There’s a good and bad note for Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama in the recent exit polls of white voters in Democratic primaries. The good note is that by a lopsided majority of six to one whites said that race was not a factor in considering whether to back Obama or not. That pretty much conforms to virtually every poll that’s been taken since Obama tossed his hat in the presidential ring a year ago. His red state Democratic primary and caucus wins and the handful of endorsements he’s gotten from the red state Democratic senators and governors seem to bolster the poll findings as well as his camp’s contention that the majority of whites have bought his race neutral change and unity pitch.

The bad note for him, though, is buried in the racial rose tinged poll numbers. In fact, they were actually buried there even as he rolled up big numbers in his primary victories in Georgia, Mississippi, Maryland, Virginia, Alabama, and South Carolina, and the District of Columbia. Blacks make up a substantial percentage of the vote in those states, and he bagged eighty to ninety percent of their vote. But much less noted was that Clinton got almost sixty five to seventy percent of white votes.

It wasn’t just the reverse racial numbers for Clinton and Obama. Obama does incredibly well in netting the vote of college educated, upscale whites. But Clinton does just as well in bagging support from lower income downscale, and rural white voters. This has huge potential downside implications for Obama in a head to head battle with John McCain in the red states. A significant percent of the voters there are lower income, rural and less educated whites. Obama banks that he can pry one or two of the red states from the GOP. Yet, if he can’t convince Clinton’s white vote supporters, and they are Democrats, to back him, the chances are nil that he’ll have any more success with Republican and independent white voters in these states.

A hint of that came in the Democratic primary in Ohio. Clinton beat out Obama in the primary, and she did it mainly with white votes. But that wasn’t the whole story. Nearly one quarter of whites in Ohio flatly said race did matter in voting. Presumably that meant that they would not vote for a black candidate no matter how politically attractive or competent he was.

An even bigger hint of the race difficulty could come in Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary. The voter demographics in the state perfectly match those in Ohio. A huge percent of Pennsylvania voters are blue collar, anti-big government, socially conservative, pro defense, and intently patriotic, and there’s a tormenting history of a racial polarization in the state. Pundit James Carville has even described Pennsylvania as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, with Alabama in between. Carville’s characterization is hyperbolic, but devastatingly accurate. Take the state’s two big, racially diverse cities out of the vote equation, and Pennsylvania would be rock solid red state Republican. While polls show some fluctuation in Clinton’s decisive lead over Obama there, she still has a solid lead.

The near unanimous backing that whites give to the notion of voting for a black candidate for president also deserves to be put to a political test to see how much truth there is to it. The question: “Would you vote for a black candidate for president?” is a direct question, and to flatly say no to it makes one sound like a bigot, and in the era of verbal racial correctness (ask Don Imus), it’s simply not fashionable to come off to pollsters sounding like one. That’s hardly the only measure of a respondent’s veracity. In a 2006 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a Yale political economist found that white Republicans are 25 percentage points more likely to cross over and vote for a Democratic senatorial candidate against a black Republican foe. The study also found that in the near twenty year stretch from 1982 to 2000, when the GOP candidate was black, the greater majority of white independent voters backed the white candidate.

Republicans and independents weren’t the only ones guilty of dubious Election Day color-blindness. Many Democrats were too. In House races, the study found that Democrats were nearly 40 percent less likely to back a black Democratic candidate than a white Democrat.

Obama’s Democratic primary and caucus wins certainly show that many white voters will vote for him. They obviously feel that he has the right presidential stuff. But a large number of whites aren’t quite ready to strap on their racial blinders even for a candidate who has leaned way over backward to run a race neutral, bipartisan, unity campaign. The big question is just how many whites will refuse to strap on the racial blinders on Election Day. That’s still the X factor for Obama.

Posted by Earl Ofari Hutchinson at 8:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the more artful, but deceitful, ploys in Obama's Wednesday speech was conflating Ferraro's utterly innocuous comments about race with the hateful rantings of Obama's own "spiritual adviser." Here's one of the quotes from that speech:

"On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike."

So there you have it, stating the bleeding obvious -- that many voters favor Obama because he is black -- is conflated with saying the CIA created HIV to wipe out African-Americans. (This is the same CIA, mind you, that was convinced there WMDs in Iraq.)

I love, too, how Obama pretends that Ferraro and Wright are at opposite "ends" of the political spectrum. Um, sorry, Barack -- these are two lefties here. The Democrats' (suddenly cannibalistic) appetite for identity politics is wholly a Democratic problem.

Anyway, back to Ferraro. "To equate what I said with what this racist bigot has said from the pulpit is unbelievable," she says, and she's right. It's far worse than some overheated Obama aide calling Hillary Clinton a monster (which, for what it's worth, is really no worse than Hillary's calling Dick Cheney "Darth Vader").

And if that weren't enough, Ferraro has also called out Obama, again rightly, for throwing his grandma under the bus. "I could not believe that," she said. "That's my mother's generation."

Really, couldn't Obama have said, "There are even dear people in my own family who have used racist stereotypes" -- and left it at that? Did he really have to brand Grandma as a racist before the whole country?

This flap is going to hurt Obama's chances greatly. Not just because it casts doubt on the sincerity of his "post-racial" appeal, but because it cuts into the very question of his decency. One of the greatest advantages Obama once had is that, unlike Clinton, he didn't seem like the sort of politician who would say or do anything, or sell anyone out, to get elected. That no longer appears to be the case.

A few months ago, I would have told you Obama would rout McCain in a general election. Now, if he wins, I suspect it will be in a squeaker -- and that's assuming he even gets to the general election.

