AA Media Clips - Weekend Roundup Sept 21-23, 2007
September 23, 2007
Barack Obama caught between lines in race battle
Sarah Baxter, Washington
THE case of six black schoolboys who were charged with a string of offences, including attempted murder, after a white classmate was kicked unconscious in Louisiana, has blown open one of the most sensitive fault lines in American politics and revived charges that Barack Obama, the presidential candidate, is not “black enough” to win the support of African-Americans.
The dispute over the “Jena Six”, with its explosive reminder of America’s hidden racism, could help Hillary Clinton consolidate her vote among the black community at the expense of Obama, who is lagging nearly 20 points behind her in the race for the Democratic nomination.
America has been rocked by a series of high-profile cases with ugly echoes of the South’s history of segregation and lynchings. It recently emerged that Megan Williams, a 20-year-old black woman, was held captive, raped, stabbed and forced to eat faeces at a farm in West Virginia. Six members of a white family have been charged with kidnapping and torturing her.
Last week thousands of demonstrators marched through the small, largely white town of Jena in protest at the treatment of the six teenagers said to have attacked Justin Barker, a white boy, after being taunted by three nooses strung from a playground tree that was considered for “whites only”.
While a handful of white boys were briefly suspended from the school after a series of confrontations, the black students, aged between 14 and 18, were expelled and charged with serious offences, even though the victim recovered quickly enough to attend a school function that evening.
Some of the charges were later reduced but one boy, Mychal Bell, remains in jail. The tree has been cut down.
Obama did not attend last week’s march, provoking Jesse Jackson, a veteran of civil rights protests, to complain that the Illinois senator was “acting like he’s white” – though Jackson later said he could not remember using those words. He did say: “If I were a candidate, I’d be all over Jena” – a pointed reference to Obama’s seeming lack of commitment to what has become a touchstone civil rights issue.
B L Moran, a local pastor who is helping the black youths, complained: “Look at all these people who have come from all over the United States. We have not seen anyone of his stature.”
While Obama kept his distance, Clinton enjoyed an easy ride on Al Sharpton’s agit-prop radio show last week where she proclaimed: “We cannot let this kind of inequality and injustice happen anywhere in America.”
Sharpton, like Jackson, has previously stood for president and been heavily defeated, not least because he was identified as a radical single-issue campaigner for black rights. But the more Obama has sought to avoid this trap, the more pitfalls it has created for him.
An African-American adviser to Obama said it would be unwise for him to follow the model of Jackson and Sharpton. “It is unfair to expect him to be a national spokesman for black folk,” the adviser said, adding that Obama also had to deal with the “issue of jealousy” in that “he is considered an upstart who is not as black as we are”.
Debra Dickerson, an African-American writer, caused a furore this year when she pointed out what she called the obvious. “Obama isn’t black,” she wrote, in the sense of being descended from west African slaves. Whites were able to swoon over him but blacks regarded him as an outsider, she claimed.
Michelle Obama called last month for a halt to the charge that her husband, the son of a white mother with slave-owning ancestors and a black father from Kenya, was not black enough.
“We are messing with the heads of our children,” she said.
Dickerson said last week it was unfair to expect Obama to pander to Jackson and Sharpton. “I don’t think he had to be at Jena. He is not a civil rights person, he is an elected public representative. Barack Obama has to answer to everybody.”
However, she predicted that Clinton would win more black votes than Obama. “We’re all very proud of Obama and would like our daughters to marry him, but I really see black people voting for Hillary Clinton. I think it makes sense. We’ve no doubt she will fight hard for us. She has a relationship with black people going back 20 years.”
In South Carolina, a must-win primary state for Obama, a recent poll of black voters showed him only four points ahead of Clinton, whose standing is boosted by the popularity of her husband, the former president Bill Clinton.
Race is also proving to be an awkward issue for the Republican candidates for president. All the leading contenders turned down an invitation to participate in a nationally televised debate this week at a historically black university in Baltimore.
