Earl Ofari Hutchinson: February 2012 Archives

The U.S. Supreme Court almost certainly will vote before the November presidential election on whether to scrap race as a factor in college admissions. The conservative majority has time and again tipped their hand that they are chomping to do away with it. The recusal of moderate justice Elena Kagan virtually assures they'll get their way. The justices may not have had thoughts about how affirmative action and the issue of race will play out in the presidential campaign. But it will again present all the thorny, potentially inflammatory, sore spots that race always pricks.

The likely GOP presidential nominee, Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum, will have an easy time with the issue. They will simply repeat the stock conservative mantra that discrimination is discrimination and must be opposed. Conservatives have backed that up with decades of lawsuits, ballot initiatives, and administrative rulings that have torpedoed any and every effort to use race to promote diversity. The assault on affirmative action will do more than just give the GOP candidate a chance to pose as the defender of a color blind America. It also potentially revives affirmative action as a campaign wedge issue. The issue largely fell off the nation's radar scope nearly a decade ago when the Supreme Court narrowly upheld the University of Michigan's right to use race as a factor in increasing minority numbers at the school.

The Bush administration at first vigorously backed the challenge to the University's affirmative action program. But mostly due to the strong and very public dissent from then Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Bush waffled and ultimately softened his opposition to it, and pretty much accepted the decision.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, affirmative action was not an issue. GOP presidential candidate John McCain and Obama made only the barest mention of it. And that came only in response to when California anti-affirmative action crusader Ward Connerly plopped his anti-affirmative action measure on ballots in three states, one of which was McCain's home state of Arizona. McCain backed the Connerly measure. He insisted that he backed equal opportunity and opposed discrimination. Obama opposed the initiatives. Connerly quickly jumped on Obama for it, noting that he cut radio ads in 2006 that hammered his Michigan anti-affirmative action initiative. Obama unabashedly said that if the measure passed it would hurt women and minorities in getting jobs and in education. Connerly tried to use Obama's opposition to his initiative as a foil. It didn't diminish voter support for Obama.

But Obama's election changed things. Race now inched back onto the public stage with conservatives watching hawk like for any hint that the president would in word or policy for any tilt toward minorities in word or administration policies. The faintest sign of that from Obama would have brought loud yelps that he was pandering to minorities and that racial favoritism was the hidden agenda of his administration.

Obama didn't give that hint. But the suspicion that race lurked closely under the surface in the Obama administration's policy decisions didn't evaporate, and if the president wouldn't play into conservative's hands on race, then they could always be manufacture a racial issue. The recent spate of musings and articles by talk show hosts web sites, blogs, and news reports that the president has written off white workers in his reelection bid fits neatly into the bogus scenario that minorities are poised to be the prime beneficiaries of a second Obama term.

This makes the Supreme Court's decision to take up affirmative action even more irresistible to the GOP as an issue to back Obama into a corner and hopefully get him to take a strong public position in support of affirmative action. If that happens the GOP will quickly pounce and play it up for all its worth to attempt to prick the racial suspicions and sensitivity of some white voters. But this might not be as cut and dried as the GOP would like all to believe.

Congress has repeatedly backed away from totally dismantling affirmative action programs, beginning a decade ago when lawmakers shelved anti-affirmative action legislation. President Bill Clinton followed suit. He drew much heat for his plan to modify some aspects of affirmative action programs, but eventually dropped his administration's talk about further watering down affirmative action programs.

Neither the Obama administration nor any of the GOP presidential contenders have uttered a word about the Supreme Court's decision to take up the case. It's simply too hot an issue at this early stage of the campaign to weigh in on. But the court's likely anti-affirmative action ruling timed for November or before will almost certainly radically change that. The certainly now is that affirmative action will be shoved back on the presidential plate.