All of which proves, once again, that long-range political predictions are for idiots.

Posted by Chris Weinkopf at 1:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

“There were early warning signals of the ugliness that could come….the message was that Obama was not exempt from a racial dig. That was also evident in the knock at Obama's Southside Chicago church, or to be more exact the minister at the church, Jeremiah Wright. He is an outspoken afro-centric activist on racial and social issues. The inference was that Obama's guilt by membership and friendship with him made him a closet radical and a race baiter.”

This writer wrote these words in a column January 6. It was a no-brainer prediction that the Wright card would eventually be played hard by the media and milked for all it’s worth. The inflammatory, provocative rants of Wright were well-known. Thousands within and without his church have heard them for years. His afro-centric tinged writings have been widely cited by black commentators. It was only a matter of time.

The only surprise was the timing. This writer expected that the Wright card would be kept tightly in the political deck and dumped on the political table by the GOP “truth squads” in the fall if Obama is the eventual Democratic presidential nominee. But then again why not dump it on the table now. The Wright rants are just too juicy, racially salacious, and media sensational to keep under wraps any longer. And since Hillary Clinton has been so trashed and demonized by much of the media, while Obama got a free pass, all the better to toss out Wright now. If Obama can be hammered with and tainted by the guilt by association tag with Wright that further poisons the Democratic Party well and makes the throngs of independents that are enthralled by Obama waver, maybe even rethink just who and what they’re getting into by backing him.

But this writer didn’t just make the prediction that the Wright card would sooner or later be used against Obama. He also flatly predicted the instant Obama stood on the steps of the Old Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois back in February 2007 and announced that he was on a history making quest to be president that two things would happen. The first is that the racial innuendos, rumors, gossip, hints, digs, and finger-pointing would be a subtle and tormenting subtext to his campaign.

The second thing was that he couldn’t duck and dodge racial matters by simply pounding away that he and his campaign was about hope, change and unity. That was good campaign stump stuff but it is not the reality of race and politics in America.

Now we come to his so-called race speech. Obama did the obligatory sprint backwards from Wright’s preachments and philosophy. The idea was not just to distance himself from Wright’s views, but to get ahead of the curve and reassure the waverers and doubters about him that his hope, change and unity theme was still alive and well. The problem with this is that it won’t quell the doubts.

He made the speech only under extreme duress, namely the beating that he took for his association with Wright, and his fear that it could wreck or at the very least be a horrible distraction to his campaign. As he correctly noted, the Wright speech(s) will continue to resurface and will continue to be a prick in his campaign’s side. It won’t open up any new dialogue on race that some commentators naively think will or should happen. Obama in fact told us why. He mentioned the O.J. Simpson case, and how the great racial discourse that the case supposedly ignited was grotesquely twisted, mangled, and ultimately botched. But that doesn’t mean race will magically disappear from the presidential campaign trail, or more specifically from Obama’s campaign trail. These questions will still be whispered or shouted out whenever Obama’s name is mentioned: Is America ready for a black president? Will whites vote for him in a showdown with two white males? Does he really have the experience (read intelligence and competence)? Is he patriotic enough? Is he black enough? Is he too black? Will he tilt toward blacks and other minorities in the White House? Will he be a yes man for (white) corporate interests? Will his election make race a dead issue in America?

This doesn’t make for serious dialogue on racial problems, let alone point America in the direction of real solutions to them. This is mere momentary racial titillation. Obama’s speech contained the seed for the racial discourse dodge when he spoke of the disparities in the criminal justice system, failing inner city schools, HIV/AIDS, and chronic and nagging Great Depression high rate of black male unemployment, the need for greater family supports only in the broadest of broad generalities. There was not the barest hint of any specific initiatives to tackle these problems.

The Wright issue and by extension race was forced on Obama. One eloquent and flowery speech won’t make either go away.

Posted by Earl Ofari Hutchinson at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In addressing the Wright controversy and the race issue, Barack Obama hit the ball out of the park. He did a beautiful job of showing how America can get past its racial obsession, not by burying real grievances, but by keeping them in their proper context:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

The only question is: Will it work? Obama may have said all the right things, but it no longer matters what he says -- it matters what people think he believes. His strongest asset, his authenticity, has been damaged. First the NAFTA flap, then the Gerldine Ferraro nonsense, and now the Wright brouhaha have all served to call Obama's sincerity as a race-transcending straight-shooter into question. And this is a hard problem to overcome.

No matter how fine the speech, it will do little good if people don't buy it.

Posted by Chris Weinkopf at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I find fascinating the polarizing and unpredictable division of opinions in the Obama-Wright kerfuffle. Just look at what we have here at FF and in the Daily News. First there's Jasmyne Cannick, who in today's paper lines up strongly behind Jeremiah Wright and his heated rhetoric, and denounces whites who would criticize it:

It seems that it's not enough that we've adopted their religion and most blacks are worshipping to their white, blue-eyed Jesus, but now they want to dictate the message that we receive as well. And in the process, they've backed Obama against a wall, forcing him to publicly distance himself from his pastor in order to prove that he's not an angry black man in disguise.

Then in a post yesterday that became an op-ed in today's paper, Jonathan offers what is, I think, the perfect counterpoint:

This is not about an endorsement from a person with distasteful ideas. This is about belonging to a community that presents an angry and aggrieved face to the world. That anger may be justified is not the point. The public face of his church is far different from the face that Obama presents to the nation.

Exactly. Jasmyne may be right that Pastor Wright represents an authentic voice for part of black America, but he stands in stark contrast to the hopeful, unifying, race-transcending themes that have been the centerpiece of Obama's campaign. If Obama had run as "an angry black man" (as Jasmyne puts it), he would never have made it to frontrunner status. Indeed, angry candidates of any race seldom do well in a country that craves optimism from its leaders.

