid, simply muttered an uncomfortable but tormenting reality for Obama; and that’s that Obama’s presidency, eloquence, political acumen, and still sky high personal likeability has not buried thoughts about Obama and race in the skulls of many.
The racial pillorying of the president has been ruthless and relentless. There are countless active anti-Obama websites filled with demeaning racist cartoons, depictions, characterizations and racially poisonous verbal bashes and attacks. The sites have received millions of hits and posts—almost all unflattering.
The digs have worked. Polls show that a majority of Republicans and a significant percent of other respondents still think there's something to the charge that Obama is an illegal alien. On the eve of Obama’s State of the Union Address, and fully one year after his election, a California Field Poll found that, fully one-third of Californians nation's most populous state are not satisfied that Obama was U.S.-born. More than ten percent have convinced themselves that he's a Constitution-violating foreigner and nearly one-quarter aren’t sure.
The silly talk about a post-racial America after Obama’s presidential win was not merely exercises in self-delusion, honest wish and hope, or deliberately disinformed media chatter. Race, Obama or no, is and continues to be America's oldest, deepest and touchiest issue. Politicians know it. And they can subtly work the race card to inflame passions, deepen divisions, and bag votes. Or they can ignore it and hope that it goes away, at least until the votes are counted. With presidential candidates, and as we’ve seen with Obama in the White House, race has been a taboo subject for presidents and their challengers on the campaign trail for the past two decades. No president or presidential challenger, especially a Democrat, can risk being tarred as pandering to minorities for the mere mention of racial problems.

The double standard on race is troublesome to Obama. He backpedalled fast from his first, and impulsive, quip that the white Cambridge officer who man handled and cuffed Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates was out of line. The reaction to Obama’s Gate’s defense was savage and the backlash momentarily sent his poll numbers down. When the Congressional Black Caucus saber rattled Obama in December with the threat of voting against one of his financial reform measures if he didn’t do more to help black businesses and the black unemployed, Obama was unfazed. He told an interviewer that he would not do anything special to help blacks. He had too. He has one eye always nervously fixed on public opinion. The Gates flap reminded him again in no uncertain terms that race is a deadly minefield that can blow up at any time and the explosion can fatally harm him, his image, and his presidency.

But polls, white voter wariness over race and Obama's nervous eye on them can't magically make racial issues disappear. In each of its annual State of Black America reports the past decade the National Urban League found rampant discrimination and gaping economic disparities between Latinos and whites in every area of American life. In the past decade, the income, and education performance gaps between blacks and Latinos and whites have only marginally closed, or actually widened. Discrimination remains the major cause of the disparities.

Shunting race to the back burner of presidential campaigns invariably means that presidents shunt them to the backburner of their legislative agenda. Yet, presidents have not been able to tap dance around racial problems. Reagan's administration was embroiled in affirmative action battles. Bush Sr.'s administration was tormented by urban riots following the beating of black motorist Rodney King. Clinton's administration was saddled with conflicts over affirmative action, police violence and racial profiling. W. Bush's administration was confronted by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, voting rights, reparations, and affirmative action battles, gang violence, and failing inner city public schools.
The pile of racial or race leaden problems that always lurk just under the surface haven’t and won’t go kapoof and vanish. Matthews’s “almost forgot” crack about Obama’s blackness was just one more reminder from a windy, and obnoxious, talking head of that.

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).

Obama’s Tin Ear on Bernanke---And Company

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama ear can’t be that tin on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. His wink and nod at the Big Banks and Wall Street’s roulette play with public monies is a big reason for record breaking home foreclosures, record breaking bank executive compensation payouts, soaring bank profits, unemployment climbing again in December, a decade high number of Americans in poverty, and Scott Brown. Yet Obama’s still busily jawboning senators to ram Bernanke through the Senate.

The checklist of Bernanke flubs is well documented. There’s fraudulent AIG, JPM, and Bear Stearns bailout, the banks and financial houses went on a free wheel orgy in trading risky and ultimately hollow derivatives, the massive bait and switch sub-prime lending scams, the stonewall of details on how and to whom the Fed shelled out trillions through the Fed's special lending programs, the near total absence of tough regulatory oversight over the failed and flawed Wall Street banks and financial houses. All of this happened on Bernanke’s watch.

Wall Street and Obama administration mythmaking about Bernanke aside, he didn't save a system from collapse. He saved a handful of flopped banks and financial houses that engaged in dubious stock spins, swaps and game playing with investor and public monies from a crisis that he and they helped create.
Bernanke, of course, didn’t make the mess alone. The not embattled enough Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Obama top economic advisor Larry Summers with their free market, minimal regulations philosophy, and too cozy ties with Wall Street also fueled the crisis.
Volumes have been written about how Bush and the Republicans eagerly cut sweetheart deals with financial industry lobbyists to gut lending and stock trading regulations, winked and nodded at the banks and brokerage houses as they engaged in an orgy of dubious stock swapping, buys, and trading, conned millions of homeowners into taking out catastrophic sub-prime loans and watered down the oversight powers of government regulatory agencies.

