Why Didn’t Rand Paul Fire His Racially Suspect Spokesperson?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The news hit last December that there was a racially inflammatory picture of the lynching of a black man next to a smiling cherubic picture of three young happy go lucky whites captioned “Happy N….Day” on senate campaign spokesperson Chris Hightower’s myspace website. Rand Paul issued this statement. “I have never heard a single utterance of racism from this staffer nor do I believe him to have any racist tendencies. However, it is impossible to present the ideas and reforms we need in this country with this controversy present. Therefore I have accepted his resignation."

What’s wrong with this? Where to begin? The racially vile picture was posted on the site on January 2008. It’s irrelevant whether Hightower posted it or not (and he didn’t say) or by a nut case prankster. It stayed there for nearly two years was viewed and commented on by countless site visitors and many others. It was removed only after a mild furor about it. The furor became a furor only after Paul emerged as a serious contender for the GOP senate nomination in Kentucky. So the ancient question again is what did Paul (or Hightower) know about the posting and when did he know about it? And if he didn’t know anything about it which we still don’t know for a fact, why didn’t he know about it? Hightower was not some low level campaign grunt. He was Paul’s main spokesperson.

Now there’s Rand’s statement on Hightower’s resignation. Note carefully that he remorsefully and regretfully accepted it with the obligatory denunciation of racism. But Paul did not fire him. He did not even reprimand him. He did not promise a sweeping, thorough investigation of how this kind of blatant racist taunt could filter into anything that remotely touched on his campaign. Nor did he publicly threaten to ban in Boston anyone who remotely allowed the use of a site connected with his campaign to post or spew racially vile material. A few libertarian sites took Paul to task for his muted response to Hightower and questioned whether Paul took the issue seriously enough. They chided him for not taking a more aggressive stance against it. It was indeed a teaching moment that Paul could have used to make it clear racism has no place in his campaign, and anyone that goes there with that will get the swift boot.

Democrats, civil rights leaders, and a wave of commentators have gotten hoarse screaming at the tea party leaders to speak out against the party’s unabashed bigots and the displays of racial hate. The pleas have fallen on deaf ears the tea party top. The simple reason is that it would cut its throat if it denounced its racists and racism, and really meant it. The shouts, taunts, spitting, catcalls, joker posters, N word slurs, Confederate and Texas Lone Star flag waving by tea party activists is and has been an indispensable political necessity for the movement.
Just as Chris Hightower about that. Paul for sure didn’t.

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

Will Race Trip up Rand Paul Too?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Kentucky GOP senate candidate Rand Paul may or may not learn what his father Ron learned. And that’s when you pop off on the always thorny issue of race there’s a consequence. The horrid thing is that the consequence might not be the same for Rand as it was for dad. The senior Paul and his backers went apoplectic during presidential campaign 2008 when it was amply and correctly pointed out that Ron Paul’s official newsletter was stuffed with oft color unabashed racial jibes and barbs. It bashed Martin Luther King Jr. as a "pro-Communist philanderer." It declared that the 1992 L.A. riots petered out “when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks." And it branded black males as "the criminals who terrorize our cities -- in riots and on every non-riot day.” And then assured the reason for that is they were genetically engineered “to hate whites and to steal and loot as much money from the white enemy as possible."

An outraged Ron Paul vehemently denied that he uttered the vile racial slurs and claimed that he did not know they were said or written by him or anyone else in his camp. The colossal problem with his denial was that the racial bile appeared in his officially approved newsletters. There was no evidence then or later that he wrote a correction, issued a clarification, or even as he hinted they were written by someone else, and, if so, that he publicly disavowed and fired that someone else.
Ron Paul had to denounce the racially loaded quips in 2008 because for a brief moment he was deliriously embraced by thousands as the populist alternative to the supposedly hopelessly corrupt, bought and paid for, corporate interest Democrat and Republicans presidential candidates. Paul’s fanatic backer’s mix of blind adulation and desperation meant more media and public scrutiny than Paul had ever gotten. That in turn meant that his past, or alleged past words, were now wide open for public dissection and accountability. The senior Paul knew that he had to indignantly deny he wrote or uttered anything that could be construed as fanning racial bigotry. The issue quickly faded mostly because Paul’s presidential candidacy quickly faded.

Things may be different with Rand. There’s his widely quoted smoking gun interview with the Louisville Courier Journal in which he blew off the 1964 Civil Rights Act as a slap against private businesses’ right to racially discriminate. He had a second and third chance to eat his words in two separate interviews after his primary win. He blew both. He did the obligatory disavowal of racism, but did not back away from his belief that the Civil Rights Act went way too far in telling private businesses that they couldn’t racially discriminate. Junior Paul, unlike dad, is suddenly a national figure and counted on by legions of revved up tea party activists to carry the party flag into battle against President Obama. Rand hasn’t disappointed. He made it clear that he’ll pound Obama and his agenda at every turn.
Even if Rand, as his dad, didn’t trash the Civil Rights Act, his odd mish mash of ultra conservatism and libertarian pronouncements would mark him as racially suspect. A cornerstone of the jumble is his view of government and what it should or should not do about civil rights. Rand, as Ron, holds that government should have minimal or better still no role in civil rights laws and enforcement. The government passed and enforced civil rights laws, did nothing to solve the country's racial ills, and worse, fueled even more racial polarization, he says. That old, worn, and thoroughly discredited view warms the hearts of the packs of closet bigots who pine for the old days when racial and gender discrimination was the American norm and government did little to protect black and gay rights.

Rand pretty much said the same thing in the Courier-Journal interview. Any other time and place in recent American politics that would instantly make him unfit to hold any state or national office. And those who defend his view would be branded as bigots and crackpots. But this is not any other time or place. Rand, unlike Ron, has the most inviting and vulnerable target in President Obama to level his fire at. He has the cheers and backing of untold numbers who share his belief that the President is leading the country to social and financial ruin. They will do everything they can to drive him from the White House.

If Rand and company have to reach back nearly half a century and dredge up a monumental piece of legislation that totally remade the racial map in America to fire up the faithful, then so be it. After all, why let a little thing like racial bigotry trip a Paul up. Ron tipped around it. Rand will do the same. The frightening thing is that he may get away with it.

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

Palin’s “Mama Grizzlies” Are Devouring the GOP Not Obama

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Sarah Palin recently told an anti-abortion activist group that “mama grizzlies” will eat up the Democrats in November and shove the country back into the GOP’s arms. Her home grown, home state animal kingdom analogy would have been more apt and frightening a year ago when the Tea Party first gathered steam. Then GOP leaders banked that the Tea Party would be their back channel hammer to pound Obama and the Democrats in November. Things went well in the beginning. The party’s angry protests, marches, and parades, the passion, zealotry, their sloganeering, name calling, their anti-tax, anti big government, and defense of freedoms code word racism boded well. President Obama seemed the perfect made-in-heaven foil. He's a moderate, African-American, Democrat who they recast as a closet unpatriotic, race baiting, socialist.

The set script, though, has suddenly radically changed. In quick succession, GOP stalwarts in Utah, Florida, Kentucky, and Maine, and John McCain in Arizona have either been knocked out the box or are under withering fire from Tea Party activists. The white hot anti-incumbent rhetoric in Tea Party circles is almost totally aimed at the GOP incumbents and candidates. Any hint from a GOP incumbent in their words, actions, or voting record of making nice with Democrats and Obama guarantees a tongue lash from Palin, and relentless hectoring, harassment, and even physical threats from street level activists. GOP leaders have slowly woke to the recognition that Tea Party activists will settle for nothing less than a full blown exorcism of any trace of moderation or compromise from the GOP.

The danger looms for the GOP that 2010 could be 1964 all over again. That was the year that a right insurgency powered by ferocious Deep South and Western opposition to the civil rights movement, legislative and court ordered desegregation, and pending civil rights rights bills rammed the GOP to the hard right and in that year’s presidential election, to political disaster. The GOP suffered mightily in the aftermath of LBJ and the Democrat’s landslide sweep. But the crushing defeat did not totally transform the GOP into a hard core rightwing opposition party. There were many conservative Republicans who were still willing to compromise, conciliate, and work when necessary with Democrats.