Meanwhile, I find myself agreeing with Rob, to an extent, that Wright's anti-American statements are not entirely bad. There is something noble, even patriotic, about not looking past the evils of one's own people. And while I disagree with Wright about what some of those evils are (the idea that the CIA created AIDS to wipe out blacks is vile, noxious hookum), I do find myself uncomfortable with certain Republican-types who react furiously to any suggestion that America might be anything less than immaculate.

Christopher Hayes makes the point nicely in this article in The Nation:

Imagine for a moment that you are pro-life. You believe that each abortion represents the murder of an innocent child. ... If you were religious, you might think that God judged America harshly for this crime, for the nation's continuing indifference, and you might even think that God damns America for its tolerance of a holocaust.

It's hard to imagine, though, that if a Republican presidential candidate were running for president and had a preacher with the views spelled out above, that it would cause much of a stir, or even register a blip in the brain-dead oscillations of the twenty-four-hour, scandal-cycle EKG. And yet here we are, five or six news cycles into an ongoing firestorm over a few seconds of two different sermons delivered by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Barack Obama's (and Oprah Winfrey's) Chicago church, and a man who Obama says "brought me to Jesus."

Although I would argue with some of Hayes' language and conclusions, he has a point. I, for one, do believe that America's abortion regime is an abomination. And a pastor who says as much, even if he uses overheated and harsh language, is speaking the truth.

Where Hayes comes up short, though, is in his suggestion that a Republican whose pastor said God was damning America for abortion would not suffer for it politically. It's one thing to say abortion is evil. It's another, from a political standpoint, to say America is evil, whatever the reason. As Jonathan aptly asks at the end of his article:

Senator Obama, is there any conceivable way that you could place on your ticket as Vice President a person who attended The Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Church for twenty years?

The answer is no, and not just for Obama, but for anyone running for president. Falwell's suggestion that America brought 9-11 upon itself went over the line for how much national self-condemnation the public will tolerate -- from the left or the right, black or white.

Here we return to Rob's discussions of national self-criticism and patriotism. As far as I'm concerned, the most toxic words Rev. Wright has uttered are not the anti-American ones we've heard on TV the last few days, but the racialist and arguably anti-Semitic ones I wrote about two months ago. Yet clearly those never generated the same level of fury.

Go figure.

Posted by Chris Weinkopf at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is an election with some strange things happening. One of the strangest is the penchant for so many white males to join with African-American voters in a few primaries to back Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama. It’s strange not because of anything Obama has said or done to get so many white males behind him. It’s strange because of the possible motive many of the men that are voting for him. Let’s put it this way. Are they voting for him because they truly buy his flowery pitch of hope, change and unity. Or, is there something darker, and more insidious at work here. The something is the deep, persistent, and widespread notion among many men that a woman is not fit to hold the highest office especially if that woman is named Hillary.

Males make up slightly more than forty percent of the American electorate, and of that percent, white males make up thirty six percent, or one in three American voters. They have been the staunchest Republican backers since Ronald Reagan’s trounce of Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Without their solid support in 2000, Democratic Presidential contender Al Gore would have easily won the White House, and the Florida vote debacle would have been a meaningless sideshow. In 2004, Bush swept Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in every one of the states of the Old Confederacy and three out of four of the Border States. He grabbed more than 60 percent of the white male vote nationally. In the South, he got more than 70 percent of their vote. That insured another Bush White House.

Male voters gave not just Bush but Republican Presidents Bush Sr., Ronald Reagan, and Richard Nixon the decisive margin of victory over their Democrat opponents in their presidential races. The majority of them that voted for the GOP presidents were middle-to upper-income, college educated, and lived in a suburban neighborhood. This closely parallels the demographic of the men that are voting for Obama. But at the same time, fewer than one in five white males labeled themselves as liberal.

The reasons for the intense and unshakeable loyalty of working and middle-class men to the GOP are not hard to find. The gap was first identified and labeled in the 1980 contest between Reagan and Carter. That year Reagan got more than a 20 percent bulge in the margin of male votes he got over Clinton. Women voters by contrast split almost evenly down the middle in backing both Reagan and Carter. Most men made no secret about why they liked Reagan and what they perceived that he stood for. The tough talk, his apparent firmness and refusal to compromise on issues of war and peace fit neatly into the stereotypical, male qualities of professed courage, determination, and toughness.

Then there’s the thing that’s even less politically and gender correct to admit and that’s that the bias of many men toward women in high positions is so deep seated that they refuse to believe that they are even biased. Psychologists have testified in countless gender bias law suits that the “unconscious bias” of male managers against women, especially against women attaining power positions. The refusal of men to promote women has been the biggest factor fueling gender discrimination in corporate hiring and promotions. Male managers in charge of promotion and pay decisions unwittingly engage in "spontaneous" and "automatic" stereotyping and "in-group favoritism" that results in the most desirable jobs at the company being filled by white males.

Even if unconscious gender bias affects only a relatively small percent of men in a close contest between a male and female candidate in which the two are rated fairly evenly in competence, qualifications and experience, the refusal of many men to vote for her could harm her candidacy. Female candidates offset the male bias by getting solid support from women voters.

Posted by Earl Ofari Hutchinson at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the more insidious tactics of the Clinton presidential campaign has been to get surrogates to say outrageous things about Barack Obama -- that way, the noxious ideas can make it into circulation, but Hillary bears no direct responsibility for them. Remember when Jean Shaheen brought up the specter of Obama's past drug use, or any of Bill Clinton's nasty-grams from a few weeks ago?