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

The new ploy among ultra-conservatives, right wing talk show jocks, on their websites, and blogs is to claim that President Obama has written off white workers in his re-election bid. This notion has even crept into a few mainstream news outlets that've done a spate of stories on Obama's supposed snub of white workers. Obama, as this line goes, is pandering to Hispanics, Gays, environmentalists, women, and left liberals with his push for comprehensive immigration reform, his inch toward open defense of gay marriage, the scrapping of the Keystone XL Pipe line, his picking a fight with the Catholic Church over contraceptives and abortion, and his relentless drive to tax the rich.
The problem with this silliness is that then Democratic presidential candidate, and after his election, President Obama has been careful to a fault to make sure that he took no stance on issues that did not have either majority or a broad consensus of public support; support that cut across ethnic and gender lines. The even bigger problem is that despite Obama's caution, and care in hewing close to general public sentiment on policy issues, the majority of lower income, white blue collar workers, especially males, have never bought his policies or him. Polls have consistently shown that this racial gap has perennially been big and daunting for Obama.
The gap is especially perplexing given that Obama in endless forays to cities, workplaces, and outposts throughout the country has made it a point to meet and greet, and hold formal and informal discussions with legions of blue collar, and rural whites. He's bent over backward to assure them at appearances at plant closings or openings, or jobs or home foreclosure townhalls that his administration is working in their interest.
Many photo shots show Obama with hands out stretched to blue collar workers on his stops. Yet, his unswerving race neutral, low-keyed, scrupulously non-confrontational, approach to presidential governance has done nothing to change the attitudes of many white voters. This is in part due to the ancient mix of racial suspicions and doubts about black competence, intelligence and ability, pure blind, naked bigotry, and despite his more than three years at the presidential helm, unease with an African-American holding the world's most visible and important political power position.

The first warning sign that Obama's white working class, male support was shaky and tenuous cropped up not in the campaign against GOP Presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 but in the war with Democratic rival Hillary Clinton during the Democratic presidential primaries. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, Clinton drubbed Obama with the white vote. Many white Democratic blue collar voters openly said that they would not vote for Obama not because of any great love for Clinton, but because he was black. It took a near holy crusade turnout by black voters in both states to seal Obama's win in the two key states and ultimately the White House.

McCain played it close to the vest on race during the general election campaign and made it clear that race would not be an issue. He sternly warned that there would be no subtle racial pandering from anyone connected with his staff. But that wasn't enough. Though Obama did better than Democratic presidential contenders Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004 respectively with white blue collar voters, McCain got the majority of the white vote. That was enough to keep him relatively competitive. But McCain's blind eye to race didn't mean that race was permanently off the table in national politics or that it would be a non-factor in Obama's 2012 re-election bid. The GOP front runners made light probes into the racial mine field with their quips about welfare and blacks (Rick Santorum), food stamp president (Newt Gingrich), and carping about entitlements (Mitt Romney).
A Quinnipiac Poll in February found that white males by a margin of nearly two to one voiced disapproval over the way Obama is handling the presidency. The continued high disapproval ratings among this group is even more glaring since it comes at the point where more Americans than in the past year say they approve of Obama's performance. This does not include a majority of white males, let alone a majority of white blue collar males.

The GOP has played hard on the anger, frustration, and hatred that many males harbor toward government and their swoon over military toughness. And for four decades before Obama took office. This fury was the ace-in-the-hole for winning GOP presidents, and even in his loss as in it boosted McCain in 2008.
Despite deep doubts among voters about the competence, credibility, conservatism (Romney) and the warfare that the GOP presidential candidates have waged against each other, recent polls still show that either Romney or Santorum would be in a horse race with Obama. To say that Obama has brought this on himself by dissing white workers is ludicrous at best, and at worst a back door play of the race card against him.

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

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
The landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act must be renewed every twenty five years. In 1981 despite some grumbles and idle threats to oppose its renewal from a few in the Reagan administration, President Reagan dutifully signed the renewal legislation. A quarter century later, again despite the grumbles and idle threats from some in Congress to delay or even block passage, President Bush again dutifully signed the renewal legislation with a big congratulatory celebration at the White House signing. The renewal of the Voting Rights Act by two conservative GOP presidents seemed to assure that any effort to scrub the Voting Rights Act from the federal books was a pipe dream.
However, that may soon change. A federal lawsuit by Shelby County, Alabama has quietly worked its way up through the appeals courts. The county wants much of the Act dumped and has recycled the same old argument that it is outdated, discriminatory, and a blatant federal intrusion into states rights. In times past this claim would have gone nowhere. But during the GOP presidential debates Texas Governor Rick Perry lambasted the Act. That squarely put it back into public focus and political play. State Attorney Generals in three states have endorsed the Alabama county's challenge. The announcement that Attorney General Eric Holder will vigorously enforce provisions of the Voting Rights Act to prevent voter suppression raised an additional howl from conservatives.