The best case in point is McCain. Pre-presidential candidate Obama’s ascension, he was widely held up as the standard model of the responsible, pragmatic, Republican conservative who was willing to reach across the congressional aisle to get things done. It’s a far different story in the Obama White House days. McCain’s sprouted wings on his heels in his mad dash to the right to keep his Senatorial job. His rush to the right typifies the GOP’s Catch 22 dilemma. He can’t win, or at least the perception is that he can’t win, by ticking off Tea Party activists. Yet, catering to them types him as a pandering, captive of the loose jointed right, shill.

Either case scenario poses the grave threat that the GOP could be a fractured, unhinged party months before the November showdown. Polls and surveys show this potentially chilling scenario. In a Pew survey 40 percent of Democrats say they have no faith in their elected representatives in Congress. That’s an all time low in the history of the Pew survey. But even fewer Republicans say that they have any faith in their congressional representatives. That’s a crushing load the GOP could drag into the fall elections. A pack of hard right candidates that carry the GOP banner will be a powerful turn-off to thousands of politically crucial independent voters. In past polls, many of them registered disgust, frustration and anger at Obama and the Democrat’s policies and signaled a willingness to shift back to the GOP. This could be out the window.

Then there’s Palin. She poses absolutely no threat to Obama’s solid or lukewarm Democratic base. The mere mention of her as a possible presidential candidate is more than enough to terrorize disappointed liberal Democrats out of their Obama inertia. The real damage that she can do will be to further 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. This could translate into a stock of disgruntled, frustrated voters who would be sorely tempted to push, prod and hector the GOP to give Palin her due as a possible presidential candidate. This kind of talk will propel even more independents away from the GOP.
Palin can talk all day about “mama grizzlies” ousting Democrats from power in November and beyond. But the stark political reality is that so far the only ones who have been threatened or devoured wear the GOP tag. This wasn’t in the GOP mainstream’s script for Palin and the Tea Party.

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

Kagan’s Affirmative Action Achilles Heel

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan will plop an issue back on the nation’s table that hasn’t been seen or heard from or about in what seems like ages. And that’s affirmative action. Even before her nomination the word furiously circulated in some circles that during her six year tenure as dean of Harvard University Law School, Kagan had an abominable record on recruiting and hiring minority professors.

At first glance, her record indeed looks atrocious. There were 29 new hires. They were 23 white men, 5 white women, and one Asian American woman; not one black or Latino professor in the bunch. When the dismal figure was released, the White House quickly pushed back. It issued a detailed fact sheet that essentially said that her zero hire of a black or Latino faculty member was grossly misleading. That Kagan had offered several African-American and Latino candidates visiting offers; visiting offers meaning invites to be a visiting lecturer. That’s not the same as a permanent offer for faculty spot. But the inference was that a visiting offer, if accepted, could lead to an offer of a permanent faculty position. That didn’t happen. The visiting offers were not accepted. That in itself is not a prima facie case to say that Kagan deliberately pushed diversity to the back burner at Harvard. Or even that she did not make a sincere effort to recruit minority faculty members. There are always factors, big, little and unseen in the business of faculty hires at major, even prestigious, universities. But Kagan’s motives and the effort she may have made to get a diverse faculty at Harvard Law in the end or a moot point.

Her record on minority hires still stands-- 29 faculty hires, and no black or Latino hires. This is hardly a moot point. There are two major reasons that President Obama nominated Kagan. The first is pragmatic politics. She already went through the confirmation wars as the administration’s solicitor general and is widely considered as a consensus building, judicial moderate. That’s least likely to ignite a prolonged, heated, and divisive fight over her nomination. The second reason is just as crucial. She is the supposedly the breathing embodiment of diversity.

At a presidential campaign appearance in 2007 Obama was emphatic in demanding that a Supreme Court pick be someone who had empathy for the poor, minorities, disabled and old. In the Senate he ferociously attacked and voted against the confirmation of Bush nominees John J. Roberts and Samuel Alito again precisely because they were hardly cheer leaders for diversity. In their views and rulings they were hard line conservative ideologues who did everything possible to subvert diversity. Obama promised there would be no ideological litmus test in his court picks. However diversity seemed clearly a prime consideration in his choice of a high court judge.
This is not an academic numbers balancing act to get the requisite black, Latino and women on the court. The issue of diversity is a fierce battleground in law and public policy. There are countless cases that invariably wind up contested before the high court on gender, age, disability, and racial discrimination, abortion, the death penalty, prisoner and victim rights, and corporate practices. The issues are highly complex, raise important legal and social questions, and are always contentious. Kagan will be in the thick of the court debate on these cases for years to come.
Conservative judicial watchdog groups know the importance of the diversity battle in court rulings better than any other group. They watch hawk like all potential Supreme Court picks, and they wage endless war in their journals, news articles, on blogs, and in position papers on the need for strict constructionist, diversity neutral judicial picks. They have and will continue to rush to the barricades in their fight to insure that a high court pick will be free of any leaning toward opinions and views that tilt toward a bias for minority rights. They will rally public opinion and Senate Republicans to battle against any such judicial pick.
The irony is that Kagan’s blurred record on diversity faculty hiring at Harvard Law School may be a plus and actually keep her out of harm’s way from conservative critics at least on the issue of affirmative action. This will and should trouble liberals and progressives who want and expect that President Obama’s high court nominee take a stand, a firm stand on the one issue that matters a lot to them and from the president’s oft spoken words to him as well, and that’s a solid commitment to diversity. The jury is still out on Kagan on this one.

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

Black Tea Party Activists Say Don’t Call Us Traitors

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

There was mild surprise when a small contingent of black tea party bloggers and writers screamed loudly that Georgia Congressman John Lewis made up that he was spit on and called the N word as he left the Cannon office building across from the Capitol in the hours before the final vote on the health care reform bill. The black tea party activists demanded that Democrats produce the tapes to prove that Lewis was attacked.

The black tea partiers were lambasted as Uncle Toms, Oreos and worst of all, traitors. They’ve heard all this before, many times before. Some of them have turned the smears into a badge of pride, and say that more blacks should, and even quietly do, back the tea party’s avowed goal of tax cuts, small government, and defense of individual rights. Their claim is a tough sell, mostly because tea party leaders have shot themselves in the foot repeatedly by saying and doing nothing about the Confederate flags, Texas Lone Star flags, and the borderline racist signs and slogans that are waved and brandished at tea party rallies. This further feeds the deep suspicion that the tea party movement is chock full of unreconstructed bigots driven to hysteria by the mere thought of a black man in the White House.

Then there’s the GOP. Its relentless, take no prisoners, four decade war with civil rights leaders, the Congressional Black Caucus, and now Obama has further deepened fear and loathing among blacks of anyone and anything that carries the Republican stamp. The black tea party activists in almost all cases mark themselves with that stamp. But blacks and the GOP and now the tea party is not a total oxymoron.
Blacks have always been either in or on the fringe within the GOP during its metamorphosis over the last half century from the multi-racial party of Lincoln, champion of federal protections, and civil rights to a white man’s party that touts states rights, promotes racial division, and that uses championing small government, defense of constitutional freedoms and individual rights as hidden racial code words.

The motives of the blacks that have stayed loyal to the GOP are varied. Some have found the GOP a good hustle. They’ve been showered with political favors, money, and PR promotion. For others the GOP is a contrarian fad to boast that aren’t part of the nation of sheep pack that pay blind allegiance to the Democrats and President Obama. Then others sincerely buy the tea party claim that taxes and big government hurt blacks too.

The seed of their attraction to the tea party movement was planted six years ago during the presidential campaign of 2004. Bush through an adroit mix of emotional appeals, political messaging, and faith based largesse to a select few high profile black evangelicals stirred the hard feeling of many blacks toward abortion, gay rights, and their defense of family values. This paid big political dividends in the must win states of Florida and Ohio. The double-digit bump up he got in the black vote padded his comfort vote margin to bag both states and the White House.

It didn’t last. Bush’s colossal Katrina flub turned the grumbles from those blacks who defected to him during the election into a stampede away from him and the GOP. The still strong current of religious evangelicalism, and anti-gay, anti-abortion, sentiment and the targeting of government as the villain behind them, coupled with mounting economic insecurity, still struck a small chord among some blacks. The off the chart black vote for Obama didn’t entirely change that. Their vote was in part a general contempt and loathe of Bush policies, repulsion at the marginal thinly veiled race tinged appeals, and Sarah Palin, and in part a rally round the brother.
Republican National Chair Michael Steele paid some initial lip service to the need for greater diversity in the GOP but that didn’t last either. He was quickly regarded as a comic mouthpiece for the GOP’s non-stop pound of Obama. This insured that any black that uttered even a faint word of sympathy for the GOP would earn the tag of traitor.