But their financial free boot couldn't have happened without a huge policy change that Summers and another Obama advisor Robert Rubin engineered during the Clinton years to scrap most of the provisions of the decades old Glass-Steagall Act. The Act was the 1930s Great Depression era measure that kept federally insured banks out of the go-go world of stock trading, exotic lending and financial speculation. It also set rigid standards for mortgage lending and strict oversight over banking practices.
The predictable quickly happened with the regulatory gloves off commercial banks, brokerage firms, hedge funds, institutional investors, pension funds and insurance companies could do whatever they wanted when it came to investing in each other’s businesses and marching in lock step with each other's financial operations. Now Obama belatedly wants Glass-Steagall, or some reasonable facsimile of it, back. But can he convince his economic troika of that?
The Wall Street three give no sign of backing away from their belief that failing financial institutions must be propped up with massive amounts of taxpayer dollars, that the industry can police itself, and that Wall Street still holds the key to economic recovery.
The three have a lock on Obama. And since one of them has to face confirmation only once and pass muster and he has done that and the others are advisors, they can’t be dumped by the Senate, but Bernanke can. That is if Obama would cut bait on him. Obama’s made that clear that won’t happen. His ear is too tin.

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).

Time for Obama to Really Act Like FDR

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama never encouraged the media concocted, ad man’s fantasy land, comparison of him to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He didn’t discourage the comparison either. He was flattered by it. But with the Massachusetts vote debacle smacking him in the face, his only hope for rebound is to really act like FDR.

FDR knew he was in a political life and death, take no prisoners war with his political enemies-- the GOP, ultra conservative Democrats, Wall Street, the big bankers and big manufacturers. He repeatedly lambasted them as obstructionists and economic royalists. Obama is in the same war. They make absolutely no effort to mask their loath of his policies and presidency, and have made it clear they will stop at nothing to bounce him from office. This was before Scott Brown’s win. They’ll be even more bellicose, intransigent and war like against him and his agenda now.
FDR didn’t just hit back, and hit back hard, against the economic royalists. He did not make weak appeals and empty threats to banks and Wall Street to be responsible, do the right thing, and ramp up lending to businesses, farm and homeowners, and pump money into job creation efforts. He imposed tough regulations on them. One of the toughest was the Glass Steagall Act. The congressional gut of Glass-Steagall unleashed the orgy of Wall Street freeboot speculation, trading, swaps, and scams of investors, borrowers and the government that nearly wrecked the economy.

FDR’s bank and Wall Street rein in sent the blunt message that he meant business on financial reform and that this was a key to job creation, saving homes, and getting businesses up and going. FDR spent, and spent, and spent some more on jobs, housing, and social service, public works in the right way. FDR did not resort to smoke and mirror photo-op, PR, showpiece White House jobs summits, conferences, and imploring business councils to expand and create jobs. He put the money directly in the hands of the needy through the litany of alphabet recovery programs.

Obama has belatedly acknowledged that Glass-Steagall must be reinstated. That’s only a start. Obama should do what FDR did and plough stimulus dollars directly into government run job training programs, job banks, and public works projects.
FDR’s economic brain trust were tough, reform minded academics and public officials, not Wall Street, and corporate shills. Obama should put the same team around him. That means asking for the immediate resignation of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. His bumbles, manipulation and outright lies as New York Federal Reserve Chairman and as treasury secretary to cover up the malfeasance of AIG, Goldman, Sachs and other Wall Street wheeler dealers have done more to taint Obama as a hopeless captive of Wall Street. Giving Geithner the boot would reinforce a tough message that Wall Street and the banks must toe the administration line on reform.
FDR would quickly pull the plug if something didn’t work or worked badly to advance his agenda. The health care reform bill is that something. Obama should yank it off the Senate table. His mistake was not to battle for health care reform, but to battle for it at the wrong time and on the wrong terms. It was a fight that was preordained to be long, contentious, embittered, and ultimately shamelessly compromised; a fight that let a GOP, flat on its back, off the canvas. He should revisit the issue later and this time write the bill himself with a fully functioning public option, firm cost containment measures, and tough monitoring provisions. Then quietly and patiently sell congressional leaders and the public on it.

FDR made sure that when he went to war it was truly the right war in the right place at the right time. He had America’s allies and the American people firmly behind him. Afghanistan and certainly Iraq are not the right wars, and only for a brief moment did they have the full cooperation of America’s allies, and the American public firmly behind them. Obama should set and stick to a firm date for withdrawal, call a regional conference of allies to inform them of the exit plan, and then demand that they make regional security, containment, and peace as much their responsibility as the US’s. He should then announce that the billions saved from disengagement will go directly into a massive program of jobs, education, housing expansion and infrastructure rebuilding—in America.