Now comes the latest cheap shot by way of Pennsylvania's Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, a longtime and prominent Clinton backer. His comment: Obama can't win because he's black.

Oh, Rendell has the good sense not to word things quite that bluntly. According to the governor, the problem isn't that Obama's black, but that, well, so many Americans are white. Closet racists, most every one of them. "You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African American candidate," Rendell told the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

See, most white folks, especially the "conservative" ones, aren't enlightened like Rendell; they'd never elect a black man. Which is why, if you follow the logic, Democrats need to elect Hillary -- because a black Democratic candidate would produce a Republican president.

Nice, huh? We get to discredit Obama on the basis of his race, while impugning white voters at the same time.

Rendell's not the first to come up with this theory. I've had multiple white Democratic friends tell me the same thing. They like Obama -- really, they do -- but they can't vote for him because so many other white people are racists.

And who knows, they could be right. But so far, the only people I've met who say they wouldn't vote for Obama on the account of his race are white liberals who claim that they could vote for a black man, but won't, because so many other whites can't.

I don't for a moment think these white liberals are racist, but unwittingly, they're perpetuating racism if -- even for what may seem like noble reasons -- they vote against Obama because of his race.

And for all their concerns about rampant American bigotry, they may be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Obama loses because white liberals who thought he couldn't win refuse to vote for him, they will later on, no doubt, point to his defeat as proof that the country is too racist to elect a black man. When in reality, the only whites who weren't ready to elect a black man were the very liberals who claim to be the most racially tolerant.

Rendell is, predictably, already backpedaling from his comments, and if the usual pattern holds up, the Clinton campaign will never even acknowledge them. But that's OK, they've served their purpose: Putting the thought into the heads of many a Democratic voter that casting a ballot for a black man would be a huge mistake.

Here's a crazy idea: What if people just voted for the candidate they liked the most, regardless of race or political calculation? After all, from the looks of things, that's what most people are already doing -- Hillary Clinton be damned.

Posted by Chris Weinkopf at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The first time I set eyes on Los Angeles Police Department Officer Randy Simmons, he was lifting a 200-pound man off the ground. In an enthusiastic bear hug.

Simmons, a large, gregarious rock of a man was warmly embracing a long-time friend, and fellow LAPD SWAT officer, who had graciously invited me to take a peek inside their fraternity, at the annual SWAT Dinner.

That was barely 10 days ago. No one in that room at the Police Academy, no matter how tactically cynical, could anticipate that less than two weeks later, Simmons would be the first man from the Metropolitan Division’s “D Platoon,” as SWAT is officially known, to die in a gun fight.

Simmons, with more than 20 years on the team, was hardly the picture of a SWAT cop the media would have you believe. You certainly would not think him to be one of the Neanderthal brutes that LAPD brass considers them. While he looked every part the former pro-football player he was – a rock-solid athletic physique that, though nearly two-decades my senior, put mine to shame – he was warm, tender even, to those around him.

As he and my host spoke, I looked around the room and noticed 20-feet away a graying man of Asian descent at a table of mostly Hispanic officers. “Wow,” I thought to myself. “I wish I could have brought the LA Times Editorial Board down here. Let them see the brutal, racist, lily-white LAPD that they so often blast. Let them see a black cop hugging a white cop like long lost brothers.”

That Asian cop, Jim Veenstra, now lies in the same hospital where Randy Simmons succumbed, a bullet having felled him in the same fusillade.

Posted by Chris Weinkopf at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now, now, let's not take at face value the innuendo-laden smear against Mike Huckabee laid out by the hard-core lefties at The Nation. if you want to know what Huckabee thinks about race, consider this story from Newsweek:

A few years later [early 1980s], Huckabee took the pulpit of a small but growing church in Pine Bluff, Ark., and started a Christian radio and TV station, which aired his Sunday sermons. One day a listener contacted him. He was a black teenager and was interested in attending services at Huckabee's church, but worried he wouldn't be welcome; Immanuel Baptist Church had been all white since its inception in the 1890s. "Of course you can come, I told him," Huckabee recalls.

The minister prepared his flock. "I hope that nobody has anything except warm feelings," he recalls telling them. "In fact, if he is not welcome, I don't want to be here either." The speech didn't go over well among some church elders, who threatened to fire him. Several members quit in protest. But most of his parishioners stood with him, and in the years that followed, the church slowly integrated. "I grew up with a lot of people who really resisted integration," Huckabee tells NEWSWEEK. "The more I listened to them, the more I became convinced that racism was an incredible evil." Rex Nelson, who worked for Huckabee when he was governor, says his racial awareness "comes from being raised poor … He knew what it was like to look up at other people who were looking down on him." (Huckabee later carried these lessons to the statehouse, where he pushed to end racial disparity in drug sentencing and urged compassion for the children of illegal immigrants—a position that put him at odds with some in his party.)

Maybe that's why today -- Martin Luther King Day -- Huckabee got the endorsement of Rev. Bill Owens, leader of the Coalition of African American Pastors. According to news reports, Owens "cited Huckabee's strong track record as governor of Arkansas in promoting blacks to board posts and embracing racial reconciliation."

The Nation's hit piece is a cheap sort of dirty politics, whether it's waged at John McCain, Mike Hucakbee, or anyone else.

Posted by Chris Weinkopf at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Kudos to Jonathan for his excellent post on identity politics. I think the distinction he makes between letting identity politics dictate whom we'll consider voting for -- as opposed to whom we'll vote against -- is key.