The tea party, though, seems to be another story. It’s loose, disjointed, populist pitch with seemingly no direct tie to the GOP mainstream seems a safe haven for some blacks to vent their opposition to big government and high taxes while declaring disdain for Democrats. The record 37 blacks running as Republicans in the fall elections in majority or heavily white vote districts bank that they can rally tea party activists to their banner. That may be delusionary thinking. But the fact that they’re willing to try is their way of saying don’t call us traitors for our political beliefs. They have a point.

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

Arizona Anti Immigration Law Puts President Obama on the Spot

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama wasted no time in denouncing Arizona’s hard-nosed anti-immigration law. He called it misguided, irresponsible and a threat to civil liberties. Obama’s right. The bill is wasteful, unenforceable, and more ominously virtually a license for police to engage in racial profiling. But it’s also popular in Arizona and judging from polls and underground sentiment of millions of Americans on immigration, popular with them too.

Arizona official’s claim they had to act in large part because the federal government has dithered, stalled, and back pedaled countless times on enacting comprehensive immigration reform. This in effect dumps the immigration reform issue squarely back in Obama’s lap. In the coming days immigration reform leaders, Hispanic activist groups, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus almost certainly will ratchet up their demand and efforts to get Obama to get the ball rolling on a reform bill in Congress. The demand couldn’t come at a worse time for Obama.
The loss of thousands of jobs, with official unemployment still nudging double digit, African-American joblessness far higher, and with low wage American workers bearing the brunt of the downturn presents a wedge for immigration foes. They will again hammer that undocumented workers snatch jobs from needy American workers. The charge has been hotly disputed but it still touches a raw nerve.
There’s still the loose network of anti-immigration organizations, and the legions of right wing talk jocks, Tea Party activists, and Fox News Network talking heads who can stir the troops to oppose any reform. The stock attack charge that any immigration reform bill is a de facto reward for breaking the law still ignites anger and passion in many Americans. Arizona governor Jan Brewer tied her signing the bill into law into another issue that ignites even greater passion and anger. And that’s crime. She flatly said that the law would help protect her state from crime from Mexico. The governor cited no evidence to show that immigration has bumped the state’s crime rate up. But then again she didn’t have to. The frightening shots of bullet riddled, hacked up bodies that have become regular news features on American TV screens from the low intensity warfare in Mexico between government forces and the drug cartels and with each other is more than enough to stir nightmare terror in many Americans that a wave of illegal immigrants flooding the country will turn America’s streets into blood drenched streets.

Immigration reform also can’t be separated from partisan politics. The two special elections slated in May in Hawaii and Pennsylvania are toss ups and a loss of either of the seats to Republicans would further add to Democrat’s fears that the three hammer blows they suffered in losing a revered Senate seat in Massachusetts, and governorships in Virginia and New Jersey were not aberrations. With November mid-term elections fast approaching and the real danger that Democrats could lose big in them, picking a fight that’s bound to be even more contentious and divisive than the health care battle is just too great a risk.
Obama has a major fight on his hands to get a financial reform bill passed. There’s the risk that the concessions he and Senate Democrats made to Republicans to quickly get the bill passed could alienate many liberal and progressive Democrats who want to see the toughest possible consumer protections in place against the ravages of big banks and financial houses. They were the driving force behind his election win and the White House banks on them their numbers and passion to help blunt the momentum of Tea Party activists in the fall, and beyond.

Obama gave immigration reform short shrift in his State of the Union back in February, and this rankled immigration reform backers. They loudly protested that the president reneged on his promise to them to make comprehensive emigration reform a centerpiece of his agenda. In the months since then they have hammered at Obama to make good on the promise with the vague hint that if he doesn’t, more than a few Latino voters may just be tempted to stay home in the fall and beyond.
Arizona may have taken the option of watch and wait caution off the White House table. And that puts Obama on the spot.

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.

Recycling the Angry White Male

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

A recent New York Time/CBS poll confirmed the obvious. Tea Party activists are overwhelmingly white, male, conservative, lower income, and GOP leaning. Nearly all passionately believe that President Obama is shoving the country to socialism. All lambaste the federal government for giving the company store away to the poor. The poor in this case are blacks. That race lurks perilously just beneath the surface with Tea Party activists is beyond dispute. To many the equation is government programs equal hand outs to undeserving blacks and the poor and that in turn equals money snatched from the pockets of hard working whites.

This is nothing new. It’s just a recycle of the media buzz depiction of the angry white male. The term was coined by political analyst and then GOP strategist Kevin Phillips during Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968. Nixon stoked the fury of blue collar, white ethnics, rural voters with his slam of the Democrats for coddling criminals, welfare cheats, and fostering a culture of anything goes permissiveness, and of course, big government Great Society pandering to the poor. The crude thinly disguised code words and racial cues worked. Nixon eked out a narrow victory over Democratic presidential opponent Hubert Humphrey. The tag of law and order and permissiveness became a staple in the GOP attack play book for the next four decades. With tweaks and refinements, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush used it to ease their path to the White House. In the mid 1990s, Newt Gingrich and ultra conservatives recycled the strategy to seize Congress, and pound out an agenda that made big government, tax and spend Democrats, and soft on crime liberals the fall guys for everything wrong with America. It touched the familiar nerve with white males.

The volatile mix of big government and economics that can whip frustrated, rebellious, angry whites (and more than a few non-whites) into a tizzy far better than crude race baiting, magnificently for a reason that goes beyond race alone. 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 from white, male-headed families. Two decades later, the number of white men in poverty has continued to expand.
Hate groups, anti-Obama Web sites and bloggers, and radio talk jocks can craft this as the prime reason for the anger and alienation that many white males feel toward health care and, by extension, Obama while convincing themselves and the public that this has nothing to do with race. This translates to even more fear, rage and distrust of big government. The vintage blends of anti-government politics and calls defending personal freedom were the neo-libertarian war cries heard at the Conservative Political Action Conference and the tea party convention. Protests over big government dwarfed the subtle and overt race-baiting appeals that were seen and heard at both conventions.

Tea party activists hammer Obama, the Democrats, big government, the elites, and Wall Street. Yet, they also grouse about abortion, family values, gay rights, and tax cuts -- 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 has been the engine that powered Reagan and Bush White House wins. Scores of GOP governors, senators and members of congress have used wedge issues to win office and maintain political dominance. The GOP grassroots brand of populism has stirred millions operating outside the confines of the mainstream Republican Party. In 2008, many of these voters stayed home. Even Sarah Palin wasn't enough to budge them. Their defection was more a personal and visceral reaction to the bumbles of George W. Bush than a radical and permanent sea change in overall white voter sentiment. They were ripe for the tea party movement -- or any movement that keyed their anger and frustration into action.

The supposed proof that the tea party movement is loaded with bigots and driven by race frenzy is that tea party leaders won't denounce the racists in their ranks. That won’t happen. One the movement would have to be structured, layered, and regimented with a unitary agenda and program for that to be the case. It's the disparate, disjointed and scrambled headless amoeba that makes the tea party movement potent, appealing and dangerous. But it won’t happen because the for more than foru decade history of politics the dangerous blend of big government, undeserving, crime prone, poor and minorities, and put upon whites has been so deeply encoded in the political thinking of millions of whites, that it’s the government not race that matters, true or not.

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).

The Jackie Robinson Baseball Won’t Remember

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was effusive when for the second year he called on the baseball world to remember Jackie Robinson and his achievements. To honor Robinson, Selig required every player, coach and umpire to wear Robinson’s old Number 42 for one game as tribute. Selig’s gesture and the player’s compliance were genuine and heartfelt and again recognized that Robinson’s smash of the color bar in 1947 was a tipping moment for race relations in America. The irony is that Robinson then and in the years after he left baseball didn’t see the game and America quite the way Selig nostalgically remembers it and him.

When Robinson nervously stood at second base in his first game in the majors he later said that he was "uneasy" and far less hopeful that his feat would change American attitudes toward Blacks. Twenty-five years after that historic day in 1947 Robinson's unease became bitter doubts. In his autobiography, I Never had it Made he unapologetically declared: "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a Black man in a white world. I never had it made." This is the other story Robinson repeatedly told in his autobiography, letters, and columns in the New York Post and the Amsterdam News.