Then there's the Supreme Court. There is little to stop the court from taking a fresh look at the Act, and even ruling that the key requirement that Southern states get "preclearance" from the Justice Department before making any changes in its voting rights laws and procedures is unconstitutional. There are a slew of other challenges in addition to Alabama's to the Act that could give the court's five conservative judges more than enough ammunition to scrap the Act.

The crop of Tea Party driven House Republicans could give the court even more cover to question the constitutionality of the Act. GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul would be one of those. He's publicly boasted that he would not have backed the 1964 Civil Rights Act if he had been in Congress then. On the fortieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act signing in 2004 Paul opposed the symbolic congressional resolution lauding it. Though Bush signed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act in 2006 a core of House Republicans stalled the legislation for more than a week and demanded that hearings be held. They used the same old argument that it punishes the South for past voting-discrimination sins, and they didn't like the idea of bilingual ballots.
A renewed assault on the Act fits right into the Tea Party's endless attacks on the alleged federal government for over intrusiveness. It would also be set against the backdrop of the hotly contested 2012 battle for the White House and conservatives efforts to maintain or expand their congressional numbers.
The GOP has already pecked at eroding the Act with the rash of photo identifications laws that the GOP governors and GOP controlled state legislatures have enacted. They have one aim, and that's to discourage and damp down the number of minority and poor voters that overwhelmingly vote Democratic.
Despite the solid bipartisan support that the Act got in prior congresses and from GOP presidents, the Act has always been more controversial than many have believed. The popular myth is that congressional leaders were so appalled and enraged at the shocking TV clips of Alabama state troopers battering civil rights marchers in Selma in April 1965 that they promptly passed the landmark law that restored voting rights to Southern blacks. What's forgotten is that the marchers were there in the first place because the bill was badly stalled in the Senate and the House. It took nearly five months to get the bill passed.
Then Senate minority leader, Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen, heaped amendments on the bill that included scrapping the poll tax ban, adding exemptions and escape clauses for Southern counties, and excluding all states outside the South. House Republicans tacked more amendments on the bill to weaken it. The fight over these amendments dragged on for weeks in Congress. The biggest fight, though, was over the poll tax ban. The tax was the most odious and hated symbol of Southern racial exclusion. Civil rights leaders were enraged when the Senate refused to eliminate the poll tax, arguing that it wouldn't pass constitutional muster. House leaders agreed.
There's no real threat that a majority in Congress will switch gears and vote to scrap the Act in the immediate future. However, the action of many state officials, attorney generals and the always looming shadow of the Supreme Court are strong warnings that the Voting Rights Act could again be in the sights of the GOP.

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

It was really a no-brainer that the Democratic National Committee chose Mayor Villaraigosa to chair this election year's Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. True, Villaraigosa has been ripped relentlessly for supposedly every imagined failing and failure in running L.A. But the hard political reality is that Villaraigosa is the perfect fit for the Democrats at the national level. His solid party credentials are impeccable. He has been the consummate Democratic loyalist, as a labor organizer, assemblyman, Assembly speaker, mayor, and one of the co-chairs of the 2004 convention.

Villaraigosa knows his way around Washington D.C. probably better than any other big city mayor, given the prodigious amount of time he's spent their during his tenure lobbying for more funding, more programs, and more political attention from the Obama administration for L.A.. His national profile will be invaluable for the Democrats in a year when they'll need all their weapons to fire up their base and insure that they stampede to the polls for Obama and the Democrats as they did in 2008.