President George W Bush obliquely criticised their decision to stay away, saying: “My advice to whomever will be our nominee is to reach out to the African-American community.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2511582.ece
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From The Sunday Times
September 23, 2007
Obama’s game plan lets Hillary do the fighting
Andrew Sullivan
Campaigns can be messy things. Last Tuesday, in a non-descript hotel room in Washington, Barack Obama’s microphone wasn’t working. It gave out a low, yet ear-splitting drone that never quite went away. Cameramen at the back of the room kept yelling at young, overwhelmed staffers to get out of their sightlines.
And Obama’s speech itself – on tax policy – was read from the Autocue as if he were reading it for the first time, stumbling over even the name of his wife. The effortless grace of that spellbinding 2004 convention speech seemed from another era.
The exhilaration of his campaign announcement in the cold sparkling Illinois winter was over. And as he droned on about tax breaks for the working poor, I found myself more interested in the crowd than the speaker.
But as I left, it also occurred to me that I’d just been bored by a black politician on tax policy. In fact we all had. And yet such is the quiet transformation that Obama has already wrought on American politics that nobody even noticed.
The days in which African-American politics were defined by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, or, even worse, Louis Farrakhan, are over. And as if to underline this achievement, Jack-son took the opportunity to condemn Obama the next day for “acting white” because he wasn’t articulating sufficient outrage at a recent civil rights controversy in the South.
The conventional wisdom about Obama is that his campaign is flailing before the relentless bulldozer of the Clinton machine. There is less to this, I’d say, than meets the eye. His campaign began with astonishing momentum – a bestselling book, media blitz, a sudden spurt in the polls, followed by a fundraising effort that beat the prodigious favourite, Hillary Clinton. Throughout 2006 and the first quarter of 2007, Obama’s national trend line in the polls was a relentless ascent, compared with Clinton’s ever-so-slight glide down. But some time this spring, he stalled and she rallied.
His support hasn’t slumped much since then; it has simply trodden water at about 20%. Clinton, in contrast, was at 38% in 2005, bottomed out at about 35% this spring and, after some superb debate performances, is now about 39%. Yes, she has twice the national polling of Obama. But in the key early races, the polling is much closer. Obama is clearly hoping that his deep pockets, very large donor base – a quarter of a million people have now donated to his campaign – and appeal to independents will keep him in the game long enough to pull off an early surprise.
Wishful thinking? The Obama campaign suspects Hillary is ahead because Hillary is ahead. She has global name recognition and deep loyalty among the most partisan and loyal Democrats. She is essentially using the same tactics that George W Bush did in 2000 – trying to amass so much money and so many endorsements that a reputation for inevitability leads to actual inevitability.
Obama, in contrast, is trying the John McCain strategy of 2000 – carve out a reputation for independence and leverage an early surprise into enough momentum to take down the frontrunner. Unlike McCain, a Republican candidate again for 2008, Obama has enough money to survive next January, and then some.
If fellow Democrat John Edwards drops out in the early stages, his 10% could go to Obama. If Obama seems a viable candidate in South Carolina, that primary’s substantial black vote could break at the last minute for the black man in the race. That’s the game plan anyway. It’s the only game plan that makes sense for an insurgent candidacy taking on an establishment favourite.
The war is the great variable. The past two weeks have led to a surprising dynamic. By backing a continuation of the surge, by declaring the strategy a success, and by killing even the most minimal attempt to restrain the president, the Republicans have wedded themselves indelibly to a war whose outcome they cannot control. McCain’s new slogan is “No surrender”, an atavistic framing of the complex debate about Iraq to appeal to the basest of Republican instincts.
It has served him well with his party’s base. Clinton and Obama, in contrast, have been issuing antiwar statements that are close to indistinguishable. Obama’s advantage is that, unlike Clinton, he opposed the war from the start. With the Democratic base incandescent with frustration at their congressional leadership’s inability to change the president’s policy, Obama has a chance to pick up support if the war turns sour again.