In 1949 Black singer/activist Paul Robeson made an ill-timed, and much distorted statement that Blacks were sympathetic to the Soviet Union. Robinson was pressured to testify before the witch-hunting House Un- American Activities Committee to refute Robeson. Robinson did not want to be used as a Black pawn to attack Robeson.
In his testimony he opposed Communism, criticized the Committee for its "partisan politics" and fiercely attacked racial discrimination: "We're not going to stop fighting race discrimination in this country until we've got it licked." Years later he did not regret his testimony but he told why he "would reject such an invitation" today: "In those days I had much more faith in the ultimate justice of the American white man than I have today."

For more than a decade Robinson gave speeches, helped raise funds, and made generous contributions to the NAACP and the SCLC. But in 1967, he resigned from the NAACP's board of directors accusing it of being "insensitive to the trends of our times, unresponsive to the needs and aims of the Black masses—especially the young—and more and more they seem to reflect a refined, sophisticated, 'Yassuh-Mr. Charlie' point of view." His criticism foreshadowed the identical charges made by dissidents that would nearly wreck the NAACP almost two decades later.

Many Blacks called Robinson an "Uncle Tom and "sell-out" for supporting the Republican presidential bid of Richard Nixon over Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy in 1960. Robinson did not receive any money or political favors for supporting Nixon. His sole litmus test was how strongly a candidate supported civil rights: "I was not beholden to any political party. I was Black first."

But the Nixon of 1960 wasn't the Nixon of 1968 who inflamed law-and- order sentiment, and pandered to racist white Southerners. As Eisenhower’s vice president, Nixon vigorously fought for the civil rights bills of 1957 and 1960 and for stronger action against racially- motivated violence. The Kennedy of 1960 wasn't the Kennedy of 1963 who took forceful civil rights action. As a senator, he voted to water down a section of the Civil Rights bills of 1957, and actively courted racist Southern Democrats. Robinson promised that if his candidate betrayed him on civil rights, "I'll be right back to give him hell." He did. He denounced the political mean-spiritedness of Nixon and the Republicans. "Every chance I got I said plainly what I thought of the right-wing Republicans and the harm they were doing."
Like many then, Robinson at first regarded Malcolm X as an anti-Semitic, race-bailing demagogue and criticized his approach to racial problems. But in time he came to respect and admire Malcolm: "Many of the statements he made about the problems faced by our people and the immorality of the white power structure were the naked truth."

He staked his career and reputation on making black economic empowerment a reality. He believed; "There were two keys to the advancement of Blacks in America—the ballot and the buck. If we organized our political and economic strength, we would have a much easier fight on our hands."

Robinson got the break of the century when he was chosen to crack the color bar in baseball. He was courted by politicians, showered with persona] honors, and attained a measure of financial success. Yet at the end of his life he realized that many Blacks had continued to lose ground: "I can't believe that I have it made while so many of my Black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity, live in slums or barely exist on welfare." Robinson until the end insisted, he never had it made. He’d likely say the same today. That’s the Robinson baseball won’t remember.

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.

Why the GOP Plays the Slavery Card

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The Democratic National Committee wasted no time in blasting Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour for being the second Southern governor to blow off slavery as a non-issue. Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell drew much heat from the White House on down when he whited out slavery from his Confederate History Month declaration. McDonnell made a tepid, half-hearted, after the fact apology. The DNC also demands that Barbour apologize. Barbour is unrepentant, and that’s not likely to change. Slavery is just too tantalizing and enduring as a race card for Barbour and the GOP to snatch it off the table.

When Ohio Congressman Tony Hall introduced two resolutions in 1997 and 2000 asking Congress to officially apologize for slavery, he was blasted from pillar to post. Irate whites filled the airwaves with long denunciations of the resolutions as wasteful and even racism in reverse. Virginia, ironically, in 2007 didn’t back-peddle from the issue. Both houses unanimously passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. The resolution was mild, innocuous, and ultimately toothless, but at least it acknowledged the monstrous wrong of slavery. But it went no further than that and for good reason. To continue to talk about it, and back it up with special initiatives to deal with failing education, high rates of joblessness, and incarceration among blacks, all very much legacies of slavery, would have been to risk a full scale political backlash

The passage of a health care reform that conservative and tea party activists loathe and use to whip their troops in frenzy, another Supreme Court pick, the recent stirred up Southern Republican confab dominated by tea party shill Sarah Palin, and the top heavy racial divide on Obama makes this the perfect time to play the slavery card. Apologies notwithstanding, it’s a no-cost code signal to millions of whites, South and North, that loathe Obama’s policies and Obama that Southern whites, especially white males, are still the party’s bread and butter.

This is no accident. Polls show that the GOP's relentless Obama bashing complete with borderline racial appeals to white males is having some success. Obama's approval ratings have flat-lined or dipped among lower income whites and independents. Among white males in the same bracket they've plunged into free fall.

The spark to reignite the GOP's traditional conservative, lower income white male loyalists has always been there. The final presidential vote gave ample warning of that. While Obama made a major breakthrough in winning a significant percent of votes from white independents and young white voters, contrary to popular perception, Republican presidential candidate John McCain (not Obama) won a slim majority of their vote in the final tally. Among Southern and Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact. Overall McCain, garnered nearly 60 percent of the white vote.

The GOP could not have been competitive during campaign 2008 without the bail out from white male voters. Much has been made since then that they are a dwindling percent of the electorate, and that Hispanics, Asian, black, young, and women voters will permanently tip the balance of political power to the Democrats in coming national elections. It's true that blue collar white voters have shrunk from more than half of the nation's voters to less than forty percent. The assumption based solely on this slide and the increased minority population numbers and regional demographic changes is that the GOP's white vote strategy is doomed to fail. This ignores three major factors in voting patterns. Elections are usually won by candidates with a solid and impassioned core of bloc voters. White males, particularly older white males, vote consistently and faithfully. And they vote in a far greater percentage than Hispanics and blacks.

Most importantly to the GOP brain trust, blue collar white male voters can be easily aroused to vote on the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and rights, and tax cuts. GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked and still bank on these voters for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance.

The GOP is, as is widely seen, an insular party of Deep South and narrow Heartland, rural and, non-college educated blue collar whites. But that's not a demographic to be totally sneered at, because the numbers are still huge.

The GOP driven by personal instincts, political leanings, history, demographics, and raw political necessity will do what it has done for decades, and more times than not successfully. And that’s use every political card at its disposal to batter an African-American president, and inflame its base with racially loaded code appeals. Slavery more than fits that bill. The DNC's accused Barbour of sending a strong message that slavery was a trifle. That was idea.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of How Obama Governed.

Obama Can Now Pick a Judge with a Heart

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

In 2005, then Illinois Senator Barack Obama was unequivocal. He said he wanted a Supreme Court justice with a heart. By that he meant someone who was not just a top legal scholar and rendered flawless legal opinions and rulings, but who had real compassion for the needs and suffering of people. In a fiery senate floor speech on September 22 that year Obama hammered Bush’s high court pick John G. Roberts as being dismissive and insensitive to race and gender discrimination.
Four months later Obama went on the attack again. He lambasted Bush’s next high court pick Samuel A. Alito as a shill for the powerful and uncaring about the rights and protections of the powerless, poor and minorities. He slammed Alito for backing prosecutors over the rights of defendants. He felt so strongly that Alito was not the right sort for the court that he joined in a futile and short lived filibuster against him.

He didn’t stop there. At a presidential campaign appearance in 2007 he said: "We need somebody who's got the heart to recognize, the empathy to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom; the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old." There was that reference to heart again.

Obama wanted and expected a Supreme Court justice to be a guardian of the people’s interests, to be cut squarely in the proud tradition of Hugo Black, Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren, and yes, on his best days John Paul Stevens. Obama saw absolutely nothing wrong with a justice being a legal scholar, judicial expert and an activist. He firmly rejected the GOP’s and conservative judicial watchdog group’s phony, politically self-serving strict constitutional constructionist litmus test for judges. Court ultra conservatives Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and William Rehnquist were unabashed judicial activists and ideologues, and conservatives heap praise on them, and abuse on any jurist that doesn’t agree with them.
Four years later and a second Supreme Court judge pick in the waiting, nothing has changed. And since it hasn’t, Obama has the enviable chance of a president’s lifetime to do what he proclaimed in his attacks on and senate votes against confirming Alito and Roberts. That’s the chance to follow his heart and pick the kind of judge he made clear that both Bush picks weren’t and pick a judge who will protect the rights of the powerless, minorities, and women. He has absolutely nothing to lose. GOP senators, Tea Party leaders, Rush Limbaugh, the pack of shrill rightwing radio talk jocks, Fox News Network, and the hodge-podge of conservative judicial watchdog groups will stick to their hit plan on him no matter who he picks to replace Stevens.