FDR did not substitute rock star photo op, stagey, high profile media posturing for tough leadership. When the GOP and the press wrote the epitaph for him midway through his second term in 1938 and a decade later wrote the same epitaph for Truman both came out swinging. FDR took to the airwaves and blasted the economic royalists. Truman tooled through the nation with his famed whistle stop train campaign and hammered the do nothing GOP congress.

FDR and Truman fired up their base, inspired millions of Americans, continued to push reform, and kept the presidency. Obama could do the same. But only if he really acts like FDR.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Where Was the World When Haiti Really Needed It?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The heartbreaking and pathetic scene I and a group of other American visitors witnessed at the small beach town in Northern Haiti still haunt me. We had no sooner arrived at the beach when a contingent of Haitian police and local officials frantically waved away a throng of the town’s residents who had poured onto to the beach to hawk food, trinkets, and carvings, and tattered clothing items, but mostly to beg. Their torn tee shirts and ragged shorts, and emaciated, hollow eyed looks bespoke of more than Haiti’s legendary, world leading poverty. It spoke of the sheer, utter desperation to get anything from those they regarded as rich foreign tourists.

The tormenting scene that I and thousands of other visitors to Haiti have routinely witnessed routinely during the past decade has become the national emblem of Haiti. Yet, it took a murderous earthquake, clips of bodies sprawled in the streets, a collapsed palace and shanties, torn streets, and the shocked expressions on children’s faces for the US and legions of public agencies and private donors to leap over themselves to promise to send an armada of food, medical supplies, clothing, building materials, construction teams, security forces and cash to Haiti.
Why did it take a natural tragedy for this? Haiti’s sorry history of American occupation, brutal dictatorial and military rule, the flood of refugees trying to escape the nation’s destitution, the perennial food crisis’s, the wave of devastating hurricanes that tore through the country in one month in 2008, the US, Canada and France’s meddling in the nation’s internal politics , and the grinding poverty is well known.

Haiti’s corrupt, repressive military rulers and government officials get standard blame for the country’s chronic poverty and bankruptcy. There’s much truth to that. But Haiti is also a relentless victim of crushing and never ending debt servitude to the IMF and foreign banks, vicious labor exploitation, and the blind eye US aid policies that stunt Haiti’s farm and manufacturing growth.

The nation’s debt burden would sink virtually any developing nation. Haiti is compelled to shell out nearly $1 million a week to pay off its debt to the World Bank and the IMF; debt incurred by the Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier regimes and their successor military governments in the early 1990s propped up by the US. Half of the loans were given to the Duvaliers and the other dictatorships. They squandered the cash on presidential luxuries with barely a cent going to development programs for the poor.

In 2008, World Bank President Robert Zoellick in reaction to massive outcry from government officials and Haitian activist groups publicly pledged to forgive part of the nation’s the debt totaling a half billion dollars. The Bank reneged on the promise. The money could have bankrolled a vast expansion of healthcare, nutrition and feeding programs, supplies of clean water, and rebuilding the country’s badly frayed infrastructure.

The United Nations has hardly been a benevolent force to aid the country’s development and Democratic rule. The UN yearly shells out $600 million to maintain its 8000 peace keepers.

Yet when the hurricanes ravaged the country the UN force did not dispatch amphibious units, build temporary bridges, or provide trucks or equipment to provide emergency help to Haitians in distress.

US AID has come under intense fire for turning a blind eye to corporations and contractors who ignore basic Haitian labor, human rights, minimum wage and environmental laws, shun service providers, and invest only a relative pittance of profit back into Haitian small businesses, manufacturing, and food production. This is a particular sore point given Haiti’s near total reliance on foreign food imports has resulted in famine, near starvation, and food riots.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report that with proper investment in food production the country is more than capable of feeding its 8.5 million population.

In 2008, a coalition of US and Haitian human rights groups flatly accused the US of aiding and abetting corruption in the country. It demanded that then President Bush and Congress determine which US corporations and Haitian officials pocketed and benefited from the more than $4 billion USAID and their sub-contractors spent from 1994 to 1998. They demanded to know who profited and enriched themselves from the over $8 billion dollars spent following the US engineered overthrown of democratically elected President Jean Aristide. The groups charged that the systematic looting of the country’s treasury did not end with his ouster. Their demands fell on deaf ears.
A colossal earthquake brought the world to Haiti’s doorstep. The questions though are why did it take that? And what will it take for the world to stick around after the rubble is cleared and help transform Haiti into the democratic, self-supporting nation it can be?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Reid Spoke the Awful Truth about Obama’s Racial Exceptionalism

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Senate Majority leader Harry Reid apologized profusely for his unguarded quip that Obama’s light skin and non-Negro dialect stood him well with him and by implication other whites. President Obama graciously accepted his apology and applauded him as a supporter and friend. But the embattled leader spoke the awful truth that millions did give Obama a racial pass. The pass did not win the White House for him; money, timing, a skillful campaign, and most importantly Bush blunders and GOP disgrace ultimately tipped the White House his way. But Obama’s racial pass made a difference, maybe a crucial difference.