Then there's the Hispanic vote. It will be huge and pivotal for the Democrats in 2012. So pivotal, that a mass outpouring of Hispanic voters could tip the balance scales toward Obama and Democratic congressional and local candidates in a handful of absolute must win swing states.

Despite the heat that Villaraigosa has taken for his stewardship of City Hall, the national elections are a totally different ballgame. What Villaraigosa did or didn't do as mayor of Los Angeles means nothing to a voter in Albuquerque, Denver, Las Vegas, or Orlando (all cities in the key battleground states with a large number of Hispanic voters). It means everything though to the Democrats. And that's what makes Villaraigosa so important to them in 2012.

The great fear a year ago when President Obama unveiled his budget for 2012 was that he caved to the GOP and Tea Party hardliners and meat axed dozens of vital programs and agencies. They included community service block grants which fund an array of community education, health and social service programs in poor, underserved, largely inner-city neighborhoods, cut programs in science, technology, youth-mentoring programs, and employment and training assistance. The screams were long and loud from liberal Democrats that the budget slashes would tar Obama as the first Democratic president to do what no Democrat or GOP president had dared do and that was to slash and restructure Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
The fears have mostly proved groundless. But Obama had to walk a perilous line. He had to downplay the surge in poverty that has dumped nearly fifty million Americans in or near poverty, and who without government subsistence programs most would sink deeply beneath the poverty line. But he was under relentless pressure from the GOP budget hawks and a big chunk of the public to make the cuts in these vital programs or risk sinking the federal government in a deeper pool of debt and deficit spending.
The pressure on him to slash and burn domestic programs is still just as great. But this time Obama moved away from the danger line with three crucial budget moves. He slashed the endless runaway military spending on the two wars that he inherited from Bush. The overall projected defense cuts total a half trillion dollars spread out over a decade. Though military officials grouse and GOP presidential contenders Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum saber rattle Obama with the claim that the cuts will render America military impotent, the cuts are only a small percentage of the over bloated defense budget; a budget that exclusive of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security dwarfs spending on health, education, and social service programs. Despite the mostly public relations posturing from some military brass and the GOP, the projected defense budget cuts are cuts that the military can comfortably live with.

Obama moved further from the danger line by stepping up his campaign to make the corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share. This is an easy call. In polls and surveys, a majority of the public, and that includes a significant number of conservatives, say that the wealthy should be taxed more. Corporate tax rates are obscenely low, and corporate evasions of them are obscenely high. Obama has held firm that the Bush tax cuts that amounted to a budget killing giveaway to the super rich must go. The tax hikes on the rich will not eliminate the still high federal deficit, but it will dent it. This would bring the deficit under $1 trillion and more importantly, reduce the need for the more draconian cuts in other health and education, and infrastructure maintenance programs.

There will be cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. But they will be stretched out over a decade, and there will be no major structural reforms in the program which is what the GOP demands and which is wildly at odds with the majority of Americans, especially those who are dependent for their health coverage on the programs, want.
A year ago, the GOP gave Obama little room to maneuver. Much of the public bought into the GOP's bogus line that Obama's alleged reckless spending was hopelessly drowning the government in a sea of red ink. Nervous foreign investors as well as a slew of financial experts and economists endlessly claimed that the budget deficit--projected to soar to nearly $1.6 trillion in the last fiscal year, a post-World War II record-- would saddle the nation, with higher taxes; deeper cuts in education, health and social services; staggering permanent debt; and possibly even bankruptcy.
That doomsday scenario was part political hyperbole, part financial panic. Even then many economists noted that the claim of financial Armageddon was way overblown. The projected deficit was about 10 percent of gross domestic product. This would be great enough to threaten economic growth if it were sustained for decades. Yet even that supposedly doomsday estimate was proportionally far smaller than the deficits that the United States ran during and immediately after World War II.

In the past year, the Occupy Wall Street protests awakened the nation to the outrageous feed at the taxpayer trough by the rich, the financial industry and corporations. There's been a greater recognition of the crucial role Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid and other government funded programs play in bolstering the economy, and American's living standards. There are tenuous signs of an economic recovery, and a modest upswing in the number of Americans who approve of his handling of the economy. This has strengthened the president's budget hand. The budget is far from perfect. There are still proposed cuts in Community Development Block Grants and spending freezes in other areas that hurt the poor. But the 2013 budget that Obama proposes does not slam the poorest and neediest and it preserves programs that have been lifelines for millions for decades. This is a budget that hits the mark despite the GOP.