His pick will be too liberal, too activist, too pro victim's rights, affirmative action, civil liberties, and for the more rabid, a closet identity politics baiter. The GOP tactics in pounding Obama’s pick is unchanged. They will scream, shout, bully, cow, and badger the court pick on the same tired hit points. The goal is unchanged and that’s to insure that she or he toes the conservative legal constructionist line not solely before the Senate Judiciary panel, but more importantly on the bench.
A slip or a too confrontational pose by the pick during the hearings will instantly be pounced on and held up by conservative attackers as proof that he or she doesn't have the right stuff to be a fair and impartial judge.
He or she will be under tremendous pressure to assure senators that they’ll play it strictly by the moderate and conservative playbook on any and all decisions that even remotely touch on race and class issues on the bench, as well as abortion and other issues that are traditional conservative causes.
None of the attack points about Obama’s pick as too liberal, activist, and therefore judicially suspect will be true. He or she will have played it close to the vest in their decisions, rulings and opinions in their stints on the various appellate courts; so close that not one of the picks will likely raise a whimper of criticism or protest from any impartial legal or judicial organization.

Obama’s pick won’t alter the still suffocating conservative tilt on the court. But a stand tough progressive can go toe to toe with the very judges who Obama felt did not embody the true spirit of what the Supreme Court should be about. That’s empathy and sympathy for the downtrodden, poor and minorities. A solid progressive pick would be a model for the type of law and justice the court in time can and should represent. Best of all, it would show that when he had the chance Obama dared put a judge on the high court with the heart that he wants.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of How Obama Governed.

Why Michael Steele Won’t Go

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Michael Steele has bungled money and staff, regularly mugs and grandstands on network talk shows, brags about being hip, a street guy, and even complains that he, as President Obama, is also subject to a racial double standard. He has more detractors than any GOP leader this side of W. Bush, and that includes legions of Republican leaders. A handful of them publicly, and even more so privately, call for him to step down. That won’t happen. There are good reasons why.

The RNC still needs Steele for the very reason he was plucked for the lead role in the first place. In the wake of Obama’s smash White House win, he was the best hope to prevent a battered, beaten, and demoralized GOP had from being shoved to the netherworld of national politics. The GOP was widely ridiculed and dismissed as an insular party of unreconstructed bigots, Deep South, rural and, non-college educated blue collar whites. Steele gives the party an image sheen that is anything but white, rural and Deep South.

Obama’s win underscored the changing voter demographics. In the decade and a half between Clinton's presidential win in 1992 and Obama's win in 2008, the number of black, Hispanic, Asian and Native American voters soared to nearly one quarter of the nation's electorate. At the same time, blue collar white voters shrunk from more than half of the nation's voters to less than forty percent. Obama handily won the Hispanic and Asian vote and crushed Republican presidential rival John McCain with the black vote. He split close to even with McCain the votes of college educated whites. In the next four years, the number of non-white and youth voters will continue to climb and the white electorate overall will continue to decline. The Democrat's expanding core base of voters, like Steele, is more moderate, socially active, and mildly pro government; the diametric opposite of what the GOP purports to stand for.

The knock against Steele is that he burns money, and he does. But he can also raise money, and fundraising is still a big part of the RNC’s mission. An even bigger part of the mission is winning elections. Steele put his fingerprints all over the GOP’s Massachusetts’ senate and New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial wins. They effectively got the party off life support and made it even more war like in hammering Obama. And now there’s the very real possibility that the GOP can wrest one maybe two House seats from the Democrats in two bellwether special elections in Pennsylvania and Hawaii in May. Dumping Steele now would resend the terrible signal that the GOP is in disarray.

The RNC’s financial hijinks are not deal busters for the GOP. It has too many other ways to raise and funnel money to candidates and incumbents, as well as to expand and energize its voter base. The Republican Governor’s Committee, for instance, has raised tens of millions of dollars. And a newly formed GOP outfit, American Crossroads, announced that it will raise tens of millions more dollars too elect GOP candidates in the fall elections. Also, donors can give money directly to local and state campaign committees, as well as directly to the candidate campaign committees. With the GOP grassroots aroused, enraged, and in a frenzy over Obama and his policies, the many GOP fundraising committees will have little problem raising the cash they need to be competitive in the fall elections.

Steele has dual value to the GOP. In addition to being the moderate, free-wheeling, shoot from the lip, non-traditional Republican, that excites many and give the party a different look and feel, he’s comfortable at tea party rallies, and aggressively courts tea party leaders. GOP mainstream leaders may shrink in red faced embarrassment at Steele (and in a recent poll by the National Journal seventy percent want him out), the RNC sex club fiasco, its high living, jet setting ways, and feign even more embarrassment at the borderline racial antics and slurs, digs from some tea baggers, and ultra conservatives. But they know that the GOP would fall flat on its face without them. Their passionate belief in God, country and patriotism, little to no government, passionate defense of personal freedoms, is the political oil that has fueled the GOP’s machine for four decades, and assured the White House for Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush.

Steele’s job is to keep the frontline troops engaged, keep the cash coming, and give the party a new free swinging, even confrontational style. GOP regulars will grumble about Steele’s antic, and the media will have a field day with them and him, but as long as he keeps winning elections, the self-designated hip chairman won’t go.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is the author of How Obama Governed.

Obama Makes it Official: He’s African-American

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

President Obama unequivocally and unhesitatingly made it official: he’s African-American. That may sound silly and facile to say that but his checking the box “African-American” on his census form did two things. It made meaningless the incessant chatter of whether Obama should be called mixed race or African-American. It recognized the hard and unchanging reality that race relations and conflict in America are still framed in black and white. The one-drop rule in America renders anyone with even a trace of African ancestry in their genealogy as black. The delusion that calling oneself mixed race, no matter how light complexioned they are, will not earn them a pass from the lash of racial persecution.


Obama has never gotten a pass despite having one of the world’s most recognizable names and faces and power positions. As other blacks, he could fume at being bypassed by taxis, racially profiled by police on street corners, refused being showed an apartment by landlords, followed in stores by security guards, denied a loan for his business or home purchase, confined to living in a segregated neighborhood, or passed over for a corporate management position.

The roughly six million or 2 percent of Americans who checked the biracial census box may take comfort trying to be racially precise, but most also tell of their own bitter experience in feeling the sting of racial bigotry in the streets and workplace. Obama has related his racial awakening in his best selling bare-the-soul autobiography “Dreams from My Father.” He self-designated himself as African-American, and took pride in that then, and that hasn’t changed.

A mere check of the biracial designation on his census form would not spare Obama from any of the routine petty racial harassments and annoyances – the subtle and outright forms of discrimination. The biracial box is a feel-good, paper designation that has no validity in the hard world of American race politics. The venom and relentless, vile that From the moment The instant that Obama tossed his hat in the presidential ring in February 2007, and through his relentless, hyper pressurized presidential battles, the vile, venomous, racial pounding has been non-stop. The Joker Posters, the Confederate and Texas Lone Star flags, the racial taunts, digs, cracks, insults, and slurs, the ape and monkey depictions of he and First Lady Michelle on tens of thousands of web sites is horrid testament that even a president is not exempt from racial loathing, bi-racial or not.

Despite the real and feigned color-blindness of many voters, nearly 60 percent of whites still did not vote for him. Most based their opposition to him on Republican political loyalties, ties, regional and personal preferences. But a significant minority of white voters did not for him because he's black, and they did not hide their feelings about that in exit polls in the Democratic primaries and the general election. Tagging him as multiracial or biracial made absolutely no difference to them, let alone changes their perception that he was black.

Even though Obama has never called himself anything but African-American, and now has made it official on the census form, the sideshow debate over whether Obama is the black president or the biracial president still creeps up. The debate is even more nonsensical since science has long since debunked the notion of a pure racial type. In America, race has never been a scientific or genealogical designation, but a political and social designation. Anyone with the faintest trace of African ancestry was and still is considered black and treated accordingly.