Two months before the presidential campaign wrapped, a survey found that one quarter of whites held negative views of blacks that were laced with the standard stereotypes. The respondents said that blacks use race as a crutch, are not as industrious as whites, they opposed interracial marriage, and are terrified of black crime (Obama mildly chided his white grandmother in his so-called race speech in March 2008 for saying she feared black men). Yet nearly a quarter of them claimed they'd vote for Obama. In every poll taken from the instant he declared his candidacy the overwhelming majority of whites were adamant that race had absolutely nothing to do with whether they’d vote for him or not. The difference was not just his lighter coloring, but his words, demeanor and political approach. His race neutral campaign was widely perceived as a soothing departure from the race baiting antics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. But others liked him because of, and were plainly fascinated by his racially exotic background. It supposedly didn't fit that of the typical African American. This was Reid’s point.

Obama’s light color, the downplay of his blackness, his clipped King’s English delivery, and his tireless pitch as the blank slate, every person’s candidate, made him personally and politically attractive. It also made him the textbook racial exceptional. This is the penchant for some whites to make artificial distinctions between supposedly good and bad blacks. It’s apparent in the unthinking infuriating, insulting, and just plain dumb crack made to some articulate, well-educated blacks in business and the professions that they are different than other blacks. Or that they are not like other blacks.

Racial exceptionalism stems from the ingrained, but terribly misplaced, belief that blacks are perennially disgruntled, hostile, and rebellious, and are always on the lookout for any real or perceived racial slight, and they etch to pick a fight over it. African-Americans who don't fit this brash, outspoken, faintly threatening type have been touted, praised, even anointed over time by some as the reasoned voice of black America. A century ago the mantle of the reasoned, exceptional African-American was bestowed on famed educator, Booker T. Washington. He was showered with foundation and corporate money, honors, and fame.

In the 1920s and 1930s, NAACP leaders always found a ready welcome at the White House. They were praised in the press and bankrolled by some industrialists. In the 1960s Urban League President Whitney Young, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins, and Martin Luther King Jr. before he fell out of favor with Lyndon Johnson after his too vocal opposition to the Vietnam War and turn to economic radicalism, were lionized for their reason and racial moderation.

In the 1980s, Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. actively cultivated and promoted a pack of younger GOP friendly academics, black business leaders, and black conservatives. Reagan and Bush Sr. plainly saw them as a leadership alternative to the black Democrats and the old guard civil rights leaders. The black conservatives were appointed to government posts, bagged foundation grants, were feted by conservative think tanks, and their columns were routinely published in major newspapers. They were continually cited by writers and reporters as a breath of fresh air among African-Americans mostly for their willingness to break ranks with and to blister Jackson, Sharpton, and the civil rights establishment.

Obama hardly fits the mold of a black conservative. And at no point during the campaign, and certainly at no point during his tenure in the White House has he said or done anything to personally distance himself from his blackness.
He has on occasion bristled publicly at the notion that he's in competition with or a critic of civil rights leaders, or that he is immune from racial jabs. He cited countless instances and times in his books where he felt the pang of discrimination, even racial profiling. He has repeatedly praised past civil rights leaders for their heroic battle against racial injustice.

But Reid and millions others didn’t give Obama a racial pass because he put race at arm’s length. He got it because of the nagging penchant to elevate some blacks above the racial fray, and declare them the exception. Reid, apology or no, simply spoke the awful truth and confirmed that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Tiger Stereotypes Tiger, and Black Males Too

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Vanity Fair made it official. Tiger is now a member in good standing in the pantheon of gang banging, drive by shooting, menacing, thug life, sexually on the make, young black males. At least that’s what the lengthy pack of Tiger bashers quickly branded the pumping iron, buffed, ghetto trademark ski cap wearing Tiger that ungraces the cover of Vanity Fair. They and a handful of black commentators gloated that the magazine dumped on Tiger something that Tiger allegedly spent the better part of a decade fleeing in horror from, namely his blackness. The nonsensical talk of Calabanasian, as he coined his mixed-race (Caucasian, black, Native American and Asian) heritage, and his public duck and dodge of any identification with black causes, supposedly was final proof that Tiger had danced down the OJ Simpson path, and of course, we know what happened to him. The Tiger baiters bet that now that he’s been scorned, trashed, and battered by corporate, and Golf World America he’ll suddenly have an OJ racial epiphany.

Any other time, the Vanity Fair shot would be laughed away or shrugged off as just fun and games stuff. It would do little to change the universal perception of the carefully honed Wheaties Box, wholesome, image of the Golf World’s reigning superstar. Indeed, when the photo was snapped in 2006, the devoted family man, clean Gene image of Tiger was still deeply frozen in the public’s psyche. The parade of porn figures, lap dancers, cocktail waitresses, and call girls who allegedly wound up in Tiger’s lair have rendered that image laughable, even pitiable. That makes the Vanity Fair cover thug life looking Tiger totally believable.