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

The outcry about the proposed redistricting proposals has been long and loud. The charges are by now well known. The plan will rip whole chunks of neighborhoods out of one district and ill fitted crazy quilt style into wildly disparate districts. The two districts that have been most often cited to prove the point are Councilwoman Jan Perry's 9th District and councilman Bernard Parks' s 8th district. Both are among the poorest, almost exclusively minority, and were the epicenter of the 1992 L.A. riots. Take Perry's first. Under the plan she'll lose downtown to 14th District City Councilman Jose Huizar and she'll be left with a district that if not for the Downtown section would have the city's highest unemployment rate, and the greatest dearth of upscale manufacturing and upscale businesses.
Perry has worked hard to change that and part of that effort has been to leverage the financially booming Downtown as a fulcrum for gaining resources and drawing major business and redevelopment dollars to the impoverished part of her 9th District. Perry protests that losing Downtown will put a severe crimp in her efforts, and she has not shirked from making that known.
Parks has been even more vociferous in opposing much of the current redistricting proposals plan. They would in an odd quirk create an opposite dilemma for him. The plan grafts on part of the more upscale, largely white, Westchester section to his mostly minority 8th District. Parks has held nonstop outspoken hearings where parades of residents have marched to the microphones to denounce the proposed shifts. Nothing of course, has been finalized yet. The proposals are still in the talking, negotiating and shouting stage. And while a litany of city officials and residents, and businesspersons have weighed in on the district's reshuffling, one voice has been strangely mute. That's Mayor Villaraigosa. Redistricting is the hard purview of the city council to approve. A redistricting panel is convened by city officials every 10 years to adjust council district boundaries to reflect changes in population and ethnic makeup.
Part of that process is designed to ensure that Latinos, African Americans and other groups denied representation in the past have adequate opportunity to win office, as required under the federal Voting Rights Act.
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But Villaraigosa ultimately has to sign off on the final proposal. And he has much power over its final shape since he put three of the members on the 21 members Redistricting Commission including the Commission's chair Arturo Vargas who is the Executive Director of the National Association of Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO).
So what does he think about the changes. He hasn't said a word. One answer is that he simply prefers to let the process play out and see what's finally approved. Another answer is that since the mayor has deep ties with those on the Council and the Commission that are charged with redrawing the lines, his hidden hand is at work in making the objected to changes. Either answer is plausible and valid.
The problem for Villaraigosa is that when the lines are finally settled on and they remake districts that are poor, even poorer, and give its residents even less political clout at City Hall, and you have residents in other districts equally ticked off about being shuttled into foreign territory districts, Villaraigosa will get an earful from all sides. He'll be hit with the charge of playing politics, favoritism, cronyism, and again turning a deaf ear to the loud pleas from city residents for fairness.
Villaraigosa will be out of office in another year. His legacy is already being written as a mayor who was either an abject failure or did the best job he could given the crisis problems that he had to deal with. Villaraigosa's stone silence on the redistricting imbroglio won't do much to make residents think that his contributions belong on the plus side of his legacy ledger.