Blacks were ecstatic over Obama's candidacy and his presidential win. They were unabashed in saying that they backed him with passion and fervor because he is black. Many would not have cheered him with the same passion if he touted himself as a mixed race candidate.

The thrill and pride for them was that a black man could beat the racial odds and climb to the political top; substituting biracial for black would not have had the same meaning or significance to blacks. The talk about Obama being anything other than black infuriates many blacks. Their anger is legitimate. If Obama doesn’t run from his black identity then the biracial card appears as a naked effort to snatch Obama’s history-making presidency from them. It’s also an implicit denial that an African American can have the right stuff – the smarts, talent and ability to excel in any arena.

Obama’s presidency was and still is a significant step forward for black and white relations in America, not mixed-race relations. The nagging racial slights and indignities that many African Americans suffer, and the racial ridicule that Obama is routinely subjected too, is an eternal reminder that race still does matter, and matters a lot to many Americans. Obama’s self-designation of himself as African-American made what’s painfully obvious official.

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.

Playing The Obama Socialist Card Again

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The GOP is playing its tattered Obama is a closet socialist trump card again. The aim is to tar President Obama as a radical out to soak the rich, hamstring private business, and radically redistribute wealth downward to the poor. In quick succession, Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, GOP congressional leaders, rightside talk jocks, and any and every tea bagger groping for something, anything, to blast Obama with following their crushing defeat on health care reform law, claim the rich will bear the burden of paying for the reform. The law marginally hikes taxes on higher income earners, and even that is phased in over several years. Even if upper income earners had to pay much more, they would still come nowhere close to the paying the top tax rate of ninety percent the upper income paid in the 1960s. Prior to the Reagan tax cuts in 1986, the rich paid upwards of fifty percent in taxes.

The knock that Obama hammers businesses, especially small businesses, is no more credible. Obama proposes no increase in the estate tax in 2011. Even then only a minuscule number of smaller businesses are big enough to pay this tax. The Bush tax hikes that are set to expire this year will have no impact on the overwhelming majority of small businesses. There is absolutely no evidence that the marginally higher tax rates are inherent business killers.

But facts be darned, branding Obama a socialist, Marxist, Bolshevik, and wealth hater is a set piece in the GOP arsenal, mostly because it works. A recent Harris poll found that 40 percent of Americans say he’s a socialist. And even if there’s much to dispute in the poll sampling and methodology, the ugly truth is that a lot of Americans believe the smear. They aren’t just the usual suspect fringe right-wing bloggers, chatters, talk radio gabbers, and tea baggers but they also include some who should know better. The Harris poll found that a small percentage of Democrats and a slightly number of self-described liberals buy into the Obama the socialist lie.

There are millions of references, quotes, quips, comments, and notations on Obama as a socialist on Google. And there are a million more references and comments on Google to the dopey Obama as Joker poster. The sheer mass of anti-Obama slanders from the right, the fringe and the GOP opponents has forced much of the mainstream media and respected commentators, analysts and bloggers who also should know better to spend time and space arguing the cons of the claim and refuting it. This just gives back-door credence to the absurd charge.

Painting Obama as a socialist is not done simply out of fury over the health care reform defeat, or out of a desperate search for any slander to toss at him. It's a loaded term that always touches a raw nerve with most Americans who are clueless on what socialism is and how it works as a system. To many a socialist is someone who is pro-union, pro-increased government spending on health and education programs, and pro-civil liberties and especially civil rights. This always drew fire from the right.

The mildest criticism of big business and the wealthy, though, is a surefire way to raise the hackles of many Americans. The American economic sacred cow is that laissez faire wealth is tantamount to a divine right of kings, and any attempt to touch it is economic heresy. Politicians know that's it is a kiss of death to be seen as an advocate for tax and income fairness. That invites being plastered with the socialist tag.

GOP presidents and presidential candidates ritually play the 'tax and spend' card to brand their Democratic rivals as dangers to middle-class wage earners. This stokes fear that underneath the Democrat's supposed taxing and spending the rich will be slammed and the poor will be the beneficiaries. The wealth taking scare has worked in the past precisely because wealth and income iniquities are so great, and the notion that there's nothing wrong with those iniquities is so deeply entrenched in tax policy, philosophy and politics.

It has worked to the extent that it has because millions of middle and working class wage earners dream that they will be rich someday and are horrified that they can have their imagined wealth downsized by a tax and spend Democrat or worse a Democrat who's branded as socialist leaning.

The Socialist slur of Obama taps into the deeply held belief--and even fear--that Obama can and will actually mug the rich and by extension those who fantasize about being rich. The small tax bump up for the well-to-do in the health care reform law gave the GOP attack dogs just enough of an opening to again scream socialism and sow more doubt and create havoc among far too many Americans about the law, and worse still, Obama.

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.

President Obama Now Looks and Acts like FDR

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The comparison of then Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the height of the presidential campaign was hyped, overblown and made mostly to sell magazines, puff up TV pundit sound bites, and by a few carried away with themselves Democratic party campaign boosters. Though undoubtedly flattered by it, candidate Obama did not encourage the comparison to FDR.
This writer as countless others the first months after inauguration did more than just hope that President Obama would inch toward looking and acting like FDR. We relentlessly pushed, prodded, and hectored him to lurch in that direction. There were many days of bitter frustration and disappointment, punctuated by loud grumbling of betrayal.

Obama as FDR knew that 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. But unlike FDR for months he soft peddled, coddled, and placated his opponents even as they made absolutely no effort to mask their loath of his policies and presidency, and made it abundantly clear they will stop at nothing to hound him from office. FDR, by contrast, hit back hard at his enemies as obstructionists and economic royalists. He never wavered from his commitment that the workers and farmers, the “common man” came first.
Now President Obama has done the same. His in the trenches fight back started when he admitted what everyone knew and that’s that making nice with the GOP and making futile appeals to them for bi-partisanship sounds good in White House interviews and Congressional speeches but in the ruthless party eat party world of real politick it’s a surefire prescription for an ineffectual, moribund, and hapless presidency, not to mention ridicule as a president sans spine.

In quick succession he’s rammed through a drastically retooled consumer friendly health care reform law that looks nothing like the pharmaceutical and private health insurer goody laden bill of six months ago and with the added FDR touch of beating back the furious lobbying by banks and private lenders to keep their profit first fingers in student lending, and making the government the lender of first resort for student loans. He added millions to back it up, with a special nod toward expanding aid to strapped historically black colleges.
A tweak of the financial reform package that takes a strong first step toward reining in the orgy of Wall Street freeboot speculation, trading, swaps, and scams of investors, borrowers and the government that nearly wrecked the economy. Though the much needed independent consumer agency with full power to oversee and regulate lending practices in the financial reform bill didn’t happen. The new agency will not be under the direct grip of the Fed which would kill any regulation that was perceived as Wall Street and Big Bank unfriendly. Obama has also endorsed enactment of a modified version of the Glass-Steagall act. That’s the tough FDR era bank regulation act.

The watered down and grossly underfunded Senate jobs bill won’t do much to dent the near double digit unemployment. But Obama has strongly signaled that he’ll plough stimulus dollars directly into government run job training programs, job banks, and public works projects. The other FDR touch is to virtually order the banks to lend more to distressed homeowners cut borrowing rates, and terms, and promise more aggressive government intervention to aid strapped endangered homeowners. These are the programs that will do much to help the working class, and the minority poor. It makes the screech that he push a black agenda seem even more silly, ridiculous and self-serving.
Obama ignored the squeals of the GOP obstructionists with appointments to judgeships. And a slew of recess appointments of top flight sensitive, moderate, first class scholars and professionals to diplomatic, commerce, and labor regulatory board posts.
He drew the ire of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by holding firm on his demand to halt renewed Israeli settler expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
On a personal and humane note, Obama magnificent gesture of donating every penny of his 1.4 million dollar Nobel Peace Prize award to solid charities and community help organizations and causes. The Big Bank and Wall Street greed merchants could learn a lesson from this example: fat chance of that.

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 he continued to swing away. FDR took to the airwaves and hit the road to blast the economic royalists and the obstructionist judges and those in congress to his reform program.
In the final stages of the healthcare reform fight and its immediate aftermath, Obama snatched a page directly from FDR and mobilized millions of Americans to fight for real reform. As long as he continues to do that he’ll continue to look and act like FDR.

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.