Still, the Tiger as racial martyr, closet thug, and America’s new racial bad boy is silly stuff. The racial stereotypes that the Vanity Fair-Tiger shot reinforces is not. It’s the shortest of short steps to think that if a fallen from the perch Tiger can be depicted as a caricature of the terrifying image that much of the public still harbors about young black males, then that image seems real, even more terrifying, and the consequences are just as dangerous.

The thought was that Obama's election buried once and for all negative racial typecasting and the perennial threat racial stereotypes posed to the safety and well-being of black males. It did no such thing. Immediately after Obama's election teams of researchers from several major universities found that many of the old stereotypes about poverty and crime and blacks remained just as frozen in time. The study found that much of the public still perceived those most likely to commit crimes are poor, jobless and black. The study did more than affirm that race and poverty and crime were firmly rammed together in the public mind. It also showed that once the stereotype is planted, it's virtually impossible to root out. That's hardly new either.
In 2003 Penn State University researchers conducted a landmark study on the tie between crime and public perceptions of who is most likely to commit crime. The study found that many whites are likely to associate pictures of blacks with violent crime. This was no surprise given the relentless media depictions of young blacks as dysfunctional, dope peddling, gang bangers and drive by shooters. The Penn State study found that even when blacks didn't commit a specific crime; whites still misidentified the perpetrator as an African-American.

Five years later university researchers wanted to see if that stereotype still held sway, even as white voters were near unanimous that race made difference in whether they would or did vote for Obama. Researchers still found public attitudes on crime and race unchanged. The majority of whites still overwhelmingly fingered blacks as the most likely to commit crimes, even when they didn't commit them.

The bulging numbers of blacks in America's jails and prisons seem to reinforce the perception that crime and violence in America invariably comes with a young, black male face. And it doesn't much matter how prominent, wealthy, or celebrated the black is, Tiger again. The overkill frenzy feeding on the criminal or borderline criminal antics of a litany of black NFL and NBA stars, that run afoul of the law or are poorly behaved, and of course, everyone's favorite stomping boy, the rappers and hip hop artists, further implant the negative image of black males. None of them, like Tiger, are hardly poor, downtrodden, ghetto dwelling young black males.
Tiger didn’t commit any crime, and the only one that he hurt was his wife, family, sponsors, and the fantasy image of him as the Simon pure sportsman. For that he’s paid and will continue to pay a dear price. The Vanity Fair cover just assured that the price he’ll pay will be even steeper.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

What’s Next--Muslim Only Lines at Airports?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson



Are Muslim only lines at airports next? The thought is offensive, disgusting, and blatantly unconstitutional. But it’s hardly far-fetched. Three years before suspected Nigerian airline terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was hauled off a Northwest airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with a powder and liquid explosive device stuffed in his underwear, British Department of Transportation officials openly discussed corralling men of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance at airports for intense questioning, checks and searches. The plan outraged Muslim leaders and British officials backed off the systematic profiling of Muslims. However, single men of Asian and Middle Eastern appearance were still subject to intense checks and searches. Britain was not alone. France and the Netherlands had already imposed de facto profiling of Muslim appearing young men and families at airports since the September, 2001 terror attacks. Polls showed that a substantial majority of Europeans agreed that racial profiling was not repugnant if it made airline travel safer and thwarted a possible terror attack. The clamor for a racial crackdown was first heard in the U.S. following the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1996,

Then President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno had the good sense not rush to judgment and scapegoat Muslims. The swift arrest of Timothy McVeigh squelched the building mob hysteria 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.

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 shot up the military base at Ft. Hood back in November. The Council on American-Islamic Relations wasted no time and issued a loud and vigorous denunciation of the mass killing. The Council didn't know at that moment whether Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged shooter, was a Muslim by birth, a converted Muslim, or even a Muslim at all. The name and the horrific murder spree was enough to drive the group to quickly distance itself from the rampage. Other Muslim organizations instantly followed suit and issued their own equally strong disavowal of Hasan.

This 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. Terror suspect Abdulmutallab has simply raised the decibel level on their call for transportation officials to openly profile Muslims at airports, train stations, and even on the open highways.

Some elected officials have even jumped on the profiling bandwagon. Congressman Peter King, ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, predictably loudly called for the profiling of Muslims. Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind went further and announced he’d reintroduce the bill he first introduced in 2005 to let police stop and search anyone they deem to be suspicious. Hikind didn’t specifically finger Muslims, but the intent of the bill was unmistakable, namely to target Muslims.