I can see why Mormons would be attracted to Romney, the way African-Americans may be attracted to Obama, or evangelicals to Huckabee, or even women to Hillary. Each of these groups believes -- rightly, to varying degrees -- that it has been kept on the fringes of society, disrespected or even discriminated against by the political establishment/mainstream/majority. For each group, the election of one of its own to the presidency would confer a sense of having "made it," and having overcome its outsider status.

No doubt, this attracted many Catholics to JFK. Surely it's what makes Antonio Villaraigosa so popular among Latinos. I even remember back in 1984, hearing Italian-American groups gush over Walter Mondale because he had named Geraldine Ferraro as a running-mate.

This is natural, and dare I say, not all bad. It's the melting pot in action. And it also tends to dissipate over time.

The real trouble, as Jonathan notes, is not when people want to see a member of their group succeed, but when they refuse to consider members of certain other groups due to their own bigotry. Romney, no doubt, has received this bigoted treatment from some evangelicals/fundamentalists. (Should he get the nomination, he can expect much more from various secular liberals.) But by far, the biggest victim of this negative kind of identity politics has been Huckabee. I have heard multiple intelligent, educated people say they would never vote for him because of his religion -- a statement that seldom arouses any controversy, but imagine if it were made about, oh, Mike Bloomberg or Keith Ellison.

The other dangerous side of identity politics is when it is used as a cheap campaign wedge. Think of the Clinton campaign's efforts to portray all criticisms of Hillary as sexist. Or think of the Obama Spanish-language radio ads that claim, "Hillary Clinton does not respect our people."

This is dangerous talk which poisons our democracy -- and it's far more destructive than members of a put-upon group pulling for one of their own.

Posted by Chris Weinkopf at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Well, imagine if we learned that Huckabee currently attends a church where the following are preached:

• A commitment to a "White Value System"
• Pledge Allegiance to All White Leadership Who Espouse and Embrace the White Value System

And what's more, what if Huckabee's church had named, oh, David Duke as its man of the year for 2007, saying he "truly epitomized greatness," and praising him for his "integrity and honesty."

Think that would raise some public concern?

If so, then perhaps it's time everyone stopped asking Huckabee about his religious preferences, and instead turned their attention to Barack Obama. Those quotes above come not from Huckabee's church, which has a history of commitment to racial equality, but to Barack Obama's -- I just substituted the word "White" for "Black" and David Duke's name for Louis Farrakhan's.

As London's Spectator explains in this article, Obama's parish, Trinity United Church of Christ, and its pastor, spout some rather odious racialist rhetoric. And as Richard Cohen notes in his weekly column (which will appear in tomorrow's Daily News), Obama's church magazine recently honored Farrakahn, the rabid race-baiter and anti-Semite whose own church's theology holds that white people are a race of devils created by an evil scientist.

Now, in yesterday's discussion, Jonathan raised the remote possibility that someone who thinks members of X or Y religion won't be saved might, in public office, not treat those people very well. It's a fair point, in theory and in history, but as I responded, there's no evidence for that concern among modern American Baptist leaders. Moreover, who goes to heaven is not the president's decision to make -- so his opinion on the matter is irrelevant to our election.

A far more troubling concern, though, is a would-be president who belongs to a church that espouses arguably racist or anit-Semitic views. Obama claims to not share these views, and if presssed, he will no doubt explicitly distance himself from them. (He'll probably also condemn his pastor's visit, with Farrakhan, to Muammar el-Qaddafi in 1984.) But is that good enough, when he hasn't protested these odious views all the years he was sitting in the pews?

Would it be enough if Huckabee attended a similar, white church?

Or is it only conservative Christians whose religious preferences are scrutinized this way?

Posted by Chris Weinkopf at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Bradley Effect, lest you forget, is a term whose origins lie here in California, circa 1982. John Nichols at The Nation explains:

Tom Bradley, the popular mayor of Los Angeles, was the Democratic nominee for governor. Polls showed the African-American Democrat running well ahead of white Republican candidate George Deukmejian. Yet, when the votes were counted, Bradley lost by more than 50,000 votes.

The result made no sense. The gubernatorial election was one of the few Democratic losses in what was a good year for the party. Bradley was an able politician with a smooth style and a sound record. Analysts took a new look at the polls, which seemed sound.

It was then that they hit on the notion that white voters, not wanting to be thought to be prejudiced against an African-American candidate, had told pollsters they were for Bradley when they had always planned to vote for Deukmejian.

The phenomenon came to be referred to as "The Bradley Effect."

So did the same thing happen to Barack? Granite State whites wanted to look racially sensitive, so they told pollsters they had a crush on Obama, while really they were planning to indulge their old-time love for the ultimate white woman?

Maybe, but I doubt it.

For starters, if voters lied to pollsters before the election, presumably they would have also lied after the election -- that is, they would say they voted for Obama even though they pulled the lever for Clinton. After all, the desire to not look racist wouldn't have vanished overnight. But this isn't what's happened. In New Hampshire, the exit-polling results mirror the actual vote, suggesting that something else is at work here.

Remember that where the pollsters got New Hampshire most wrong was on the women's vote. They predicted women would narrowly break for Obama. In reality, women voted overwhelmingly for Clinton. So, if you believe that Obama got Bradley Effected, you also have to believe that New Hampshire's closet racists are overwhelmingly female.

That's possible, I suppose, but there's absolutely zero evidence to suggest it's the case. Meanwhile, Ockham's Razor points to a simpler explanation -- Clinton's last-minute campaign theatrics rallied her base of women support.