The GOP Would Cut Its Throat if it Denounced Racism

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Ohio Democrat Tim Ryan could have saved his breath when he furiously demanded that GOP leaders denounce the blatant racists among them. The loud chorus from other Democrats, civil rights leaders, and even an on line petition from an advocacy group begging the GOP to speak out against its naked bigots is a good preaching to the choir, PR gambit but it won’t change anything at the GOP top. The GOP would cut its throat if it denounced its racists and racism, and really meant it. The shouts, taunts, spitting, catcalls, joker posters, N word slurs, Confederate and Texas Lone Star flag waving, by tea baggers is and has been an indispensable political necessity for the GOP.

Despite the GOP’s narrow health care defeat, maybe even because of it, the GOP’s programmed racist public ugliness is having some success. Obama's approval ratings, always tenuous at best among white males, have plunged into free fall among them. A bare 35 percent of them say they will back Democrats in the fall mid-term elections, and less than half of white women say they will back Democrats.

The spark to reignite the GOP's traditional conservative, lower income white male loyalists, and increasingly white female supporters, has always been there. The final presidential vote gave ample warning of that. While Obama made a major breakthrough in winning a significant percent of votes from white independents and young white voters, contrary to popular perception, McCain (not Obama) won a slim majority of their vote in the final tally. Overall, Obama garnered slightly more than 40 percent of the white male vote. Among Southern and Heartland America white male voters, Obama made almost no impact. Overall McCain garnered nearly 60 percent of the white vote.

The GOP could not have been competitive during campaign 2008 without the bail out from white male voters. Much has been made since then that they are a dwindling percent of the electorate, and that Hispanics, Asian, black, young, and women voters will permanently tip the balance of political power to the Democrats in coming national elections. Blue collar white voters have shrunk from more than half of the nation's voters to less than forty percent. The assumption based solely on this slide and the increased minority population numbers and regional demographic changes is that the GOP's white vote strategy is doomed to fail. This ignores three political facts. Elections are usually won by candidates with a solid and impassioned core of bloc voters. White males, particularly older white males, vote consistently and faithfully. And they voted in a far greater percentage than Hispanics and blacks.

The GOP leaders have long known that blue collar white male voters can be easily aroused to vote and shout loudly on the emotional wedge issues; abortion, family values, anti-gay marriage and rights, and tax cuts. For fourteen months, they whipped up their hysteria and borderline racism against health care reform. This was glaringly apparent in ferocity and bile spouted by the shock troops the GOP leaders in consort with the tea baggers brought out to harangue, harass and bully Democrat legislators on the eve of the health care vote. These are the very voters that GOP presidents and aspiring presidents, Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr. and W. Bush, and McCain and legions of GOP governors, senators and congresspersons banked for victory and to seize and maintain regional and national political dominance.

But the GOP’s best efforts to stir and keep them stirred into frenzy wouldn’t get to first base if millions didn’t genuinely believe that Obama was the anti-Christ (new Gallup poll) and that every Democrat before him had turned government into a Frankenstein monster to tax them out of their gourd to create endless social programs that benefit minorities at the expense of hard-working whites. This is exactly how hate groups, the legion of anti-Obama Web sites and bloggers, and radio talk jocks craft the reason for the anger and alienation that many white males feel toward health care and, by extension, Obama. This translates to even more fear, rage and distrust of big government.



The GOP’s win with white vote strategy failed in 2008 only because of the rage and disgust of legions of white voters at Bush's horribly failed and flawed domestic and war policies. This 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. Even if the GOP is, as is widely seen, an insular party of Deep South and narrow Heartland, rural and, non-college educated blue-collar whites this is not a voting demographic to mock, ridicule, sneered at, let alone dismiss, because the numbers are still huge.

The GOP driven by personal instincts, political leanings, history, demographics, and raw political need has masterfully played the race card for a half century to get its way. Asking it to stop now would be asking it to cut its own throat.

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.

International Women’s Day: Iran and The Global Struggle for Women’s Liberation

By Sikivu Hutchinson

The influence of mainstream media has often made it difficult for Western women to draw parallels between sexist oppression of women in the West and that of Middle Eastern women. Programmed to see Middle Eastern women as the “other,” shackled by backward, terroristic Islamist regimes, many uncritically accept the mainstream media’s portrayal of the “secularist” enlightened West as the liberator of Middle Eastern women. As an activist in the Iranian women’s movement, Sussan Gol has been outspoken in making connections between her struggle and the global implications of women’s oppression. Gol recently traveled to the U.S. to participate in the commemoration of International Women’s Day on March 8th. She went to high school in L.A. and moved back to Iran after the fall of the U.S.-backed Shah government in
1979. The rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini led to the repeal of virtually all of the civil rights women had begun to enjoy prior to the Revolution. Compulsory implementation of the hijab (a practice which entails modest traditional dress, such as the veil) and the draconian restrictions of Sharia (Muslim law) have severely limited women’s basic mobility, access to education, rights within the family and in the political sphere. During the Shah’s rule, separation of church and state was observed and overt control of women through the hijab was relatively minimal. With the institutionalization of a theocratic Islamic fundamentalist state, women were routinely forced into arranged marriage and treated as the property of their husbands and male relatives. Policed in every aspect of public and private life, women have no right to their own children and are even forced to sleep with their husbands four times a day.

Because of their activism, Gol and her husband were jailed and placed in solitary confinement by the Khomeini regime. In the mid 1980s her husband was executed by the government. She has continued to agitate for women’s rights in an atmosphere that she describes as “suffocating,” holding that Islamist feminists are making a bargain with the devil. For Gol, the relationship between gender equality and fundamentalist Islam is unequivocal. While some Iranian women’s rights activists are interested in reforming Sharia law, Gol believes that any version of Sharia critically undermines human rights by policing women’s bodies, constructing them as property and denying them the fundamental right to control their own lives and destinies. She sees parallels between the struggles of Iranian women and those in the West. Historically there has been a paternalistic divide between women’s rights activists in the West and Islam. Some Western feminists view Islamic fundamentalist oppression of women as the antithesis of Western ideals and values. However, Gol stresses that there are similarities between Muslim women’s experiences and that of non-Muslim Western women. Despite the claim of Western cultural superiority, Christian fundamentalist incursions into reproductive rights, epidemic domestic violence, the near enculturation of sexual assault in American society, inequitable access to child care and gender-based pay inequities continue to imperil women’s right to self-determination.

Thus, although the U.S. and Europe are often regarded as the models for women’s political agency, Middle Eastern feminists like Gol emphasize their solidarity with the struggles of disenfranchised women in the West, particularly that of women of color. Sex trafficking and prostitution as a form of capitalist commodification of women’s bodies is a common thread. Due to the Iraq War, sex trafficking of Iranian women has exploded. In some instances poor women are “exported” to countries like Dubai and sold into kingdoms as sex slaves and prostitutes. Because of the gender wage hierarchies imposed by the West, the inability of unskilled female laborers to find living wage employment to support their families has made sexual slavery a desperate final option for some women. For example, in the absence of job opportunities, young African American women may turn to the sex trade or be “pimped” into prostitution by predatory male hustlers. Gol also points to the pervasiveness of international sex trafficking in the U.S. and Eastern Europe as examples of how women’s bodies and sex work have continued to be valuable commodities in the global marketplace.

These regimes of patriarchal exploitation and control have been exacerbated by U.S. imperialism in the Middle East. Driven by the U.S.’ strategic interest in controlling Iran’s oil reserves, Iran has historically been caught in the crosshairs. According to Women for Peace and Justice in Iran, U.S. intervention in Iran “postponed the advancement of rights in Iran for decades,” undermining “secular and left opposition to the rule of the Shah and bolstering the superiority of the Islamic forces when the revolution was eventually won.” Over the past several years, the mainstream media’s portrayal of the U.S.’ invasion of Iraq as a democratic mission has been exposed by human rights and anti-war activists as nothing more than imperialist propaganda.

Nonetheless, the Obama administration has renewed its predecessor’s commitment to this agenda. Consequently, Gol condemns the U.S.’ deployment of 70,000 more troops in Afghanistan. She views U.S. occupation as destructive to progressive social justice change in the region. As many Middle Eastern activists have noted, U.S. occupation has been a major catalyst for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. However, Gol cautioned, “Islamic fundamentalism hangs on its ‘death to America’” rhetoric as a means of legitimizing and reinforcing nationalism. In some regards, poor people in the region see no other viable alternative to Western imperialism besides Islamic fundamentalism. Tragically, some Iranian feminists and intellectuals also buy into this line. And it is for this reason that Gol faults the activists of the Iranian Green Movement for their failure to challenge its leaders on the issue of nationalism and women’s rights.