The New York Assembly will reject Hikind’s bill again. But the rejection isn’t likely to be unanimous. Legislators read the papers and the polls. Informal on line polls taken immediately after Abdulmutallab’s failed terror attempt found that a majority of Americans are ready to turn a blind eye to law, the constitution and just plain human decency to target Muslims, any Muslim, for special scrutiny. No matter that a potential terrorist can come in any shape, size, color, gender, and disguise. The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights noted that convicted terrorists John Walker Lindh were white, and Richard Reid was Jamaican and British. Abdulmutallab is Nigerian, but from all appearances he could just as easily be mistaken for a young African-American hip hop artist.

Broad-based ethnic profiling creates in turn panic and the false sense of security that airlines are actually preventing terrorist attacks. It also causes law enforcement resources to be squandered chasing the wrong targets. Worse, it’s a witch-hunt against a group based solely on their religion and ethnicity. This fuels even greater racial division, fear and hysteria. The public whispers and the right wing’s open talk of Muslim only airport lines do the same.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Something Special for Everyone from Obama, But Not for Blacks

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


President Obama’s repeat lecture to black critics that blacks shouldn’t expect anything special from him is disingenuous at best, and an insult at worst. Here are two quick political reality checks. He would not have won the White House if he had not won Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina. Three out of these four states gave Bush his crucial margin of victory over Al Gore and John Kerry. Obama won these four states because black voters turned his election into a holy crusade and stormed the polls on Election Day. The voting percentage and numbers in every other state that Obama won was equally off the charts.

The unrequited political love black voters showed for Obama didn’t stop with them giving him a top heavy vote with no strings attached. For practically his entire first year in office they’ve also given him their mute silence. This despite chronic double digit unemployment among blacks and 1930s Great Depression joblessness among young African-American males, higher percentages of homelessness, home foreclosures, school drop out rates, incarceration rates, and higher incidences of every major medical maladies among blacks than any other group in the country. African-Americans are still the prime victims of hate crimes, housing, employment and business loan discrimination than any other group.
Special interests, be they lobbyists, big money campaign contributors, corporate, labor, and political interest and ethnic groups, are the key to election victories. No politician, and I mean no politician, has a prayer of winning a major political office in America without their money, power, influence, and support. All politicians make promises to special interest groups to pocket their money and votes, and if they don’t keep them, or displease them, they will hear about it either through loud vocal protest, or their greater threat to fold up the check book, and their votes.

Obama knows this. His campaign war chest bulged with millions from the Wall Street financial houses, banking interest groups and their CEOs, as well as insurance industry and pharmaceutical groups. Wall Street has been amply rewarded with billions of taxpayer bailout money. Big Pharma and private insurers have been rewarded with the dump of the public option, guaranteed mandates, with government subsidies, to private insurers, and no effective caps on drug costs in the health care reform bill.

Labor, environmentalists, and gay groups were rewarded with a guarantee to fight for Employee Free Choice Act to do away with private-ballot union elections in the workplace, reduction of greenhouse emissions, and ramped up green investment spending, the scrapping of don’t ask don’t tell, passage of the expansion of the hate crimes law, and support of gay marriage. Even religious fundamentalists who Obama had absolutely no hope of winning any substantial support from even got a small payoff from him when he pledged not to scrap Bush’s Faith Based Initiative.
Obama took umbrage at the light handslap from the Congressional Black Caucus to do a little more for the black unemployed and dire cash strapped black businesses and broadcasters, while making the ridiculous claim that the poorest and neediest will be helped by him helping everyone else. He should just level with them. And tell them that he can’t and won’t do anything special for blacks, because he’s scared stiff he’ll be even more shrilly race baited by the GOP and Sarah Palin and the tea bagger ultraconservatives as a stealth Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in the White House.

He ran for and won the White House with the mantra that any real or perceived tilt toward blacks by a black presidential candidate, let alone a black president, would be tantamount to committing political suicide with white voters. The majority of them did not vote for him, and if polls are any indication, still wouldn’t vote for him. Expect more calls from the black critics for Obama to do more for blacks, and expect more lectures from him why he won’t.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

Obama Again Reminds He’s Not Black President Obama

Earl Ofari Hutchinson


The Congressional Black Caucus got another painful reminder that President Obama is not black President Obama. In a press interview Obama bluntly said that he would not propose any special initiatives for blacks. Obama’s sharp retort was in direct response to questions about how he’d solve a glaring problem and a glaring demand from the Caucus. The problem is the astronomical high unemployment rate for blacks, especially young black males. Latest job figures show joblessness for young black males matches and in some parts of the country tops the unemployment rate at the height of the 1930s Great Depression.

The Congressional Black Caucus demanded that Obama specifically shell out more money and formulate more programs to help the black jobless and to aid cash strapped minority broadcasters and minority businesses. The Caucus lightly saber rattled Obama with the threat of delaying or even opposing his financial regulation plan if he didn’t play ball. The Caucus is about as likely to buck Obama on the financial legislation when the final House vote is taken as the American Bankers Association is to back it. But the Caucus made its point. And so did Obama when he reiterated that he won’t propose any new programs for blacks.

Obama set that in stone from 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. The focus was on change, change for everyone. He had little choice. The institution of the presidency, and what it takes to get it, demands that racial typecasting be scrapped. 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.