Race, far from being the albatross on the Obama campaign, is actually its greatest asset. Yes, the candidate is charming and inspiring, but those two traits alone wouldn't put a virtual political neophyte into frontrunner status. Race is a factor, too -- a positive one.

Obama connects precisely because he is African-American. Millions of American whites want to vote for a black man, to quell their own inner demons, perhaps, but also to demonstrate that, once and for all, America has gotten over its struggles with race. (Conversely, this is also why much of the traditional black American leadership has been reluctant to embrace Obama, because his success undermines the "America is inherently racist" narrative that sustains its political relevance.)

I don't doubt that there are some closet racists out there who secretly hope for Obama to lose. But I suspect they are vastly outnumbered by anti-racist whites who would love nothing more than to elect a black president -- one who can transcend race and lay identity politics to rest in favor of a polity in which the content of one's character truly reigns supreme.

Call it the Anti-Bradley Effect: Voters who say they are color-blind, but who are drawn to Obama in no small part because he's black.

It may sound funny, but in a very real way, this is progress.

Posted by Chris Weinkopf at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

No-shot GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul tossed out yet another juicy zinger this time on Meet the Press when he said that Lincoln was a bad guy for fighting the civil war. Paul’s solution: simply shell out some cash, buy the slaves, and set them free. One would like to believe that Paul is just jerking off the press and the public with his shoot from the lip, loose brained, solutions on everything from taxes to ending the Iraq war. And that his dig at Lincoln for fighting the Civil War is the latest in the train of dumb wit Paulisms.

But the Civil war and the Lincoln jibe needs a response for two reasons. The first is for its idiot read of history. Lincoln as an Illinois Congressman in 1849 proposed a bill for voluntary and gradual emancipation of the slaves in the District of Columbia. Lincoln toyed with the idea of offering compensation to get the slavemasters to go along with it. Congress dominated by Southerners and the slave owners showed absolutely no interest in taking a government bribe to give up their slaves in D.C. Lincoln didn’t give up the idea. In 1861, Lincoln, now president, dangled the carrot of federal dollars in front of the slaveowners in the Border States. He’d pay them $400 per slave to free them. There were no takers. The next year, Lincoln even arm-twisted Congress to pass a resolution providing for payment to the slaveowners in the Border States and elsewhere. That went nowhere too.

The slave masters understood something that Paul doesn’t. Slavery was not an aberrant, patchwork system that consigned a few million luckless blacks to hard, unpaid labor. Slavery was a cornerstone of the Southern economy. It wove personal lifestyle, custom, and comfort together for the benefit of the slave owners. Slavery was slyly encoded in articles in the Constitution, protected by court decisions, and bolstered by the full force of federal law (the enforement of the fugitive slave law). Lincoln had a better chance of dismantling slavery with dollars than Paul has of winning the White House.

The other more compelling reason to take on Paul’s dumb crack is that while the North may have won the war, the South won the peace. No other region has so dominated national politics--the military, the courts, Congress, the White House--as the South. It retooled slavery into a iron clad sytem of Jim Crow segregation, economic domination, and state government sanctioned violence to maintain power. No amount of money could have changed that.

The South maintained political dominance for nearly century after the end of slavery by forcing every Democrat or Republican that wanted to bag or stay in the White House to do and say as little as possible about race and racism, slavishly adhere to states rights, and pander to Southern politicians. When the civil rights movement momentarily changed this neat political formula white Southern Democrats simply swapped their Democratic political pin for a Republican one. In the eyes of many white Southerners, the Democratic Party became the hated symbol of integration and civil rights.

Millions in the South and elsewhere agree with Paul that the legacy of slavery has ruined the nation. If they could turn the clock back a century and a half they’d do just what Paul says and would not shed one drop of blood to free the slaves. Worse, they wouldn’t spend a penny to free them either. My suspicion is that neither would anti-big government, abolish-taxes Paul. Lincoln are you listening?

Posted by Earl Ofari Hutchinson at 8:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The shock jock on a popular Los Angeles talk radio station screamed through the microphone with apoplectic delight, “You see, they hate each other too!" The “they” and the “each other” are African-Americans and Latinos. His shout was loud, crude, and aimed to do what shock jocks get paid to do, namely shock. But this was not standard shock jock bluster. He based his rant on a troubling eye catching response to a question in a recent survey by the New America Media. NAM is a consortium of ethnic media groups in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a wide-ranging poll, it sampled opinion among blacks, Latinos and Asians about each other.

The response that raised the eyebrows was that a near majority of Latinos said that blacks were crime prone and that they feared for their safety around them. A slight majority of blacks returned the negative typecast compliment and said that Latinos take jobs from blacks and they are out to undercut their political power.

Those are the type of utterances that white bigots supposedly spew. However, now they just as easily rolled off of black and Latino lips. That revelation for the shock jock and for many other whites merely confirmed that blacks and Latinos can be bigots too. The ugly truth is they’re right. And that also tells much about the often muddled, confused, and conflicted picture of race and ethnic relations in America.

For decades bigotry was always defined as racial discrimination and violence against blacks by whites. The black power movement and the strident black militancy of the 1960s dramatically changed that. Now blacks were hammered for their anti-white racial taunts. That eventually morphed into and codified as blacks playing the race card whenever things went especially bad. That always meant making whites feel guilty to get an advantage. The point is that blacks and whites were still the only ones that hurled vicious and vile negative stereotypes about each other and at each other, and that’s where it ended. The NAM poll convincingly exploded the notion that blacks and whites were the only groups that saw each other through jaundiced racial lens.

Blacks, Latinos and Asians can hold the same hostile racial attitudes toward each other, and aren’t afraid to voice them.