President Obama's reversal on his decision to keep hands off the fundraising efforts of his campaign aligned super PACS raised a few eyebrows among campaign finance reform advocates. This seemed like a betrayal of Obama's oft stated position that the relentless chase and dependence on fat cat donors to bankroll campaigns has gone way off the deep-end. In 2008, Obama's said that he'd raise the bulk of his campaign funds from almost literally the nickels and dimes of small donors. That he would not take a penny from lobbyist groups and that he would back an overhaul of the campaign financing rules.
Obama's sharp attack on the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision that virtually gave free license to corporations to dump money directly into partisan campaigns was cheered by campaign reform advocates. This renewed hope and the expectation that Obama would push Democrats to enact proposed legislation to blunt the court's decision and restore checks on corporation's and the financial industry's power to sway elections. So far that legislation has gotten nowhere in Congress. But Obama's reversal on Super PACs is not a betrayal of principle. It a reflection of the brutal reality that to run and keep the White House it will cost a pretty penny. There were two glaring things that again drove that brutal reality home to the White House.
The GOP has rebounded from its anemic fund raising takes in 2008 and has drawn almost dead even with the Democrats in fundraising. A huge chunk of the money is coming from its corporate dominated Super PACS. The other thing is Mitt Romney. He will likely be the GOP presidential nominee and is every bit the cash fundraising cow that Obama is. According to recent reports, nearly 60 corporations and individuals dumped more than $100,000 on a super PAC backing Romney. Typical of the hard money pouring in is Bain Capital, Romney's old outfit. According to the Center for Public Integrity, current and former Bain executives and their relatives have shoved nearly $5 million to organizations that back Romney's presidential bid.

He's also banked tens of thousands of dollars from Walmart's Walton family members, and Koch family members. The heavy duty cash has poured in just to help Romney get the GOP nomination. It takes little imagination to figure that once he bags the nomination the corporate and financial industry donors will radically up the ante for him.
The ideal is to make public financing the rule and the law for federal elections. In a perfect world, that would be the case and big money would not obscenely skew the election process toward those who can essentially pay the most for it. But the Supreme Court decision effectively killed that ideal. This insured that Obama, nor any other presidential candidate, can be competitive in a hard fought primary and even harder fought general election campaign without the tens of millions that lobbyists, PACs, corporations, Wall Street, and labor unions shove into a presidential candidate's campaign coffers. The 2008 presidential primary and general election was the ultimate proof. Hillary Clinton was the near consensus early odds on favorite to bag the Democratic nomination. Her failure had nothing to do with campaign bumbles, policy stumbles, or voter rejection. She simply ran out of money to be competitive with Obama in the smaller state primaries. That enabled Obama to rack up what ultimately proved to be an insurmountable delegate lead. It was the same in the general election. Obama had a bulging campaign chest. Republican presidential foe, John McCain didn't. It was the financial head of stem that Obama had built up coming out of the primary battle with Clinton that made the difference for Obama in being able to saturate the airwaves with his campaign pledges and assaults on McCain. None of this came cheap.
The 2012 campaign will not be a rerun of 2008. Romney with his cash raising prowess from his solid corporate and financial industry ties has an advantage that McCain didn't. But that's not all, Romney will continue to try and turn the tables and pound Obama on his alleged financial and economic failures. He will ask the question Reagan asked Carter during their 1980 presidential debate "are you better off than you were four years ago." The question worked again when Obama asked it about the GOP in 2008. But it costs money and lots of it to message the administration's accomplishments on this pivotal issue, and to ultimately convince voters that the answer is yes. The GOP gave Obama no choice but to directly go after the fat cat donors to effectively get his message across and make the case for a second term. Romney will have just as much money to try and make the opposite case.

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

An NAACP notable, that is a local NAACP branch notable in Texas, praised GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul to the skies after the barrage of attacks on Paul for the racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic digs in his Ron Paul Survival Report newsletter. Herman Cain endorsed Paul rival Newt Gingrich. And despite the slap at Gingrich for racial pandering, Gingrich has never shirked from being in the company of African-American leaders including for a brief moment the Reverend Al Sharpton. His rival Rick Santorum has also gotten support from some black evangelicals including loopy Florida African-American minister O'Neal Dozier. Santorum stopped in at O'Neal's Worldwide Christian Center in Pompano Beach, during the Florida primary and got a rousing nod from Dozier. Santorum even got the even more controversial, and far out Michael the Black Man (his self-description nee Maurice Woodside) to endorse him at a Coral Spring, Florida campaign rally.