Obama got a bitter taste of the misery that race can cause a president him when in an unscripted moment he spoke his mind and blasted a Cambridge cop for cuffing and manhandling Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates. The loud squeals that he was a bigot, racist and anti police for siding with Gates bounced off the Oval Office walls. A chagrined Obama back pedaled fast and asked all for forgiveness. There would no White House repeat of the Gates fiasco.

Obama has clung tightly to the centrist blueprint Bill Clinton laid out for a Democratic presidential candidate to win elections, and to govern after he won. The blueprint required that the Democratic presidential candidate tout a strong defense, the war against terrorism, a vague plan for winding down the Iraq War, tepid proposals to control greenhouse emissions, mild tax reform for the middle class, a cautious plan for affordable health care, pro business solutions to joblessness, and make only the most genteel reproach of Wall Street.

The Clinton blueprint also required a Democratic presidential candidate to formulate a moderate agenda on civil rights, poverty, failing inner city public schools, the HIV-AIDS crisis, and the racially skewed criminal justice system in written policy statements. And then say virtually nothing about any of these things on the campaign trail. Democratic presidential candidates Al Gore and John Kerry followed the Clinton blueprint to the letter during their campaign and if either had won, the likelihood is they would not made these problems priority items in their White House.

Obama 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 health care reform battle and the decision to escalate in Afghanistan or near textbook examples of this. The two dozen back door meetings Obama had with the major pharmaceuticals and private insurers at the White House in February virtually guaranteed that a big chunk of the health care reform package would reflect the interests and the wishes of the health care industry. This is the price to be paid to get their backing.

It’s the same with Afghanistan. The Pentagon wanted and demanded a huge ramp up in American ground forces in the country. Given the pressure to win the war, and the power of the military and the defense industry, Obama was in no real position to say no.

Obama’s no to the Congressional Black Caucus on black joblessness and a beef up of minority businesses has everything to do with the price of White House governance. That price is a cautious, conciliatory, and above all, a race neutral presidency.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

The Tiger Beatdown

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Beat em' when they're down and beat em' again for good measure before they can get up. The beat down supposedly is not the American way of dealing with those who are down. The ground rules radically changed the moment Tiger Woods did life threatening damage to a tree and a fire hydrant. With that the beat down started with a vengeance. No matter that the only body damage done was to Woods. There was no allegation or hint of drugs or alcohol. No matter that the law did not compel Woods to talk to police just to provide his license, registration and proof on insurance. No matter that he publicly accepted responsibility for whatever damage he caused, called the gossip “malicious,” and pleaded for the media and public to respect his privacy.
None of this has mattered. It’s irrelevant not because a sex, celebrity gossip, rumor and innuendo starved and obsessed mainstream media salivates at the prospect of scandal and titillation at the mishaps of celebrities. Nor have Woods’ pleadings that the accident is a non-issue been sloughed off because he is one of the sports world’s most bankable, best known noblesse oblige goody two shoes role model for the sporting world.
The truth is that the Tiger Woods beatdown began ages ago. The whispers, innuendoes, and back biting began the instant that he exploded on the golf scene. He wasn’t black enough. He was too black. He was too arrogant. He was too aloof. He was too selfish. The more green Masters Tournament winners jackets that he donned and world class tournaments he won, and the fatter his bank account grew, the undertow of carping about him continued unabated. There have even been personal and race tinged digs and cracks that golfer Fuzzy Zoeller (“fried chicken”) and Golf Channel’s Kelly Tilghman (“lynch him”) made about him.
Woods graciously and diplomatically shrugged off the inanities and kept doing what he does best and that’s win tournaments. It didn’t stop the gossip mongers. Woods was simply too big, too good, and too rich for the tastes of a wide swath of the public and the celebrity crazed media.

Despite Woods careful and cautious downplay of race, for another swath of the public he was still a black sports icon who dominated what for decades was a gentlemanly, high brow, near sport of kings, white man’s game. The price a black sports icon pays for resting on that high perch can be steep. One misstep and he or she can become the instant poster child for all that's allegedly wrong with celebriity, sport and society.
There are two reasons for that. When Woods tore up the greens he became the gatekeeper for the storehouse of fantasies and delusions of a sports crazed public as well as advertisers, sportswriters, and TV executives in desperate need of vicarious escape, titillation, excitement, and profits. Woods was the ultimate in the sports hero who fulfilled that empty need.
He was expected to move in the rarified air above the fray of human problems while raising society's expectation of what's good and wholesome. He’s been handsomely rewarded for fulfilling that fantasy even though as he admitted in his statement about the accident on his website tigerwoods.com, he is only human. He reminded the world the obvious. He has the same flaws and foibles as anyone else, and that certainly includes sports icons.
The other reason for the Woods beat down is his fame and fortune. Black super stars cause much media and public hurt when they supposedly betray the collective self delusion of sport as pure and pristine. That stirs even greater jealousy and resentment. That's evident in the constant fan and sportswriter carping about how spoiled, pampered and over paid Woods and black athletes supposedly are. The first hint of any bad behavior by them ignites a torrent of self-righteous columns and commentary on the supposed arrogant, above the law black athlete.