Global women’s liberation is undermined by cultural binaries that weave a narrative of Western enlightenment versus Middle Eastern fundamentalism. In their pursuit of human rights for women in Iran, Gol and her feminist allies provide important global context for shared struggle and justice.

Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a contributor to KPFK’s Some of Us Are Brave and WBAI NY’s Women's Collective.

Torrance California Police Stop Again Casts Ugly Glare on Racial Profiling

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The throng of angry whites jeered, catcalled, and spat out borderline racial insults at the small group of mostly black protestors. This wasn’t a march against Jim Crow in Montgomery, Birmingham, Jackson, Mississippi, or Cicero, The year wasn’t 1963. The charged racial confrontation happened on March 14, 2010 in the self-billed All-American, mostly white Los Angeles suburban bedroom city of Torrance, California. The march was called to protest the unwarranted stop, search and harassment of Robert Taylor, a prominent Los Angeles African-American minister and civic leader by two white Torrance police officers on March 4. Following the stop, there were hundreds of outraged letters many filled with vile, crude, and profane racist pot shots at blacks, in local newspapers blasting Taylor and civil rights supporters.
The Taylor stop fit the all too familiar pattern of many unwarranted stops of black and Latino motorists. Torrance police officials claimed that he and the car he drove allegedly fit the description of a suspect and car involved in a robbery and assault a day earlier.

The problem is Taylor is not even remotely close in appearance to the description of the suspect. The picture circulated was of a short, stocky dark complexioned 30ish black male. Taylor is tall, in his 60s, and light complexioned.
Predictably, as in most racial profiling allegations, Torrance police and city officials hotly denied the profiling charge. They justified it with the stock story that crime is on the rise in the city, but offered no compelling stats to back up that claim. Taylor’s stop would have likely ignited the usual finger pointing, charge swapping, and then faded fast except for one thing. Torrance has been slapped with a Justice Department lawsuit, civil rights lawsuits, court settlements, and hundreds of verbal complaints over the years by black and Latino motorists, shoppers, African-American mail carriers some in full uniform that work at postal stations in Torrance, and residents such as Taylor who allege they were racially profiled.

Torrance is hardly unique. The past decade, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Miami and other big and small cities have repeatedly been called on the carpet for alleged racial profiling. In an address to a joint session of Congress in 2001, then President Bush blasted racial profiling, "It’s wrong and we will end it in America." It hasn’t

The refusal to admit that racial profiling exists by many public officials and many in law enforcement has done much to torpedo nearly every effort by local and national civil rights and civil liberties groups to get law enforcement and federal agencies not only to admit that racial profiling happens but to do something about it. The throng of white protestors that harangued the blacks and other supporters who protested the Taylor stop in Torrance was ample proof of that.

A perennial federal bill served up by House Democrat John Conyers to get federal agencies to collect stats and do reports on racial profiling hasn't gotten to first base. A similar racial profiling bill met a similar fate in California in 1999. The bill passed by the state legislature mandated that law enforcement agencies compile racial stats on traffic stops. It was promptly vetoed by then Democratic governor Gray Davis.
Despite Davis’s veto, nearly 60 California city and county police departments, the California Highway Patrol, and University of California police agencies either through mandatory federal consent decrees or voluntarily collect date on unwarranted traffic stops of motorist and contacts civilian to determine if there is a racial bent to the stops. Torrance is not one of those cities.

Nationally, 46 states collect data either voluntarily or compelled by state law on unwarranted pedestrian contacts and traffic stops. Most police officials, as in Torrance, loudly contend that good police work is about the business of catching criminals and reducing crime, not about profiling blacks and Latinos. If more black and Latino men are stopped it's not because they're black or Latino but because they commit more crimes. The other even more problematic tact used to debunk racial profiling is the few statistics that have been compiled on unwarranted stops. In this case not by police agencies but based on citizen responses. In two surveys, the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics took a hard, long quantified look at racial profiling using information that it got from citizens. Both times, the agency found that while whites are stopped, searched and arrested far less than blacks or Latinos, there was no hard proof that the stops had anything to do with race.
This has done even more to damp down a public outcry to get police agencies and legislators to admit that racial profiling is a fact on many city streets and highways and then to take firm action to eliminate it.

The arrest last July of Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gate's touched off a brief furor over racial profiling. Taylor’s stop and search has done the same in a bedroom Southern California city. It has again cast the ugly glare on the always troubling problem of racial profiling.

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

The Vile Fascination with the Monkey Image of the Obama’s (and African-Americans)

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The worst thing about the CEO of the Tennessee Hospitality Association Walt Baker’s silly, sick, demeaning depiction of First Lady Michelle Obama as a chimp ironically is not the depiction. It’s Baker’s clueless defense. The instant the storm broke, and Nashville’s mayor, the state’s GOP leaders denounced him, and the contract was summarily yanked from his marketing firm, Mercatus Communications, to help promote the city's new convention center, Baker predictably wailed that he’s not a bigot, racially insensitive, and the cartoon was nothing but political humor.
He fervently believes that. He just as fervently believes that lampooning Michelle Obama, and President Obama as a monkey, ape, gorilla is just can’t you take a joke fun and games. He and the pack of race baiting websites, chat rooms, and of late, college frat parties, and student websites that ridicule the Obama’s (and African-Americans) in assorted off beat, crude, vile cartoons and always with the vile depiction as monkeys or apes is by now standard fare. It’s no accident that it is.

The long, sordid and savage history of racist stereotyping of African-Americans has been the stock in trade of race baiting and racial ridicule and for more than century. A few grotesque book titles from a century ago, such as The Negro a Beast, The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization, and the Clansman depicted blacks as apes, monkeys, bestial, and animal like. The image stuck in books, magazines, journals, and deeply colored the thinking of many Americans of that day; that day?
In the movie version of Rudyard Kipling children’s classic, The Jungle Book, the Disney Studios in 1967 graduated from the other standard animal depiction of African-Americans as black crows to depicting African-Americans as the Monkey like jive, gibberish blathering King Louie. The film was remade in 1994.

Fifteen years later, New York Post Cartoonist Sean Delonas ignited a firestorm with his casual depiction of President Obama as a monkey. He did it precisely because that image didn’t die a century, half century, a decade, or even a year ago. In 2007 Penn State researchers conducted six separate studies and found that many Americans still link blacks with apes and monkeys. Many of them were young, and had absolutely no knowledge of the vicious stereotyping of blacks of years past. Their findings with the provocative title “Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences,” in the February 2008 issue of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, was published by the American Psychological Association.

The overwhelming majority of the participants in the studies bristled at the faintest hint that they had any racial bias. But the animal savagery image and blacks was very much on their minds. The researchers found that participants, and that included even those with no stated prejudices or knowledge of the historical images, were quicker to associate blacks with apes than they were to associate whites with apes.

This was not simply a dry academic exercise. The animal association and blacks has had devastating real life consequences. In hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 the Philadelphia Inquirer was much more likely to describe African Americans than Whites convicted of capital crimes with ape-relevant language, such as “barbaric,” “beast,” “brute,” “savage” and “wild.” And jurors in criminal cases were far more likely to judge blacks more harshly than whites, and regard them and their crimes as savage, bestial, and heinous, and slap them with tougher sentences than whites.

First Lady Michelle Obama is a woman, a black woman, and a soft target for the frustrations and even scorn of the Obama loathers. During the campaign Obama opponents eagerly latched onto out-of-context statement she made at a campaign rally in which she allegedly questioned her faith in America, and made a supposedly less than reverential reference to the flag. They brutally tarred her as a closet anti-American, race-obsessed, black radical. That made her an instant campaign liability. For weeks she virtually disappeared from the campaign trail.

She has played a relatively low key role in the White House, and has succeeded in pretty much staying out of harm’s way from the hits of hubby Obama’s avowed enemies. That is all except when it comes to the image assault from the eternal animal mockery of blacks, an image that Baker and legions of other see nothing wrong with. It’s an image that the First Lady and the President haven’t seen the last of it. It’s just too juicy, vile and hurtful to die. It’s been that way for a century.

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

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.