The question and mystery is if the three most unabashed conservative of the four GOP presidential candidates scrounge up some African-Americans to co-sign their campaigns why can't the fourth candidate, Mitt Romney find even one African-American to endorse him? South Carolina congressman Tim Scott, who declined to endorse anyone in the South Carolina primary didn't endorse him. Florida congressman Allen West chose a Gingrich dinner to shout to "lefties" to get the hell out of America.
Romney's goose egg in getting endorsements from black GOP officials, elected officials, any black Republican to endorse or even a few token black faces to stand behind him for stump photo-ops has been plainly apparent at his campaign rallies, stage appearance and events. They have been a staple in the background at GOP candidates and elected officials staged public functions. GOP presidential candidates for four decades have followed the lead of then GOP presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968 with his well orchestrated, and well-placed, photo-ops with assorted moderate black leaders, and even getting occasional endorsements from a black celebrity such as Sammy Davis Jr. and Wilt Chamberlain. Former President George W. Bush went much further and managed to blunt the hard criticism that a GOP White House is almost always a virtually an exclusive white, rich, male, clubby preserve with his arguably breakthrough appointments of Coin Powell, Secretary of State, and Condoleezza Rice, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, and Alberto Gonzalez, Attorney General.
So then how to explain the Romney campaign's solid whiteness. The issue of Romney's blind spot on out-reach to African-Americans was glaringly apparent during his stint at Bain Capital. Not one of the dozens of Managing Directors at Bain was African-American. More than half of Bain's directors had BAs or MBA degrees from Harvard.
That's important to note for two reasons. Harvard had made a major effort over the years to ramp up the number of African-Americans and minorities in their business programs. So there was certainly no shortage of black candidates Bain and Romney could have recruited to the company and elevated to Managing Director. Even that failure might have passed under the radar scope, except that Romney boasted during his Massachusetts Senatorial bid in 1994 that public companies should be required to report how many women and minorities they had in order to "breakthrough" the glass ceiling.

Romney boasted even louder during his tenure as Massachusetts governor that he had a sterling record when it came to appointing minorities and women to state posts. But that came after Romney was pushed and prodded by civil rights and women's groups for his near exclusive white male state house. Romney partly in response to the public pounding, and partly with an eye on a presidential run where he knew his state record on diversity would be closely scrutinized made a slew of appointments of minorities and women to the state bench in his last year in office.
Romney's lily white retinue of aides, campaign staffers, advisors, and bankrollers, not to mention endorsers has been so noticeable that even black conservative and former Oklahoma GOP congressman J.C. Watts lambasted Romney for it. Watts challenged Romney for having a virtually lily white campaign staff. A nonplussed Romney shrugged it off and blithely said that he hires the best persons that he could find. Evidently that didn't include Watts, and it wouldn't. Watts has endorsed Gingrich.
The scorecard then reads like this: Gingrich, Santorum, and Paul, all have asked for and gotten endorsements and support from African-Americans. There is no record or evidence that the supposed more moderate Romney has asked for or gotten any black support or even taken a photo-op with some dutiful blacks. The question that will loom even larger as Romney closes in on the GOP nomination is. Where are Romney's blacks?

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

It's not the firestorm that the Susan G. foundation touched off by lopping off funding to Planned Parenthood last year and that it announced the other day. It's not even the foundation's right to lop off the funds. Though they could have done better than put out the weak, silly, half-baked line that it had nothing to do with abortion, or that it buckled to pressure from anti-abortion groups. It did, and everybody knows it. It's not even about sullying Komen's reputation. Since the foundation does good work in raising cancer awareness, and pours much money into women's cancer prevention education programs.
No, Komen's dumb move did exactly what anti-abortionists and presumably at least some of the shot callers at Komen didn't want to happen. And that's turn the funding hit against Planned Parenthood into a walking advertisement for PP. In the space of 24 hours, PP raised nearly a half million dollars in online donations from more than 6000 donors. And that's just online, almost certainly the organization will raise tens of thousands more in the days to come as cash and checks continue to pour in.

Komen's dumb move also gave PP something that spending thousands in ad dollars couldn't do. And that's promote PP's organization and cause. PP has and will continue to do just fine without Komen's cash. But there's a cautionary tale that Komen and anti-abortionists again told the world. That's be careful when you try to bully something into happening, the very opposite usually happens. PP is the latest proof of that.