Woods has not had nor will he have a day in court. He hasn’t done anything to warrant one. But he squirms on the hook in the other court, the court of public opinion. Many in that court have tried, convicted and sentenced him. His sentence is cruel. That is having to cancel golf tournaments, hearing whispers from sponsors and ad persons about his image, and of course, the drumbeat tabloid gossip. But given who he is the sentence is not unusual. It's called the Tiger beat down.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.

It’s Official: Afghanistan Is Now Obama’s Baby

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

There was never doubt the moment General Stanley McChrystal flatly told President Obama last summer that the US must deploy up to 45,000 more troops in Afghanistan that’d he heed his command. The Pentagon had officially spoken through McChrystal. With the rare exception of JFK’s pushback against the generals during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when the Pentagon speaks presidents listen. It’s been a costly listen. Vietnam, Somalia, Lebanon, Iraq, and now Afghanistan has cost countless America lives, squandered billions, frayed relations with the European allies, and reinforced the US’s global reputation as a swaggering, bombs and bullets first bully. Afghanistan is no exception.

The apparent tussle between Obama and the Pentagon over a massive new troop build-up was never anything more than a game of political timing and numbers. It was simply bad politics to dump nearly 50,000 more troops in the country at a time when polls showed the American public has overwhelmingly soured on the war, and the majority of his base, liberal Democrats and progressives, scream for a withdrawal. With the GOP counterinsurgency gathering a head of steam Obama also cast a nervous eye on the recent off year elections. There was too much uncertainty about how Democrats would fare in state elections A double down on troops at a cost of billions more, and the almost certainty of bigger casualties demanded delay.

But there was no doubt that Obama would up the Afghan ante. This has as much to do with the Pentagon’s relentless demand to escalate as with his unshakeable belief that the war can actually be won, no matter the cost.

Obama was willing to stake the credibility of his administration on that even before taking office. In his August 2009 speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention, Obama sounded his it’s the right time, right place and right war mantra line. “This is not a war of choice. “This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.”

There are of course better options to fight terrorism than a big, costly, and controversial Afghan occupation. Vice President Joe Biden for one urged a drastic scale back of the troop commitment in the country and to concentrate on targeted attacks against Al Qaeda wherever it was found. Biden’s pitch for a less costly, more rationale approach to achieving Obama’s aims was for the most part ignored.
Obama’s buzz words are reforms, and anti-corruption measures, exit strategies, Afghan government, tight afghan security forces, and NATO partnerships. This is part fawn hope and part political script to sell the massive troop build-up to fight an unpopular war. The US hasn’t come anywhere close to achieving any of these goals. Pouring 30 to 50,000 more troops in the country won’t change that.

Aghanistan is a near impossible war to wage let alone win for reasons that go beyond simply finding a democratic government and shoring up a stable, corruption free governnment. It blends religious fanaticism, medieval beliefs, territorial imperative, and deeply flawed political assumptions about terrorism into a nightmare cauldron. Afghans, whether fighting the British a century ago and later the Russians, waged the wars spurred by a rigid, uncompromising Islamic fundamentalism that reached way beyond the tenets of traditional Islam. God was always on their side.

Even if there were any validity to the fantasy that Afghanistan could be cleared of the Taliban by military action alone, that would hardly end the threat of terrorist attacks. Terrorist groups can easily regroup in a host of other safe havens in places such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, the Sudan, Lebanon, and Iran and continue to receive financial backing through drugs, illicit arms sales, and covert state government backing. Then there are the terror targets themselves.

A study of suicide attacks by Robert Pape of the Chicago Project in 2005, found that almost all terror attacks and targets are aimed at getting the occupying forces to pull their troops out of a disputed territory whether it’s Iraq, the West Bank, Israel, or Afghanistan. A bigger US occupation far from diminishing the prospect of more terror attacks assures that there will be more of them with US forces being in the terrorist bulls eye.

Military analysts seem genuinely surprised that the US build-up hadn’t achieved the goal of reducing the influence and numbers of Taliban fighters and supporters within Afghanistan and Pakistan and by extension diminishing the threat of more terror attacks. Yet, there is a direct inverse correlation between the military ramp up in rural areas and the ramp up in support for the radicals. The obvious conclusion is that thousands more US troops will stir even greater resistance.

Obama declares that he will finish the job in Afghanistan. But thirty thousand more troops won’t guarantee a finish, just a bigger bill, more lives at risk, and a potential political disaster. No matter, Obama’s made it official, Afghanistan is now his baby.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book, How Obama Governed: The Year of Crisis and Challenge (Middle Passage Press) will be released in January 2010.