The common litany of stereotypes, myths and misconceptions that many blacks and Latinos now routinely toss out about each other sooner or later will rudely force their way into and badly taint the way blacks and Latinos see each other. In a worst-case scenario, the gulf in attitudes, perceptions and ultimately relations could widen rather than narrow between the two groups. The New America Media survey zeroed in on the negative beliefs and sentiments that blacks and Latinos hold about each. It other offered more proof that race relations and worse racial bigotry can no longer be colored in black and white.

Posted by Earl Ofari Hutchinson at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

To understand how incredibly separated from reality the politically driven Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners is, one look no further than their latest review of an officer-involved shooting.

Distributed yesterday on the LAPD web site, this report, regards the January 22, 2007 shooting of Officer Andy Taylor.

The long-story short of this event is that Officer Taylor was shot four times at point-blank range by a suspect who was handcuffed and already searched. Taylor barely survived, saved literally by his badge, which deflected a round suspect Mathew Powell fired into his chest.

The report is bizzarre on its face, even to those of us fully familiar with the stilted "Officer A, Subject 1" language that is a by-product of certain police officer protection laws. But, for a real trip down the LAPD Rabbit Hole, flip over to page 11 and read this gem of antiseptic, ivory tower analysis (Officer C is Taylor, Suspect 3 is Powell):

Following the removal of Subject 3 from the apartment, Officer C guarded Subject 3 in the hallway. Officer C sat Subject 3 up into a seated position, with Subject 3’s back against the north hallway wall, opposite the doorway to the apartment. Officer C then observed Subject 3 raising his right knee and begin to rise up from the ground by pushing up with his right leg. Officer C placed his hands on Subject 3’s upper torso in an attempt to push him back to a seated position. Simultaneously, Subject 3 rotated his body in a counterclockwise direction, bringing his hands to his right side while holding a handgun. Subject 3 then fired two rounds at Officer C, knocking him rearward. Officer C regained his
footing, crouched down and grabbed Subject 3’s wrists with both hands. Unable to gain control of Subject 3’s handgun, the struggle continued westbound down the hallway. As Subject 3 raised himself off the floor, Officer C tackled him to the ground in a prone position with Officer C landing on top of him. Subject 3 canted his body onto his left side, extended his arms to the right side of his body, attempting to point the handgun at Officer C. Officer C attempted to force Subject 3’s torso onto the floor with his bodyweight while fighting for control of the handgun.

The BOPC found Officer C’s non-lethal use of force to be in policy.

That's right, the BOPC devoted all of that space to finding Taylor acted appropriately in tackling a man who was in the process of shooting him. It's a good thing the BOPC didn't consider the possibility that Taylor spoke to the scum ball in a disrespectful manner after being capped four times. They might still be writing for another month if that were under review.

There's your consent decree at work, Angelenos. A cop gets shot four times and hours of effort go into analyzing if the officer was "in-policy" in tackling him. Glad to know we have that much trust in the LAPD hiring process.

The rest of the report, however, is revealing in other respects.

At the end of the incident narrative sit a series of facts that do not appear in most (if any) other force incident reviews. These include statements that Powell's hands were tested for gunshot residue, his gun was tested for finger prints and hisDNA was also found on the gun. Also included were details about the actions of fire fighters and paramedics ho responded to the scene.

What was this all about? Well, if you read the Times Homicide Blog you will find a lengthy discussion i the comments in which Powell's famly asserts he was wrongly killed for a variety of vacuous reasons. Normally, this would be of no concern to logical folks.

Unfortunately, the BOPC is neither normal, nor logical. (Remember, this is the same body whose newest member declared "diveristy" to be the department's greatest challenge the day a cop was nearly killed - quite possibly because of said body's most controversial policy).

Nope, Commissioner John Mack, who never met a cop he actually liked, took up the cause of the wanna-be cop-killer Mathew Powell. He demanded updates on this particular case outside of the normal reporting cycle.

It's obvious, I suppose. Andy Taylor OBVIOUSLY shot himself four times with a random gun, just to make the killing of a random suspect look good. I mean, nobody actually kills cops. That's just an excuse to cover up murder and oppression of well intended thieves and drug dealers. Isn't that right, Mr. Mack.

Are you paying attention, Mr. Mayor?

Posted by Robert C.J. Parry at 11:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Sean Taylor murder ignited what has to rank as the dumbest, wrong-headed orgy of stereotype laced speculation in living memory. The instant the Washington Redskins all-pro safety was gunned down in his suburban Miami-Dade County home, a pack of talking head sports analysts, writers, and fans filled the airwaves and newsprint with their see I told you so pontifications that Taylor’s alleged thug life style did him in.

The initial accounts of his murder fed ample fuel to the contention of the self-styled experts that the supposed self-destructive ghetto culture has done in countless numbers of young black males. Taylor, of course, was the latest, but by no means the only tragic example of that. They insisted without a shred of evidence that the break-in at his home was not random, that he was a target, and that the killing was a hit.

The initial news accounts were a heavy handed pile on of Taylor’s misdeeds, run-ins and altercations with the law. Subsequent news accounts dropped the obsessive itemizing of the full litany of Taylor’s missteps. But they still managed to do a sneaky broken record sounding reminder that Taylor had had past problems with the law. That further imprinted in much of the public’s skulls that Taylor was a bad guy and that there had to be a direct connect between his past, that really wasn’t past, and the murder.

There were two tragedies in the Taylor murder. The first is the murder itself. It snuffed out the life of a talented, promising, young man who was well on his way to becoming a solid role model and leader for his teammates and other young players, and in time may well have been that same solid role model off the field as well.