Under these conditions, you’d expect Clinton to be toning down the rhetoric and Obama ratcheting it up. But the opposite has happened. Clinton described Vice-President Dick Cheney last week as “Darth Vader” in front of a Democratic crowd. They loved it. Obama unveiled his first Iowa ad for Democratic activists that included this sentence: “In 20 years of public service, I’ve brought Democrats and Republicans together to solve problems that touch the lives of everyday people.” This message is not just for public consumption. In Democratic-only settings he often proudly cites his support from Republicans. In a polarised climate, where Rudy Giuliani is already lambasting Hillary and itching for a fight, Obama is sticking to a disciplined message of reconciliation, unity, responsibility.
Is this a mistake? Whoever won a Democratic primary by insisting on being open to Republicans? That is the risk Obama is taking. But when you observe and listen closely, you see this is what he actually means.
He detects an enormous weariness among Americans about their internal divisions in a time of war, overlaid by the anger and divisions that have deepened and widened under the Bush presidency. He suspects that if he can get past Clinton’s aura of inevitability, Democrats will realise he has a much better chance of winning a real national majority in the general election than Clinton does. Clinton polarises the way Bush polarises. She can hope for a Karl Rove-style 51% majority in a deeply divided country. He’s aiming for 55%.
Clinton, in other words, represents payback for the Democrats and liberals after the Bush era, just as Giuliani is emerging as the inheritor of the Bush legacy of divide and rule. Right now, Obama remains to the side, offering Americans something else: not payback, but a new page.
Neither black nor white, neither atheist nor born-again, a candidate who favours withdrawal from Iraq but an offensive against Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, a progressive offering the working poor a tax cut, his bet is that, in the end, America wants to come together again. The unanswerable question is whether America really does.
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newsday.com/services/newspaper/printedition/friday/nation/ny-uscamp215383972sep21,0,257359.story
Newsday.com 09.21.07
La. rally move race to fore of presidential race
BY MARTIN C. EVANS
martin.evans@newsday.com
WASHINGTON - With images of 1960s-style protests being aired from a Deep South town yesterday, the Jena 6 case involving black teenagers arrested for beating a white schoolmate has tossed a political hand grenade into the race for the White House.
It is one that Democratic front-runners Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama - whose party has traditionally depended on a civil rights agenda more than Republicans - have been slow to pick up, analysts say.
Clinton, who tops all Democrats in polls, risks stumbling should she directly challenge U.S. citizens to ponder racial inequity. Nor can Obama, who has been buoyed by support from liberal whites, risk being seen as racially polarizing, as were Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in their presidential bids.
The political debate comes as thousands of people, led by Sharpton and Jackson, traveled to Jena, La., yesterday to protest what many blacks see as the unjust arrest of six black youths, who had been charged with attempted murder for attacking a white youth.
Neither Obama nor Clinton attended the rally, which ended at the local high school, where racial confrontations began last September. That month, three white students hung nooses from a "whites only" tree after black students expressed a desire to sit under it.
Obama's campaign released a statement yesterday saying: "The thousands of Americans from every race and region who have descended on this small Louisiana town carry forth the legacy of all those who sat at lunch counters and took freedom rides to strike a blow against injustice wherever it may exist."
Clinton, who has said she is "very worried about what is happening in Jena," did not comment on the rally. Her campaign issued a statement last night saying that "she has been very clear about her views on the Jena 6 matter."
Observers, though, say the candidates have not adequately addressed the case.
Republicans have also taken a low profile. President George W. Bush addressed the tensions for the first time yesterday, saying, "All of us in America want there to be, you know, fairness when it comes to justice."
The Jena 6 case has drawn criticism because even though there were a series of confrontations between whites and blacks after the tree incident - including one in which a white youth menaced blacks with a shotgun - no whites were charged. In June, a black teen was tried as an adult in the beating of the white youth and convicted by an all-white jury. The Jena case, observers say, illustrates the need for response.