The second is that for an enraging instant it gave the legions of know it alls the irresistible chance to point the blame finger at the killer lifestyle that supposedly ensnares all young black males, and that included Taylor. Fortunately, the arrests of the suspects and their confession of what actually happened that fateful evening at the Taylor home gives lie to that notion. But even in Taylor’s death, and even after the truth came out about it, the truth is still a casualty to stereotypes. Witness this, every news account of the arrests, confessions, and background information on the suspects was still punctuated with the reminder of Taylor’s scrapes with the law. The thug life fascination with black males is still very much alive and kicking in some press rooms, and beyond.

Posted by Earl Ofari Hutchinson at 7:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Robert Saltzman needs to read his new business card. The Los Angeles BOPC does not the stand for Board of Political Correctness. It is the Board of Police Commissioners, and bears some of the greatest responsibilities in Southern California .

Saltzman is its newest member and his decisions will directly influence life or death situations that impact cops, crooks and citizens alike. Sadly, Mr. Saltzman's first comments on these responsibilities reflect a stunning lack of knowledge about the Los Angeles Police Department: "Diversifying the police force is a significant problem, perhaps the most significant problem facing the force," said the USC Law School Associate Dean, in a story in Friday's DN by Rachel Uranga.

Clearly, Mr. Saltzman has not studied the LAPD. Had he, his comments would reflect facts like these:

• 71% of the officers graduating from the LAPD's last four academy classes have been ethnic minorities. Many of the remaining 29% were caucasian women.
• More than 45% have been Hispanic
• Those classes averaged 17% female

Moreover, had Mr. Saltzman done his homework, he would know that "diversity" of the LAPD did nothing to prevent the problems in the Rampart CRASH squad. The primary perpetrators of the worst LAPD corruption in 50 years were Hispanic and Black. Changing the LAPD's "color" did no favors for Javier Ovando, who was shot by the very diverse Rafael Perez and Nino Durden. And it did nothing to prevent the MacArthur Park fiasco. Out of the three most senior folks directly involved - the two ground commanders and the Assistant Chief who signed off on the May 1 planning - there was uno gringo hombre.

Clearly a lack of diversity did not contribute to those problems.

More bothersome, Mr. Saltzman's comments came just hours after an undercover (and thus unnamed) Hollenbeck Division officer was run over and horribly injured by a fleeing suspect. This incident has already raised tremendous questions among LAPD rank-and-file as to whether the BOPC's new post-Devon Brown shooting policy (which essentially prohibits firing at moving vehicles) nearly got this officer killed.

Unfortunately, the attempted murder of a cop isn't on the radar of the LAPD's newest leader. For what it's worth, I'm told this officer is Hispanic - he's diverse!! - so it's politically correct for Commissioner Saltzman to care.

The officers I know - almost all beat coppers exclusively below the rank of lieutenant - would prefer that Mr. Saltzman devote his attention to addressing a few other issues that impact the day-to-day policing of Los Angeles. A sampling of the greater concerns:

• Officers (of all "diversities") are fleeing the LAPD. Why?
• The Consent Decree is tying cops hands and keeping hard charging cops out of choice assignments. How does that lower crime? How does it solve the above problem?
• Gang members are said to be getting through the LAPD hiring process - academy cadets have been caught throwing gang signs in the hallways. Is that just maybe a bad sign? Or is that the kind of diversity he strives for? After all, crooks are part of society. Perhaps the LAPD reflect them as well.
• I'm told of cadets re-cycled five and six times, who have been in training longer than a lot of their instructors have been at the Recruit Training Center . Is that the kind of diversity you want, Mr. Saltzman? Is that the cop you want coming to your door with a loaded gun?
• The revised Shooting Policy might have resulted in gruesome injuries to one cop already. Perhaps it should be changed before one gets killed? Maybe?
• The Department's ASTRO radios are falling apart and quite nearly useless. They are a threat to the safety of officers and citizens alike (calling 911 is useless if the dispatcher can't raise an officer). "If there's another Northridge Earthquake, the peole of Los Angeles will see just how bad the ASTROs are," one copper told me. Perhaps funding their replacements will save more lives than counting noses?

Yes, dealing with these issues will force a lefty like Mr. Saltzman to blame someone other than the LAPD for all the world's faults. But, it might just make LA a safer place for folks of all colors - even the ones in blue.

Posted by Robert C.J. Parry at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Spin Zone Bill haters are having another field day with Bill O’Reilly after his latest shoot from the lip seeming insult of blacks. At first glance O’Reilly’s quip on his radio show that he marveled that black diners at Harlem’s famed Sylvia’s restaurant were “respectful,” didn’t utter m’f s when they ordered, and acted, well, like white folks, in a suburban Italian restaurant, looked and sounded dumb and racist. O’Reilly haters trotted out a string of other O’Reilly borderline race tinged cracks and gaffes over the past years as proof that O’Reilly is at best racially insensitive and at worst an unreconstructed bigot.

Spin Bill is a jello soft target for dumping the racist tag on. But aside from his usual acerbic take-no-prisoners, let fly with the cracks style, the talk show host didn’t say anything that was earth shatteringly offensive. And he certainly didn’t say anything that many whites, non-blacks and a fair number of blacks don’t routinely whisper behind closed doors.

It’s easy and fun to razz O’Reilly as a loudmouthed racist, turn the tables and give him a dose of his own medicine. But dumping on O’Reilly for giving his honest personal reaction to the scene at Sylvia’s is disingenuous and self-serving. It simply puts O’Reilly on the hook while letting far too many others off of it.

Posted by Earl Ofari Hutchinson at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)