"I feel they [Clinton and Obama] are intimidated and don't want to wade into the racial swamp of how you characterize this issue with respect to race relations," said Ron Walters, a University of Maryland political scientist.
Michael Fauntroy, an assistant professor of public policy at Virginia's George Mason University, said while other issues are more readily discussed, race remains "uncomfortable."
Although an appeals court overturned the conviction Sept. 14, neither Clinton nor Obama addressed the issue until Obama released a statement Sept. 10, saying, "when nooses are being hung in high schools in the 21st century, it's a tragedy."
Two days later, Clinton released one, saying, in part: "I do not condone violence of any kind, but this situation raises very serious questions of injustice and inequity."
Jena in time
SEPT. 1, 2006. Three nooses are found hanging from a so-called "white tree" at Jena High School that school officials had told black students they could sit under.
SEPT. 7-8. Principal recommends expulsion for whites who hung nooses. Superintendent suspends them for three days.
SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER.
LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters tells students: "I can take away your lives with a stroke of my pen." Some black students thought the remark was addressed to them.
White students attack a black student who came to a whites-only party. They were not charged.
Black students chase one of the attackers. The blacks wrest a shotgun from the white student. The white youth was not charged; the blacks were charged with theft.
DEC. 4. A white student, Justin Barker, is beaten unconscious by six black students. He is treated for cuts and bruises.
DEC. 5-7. Police charge six black students with aggravated second-degree battery. Walters upgrades charges to attempted second-degree murder. He reduces them after complaints from civil rights groups and others.
MAY 10, 2007. Barker is arrested for bringing a gun to school. Superintendent recommends expulsion.
JUNE 28. Mychal Bell, 16, is convicted of aggravated second-degree battery. He faces 20 years in prison. Later, an appeals court throws out the conviction.
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http://www.timesanddemocrat.com/articles/2007/09/23/opinion/12754798.txt
O.J, Simpson no measure of U.S. system
The Times and Democrat
| Sunday, September 23, 2007
ISSUE: O.J. Simpson's arrest
OUR VIEW: Ex-football star's case should be measure of justice system
Once O.J. Simpson gave lessons to NFL defenses as a star running back. He later brought new insight to the broadcast booth as a network analyst covering National Football League games.
For more than a decade now, Simpson has shown Americans the ins and outs of our legal system -- and in so doing has become a lightning rod in debate about justice and racial bias.
Civil rights leader the Rev. Jesse Jackson was in Orangeburg this past week addressing inequities faced by African-Americans. In urging students to become activists -- and voters -- he blasted South Carolina for the high number of African-Americans the state locks up each year -- and he warned that the plight of six black students charged with beating a white student in Jena, La., is not isolated. That incident capped months of tension at the Jena high school after white students hung nooses in a tree that supposedly was to be a site for only whites to congregate.
Jackson's appearance was followed a day later by a statement by presidential candidate and former Sen. John Edwards: "When a 'white tree' stands outside a public school, marking a place where white students sit but black students are not welcome, there is something so wrong that the right words are hard to find. When children have learned to intimidate each other with age-old, hateful symbols of racial terror, we are reminded that we cannot take progress for granted. And we must turn to the larger truth: That we still have two criminal justice systems in this country -- largely defined by race and class."
The weekend before, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton told the S.C. NAACP regarding the "Jena 6": "There is no excuse for the way the legal system treated those young people."
"We have to believe justice is blind in America," she said.
Which brings the nation back to a focus on O.J. Simpson, the man a majority of Americans believes got away with murder in being acquitted in 1995 of killing his estranged wife and another man in California.
Simpson's plight became the source of a major racial divide and debate about the fairness of the legal system, with African-Americans finding reason to celebrate a verdict that even many believed did not reflect justice.
But not guilty of that crime Simpson was -- and is. That is the American system. Were he to go on national television and announce that he indeed did kill the two people, there is no retrial. In America, there is no double jeopardy.
Further dividing Americans over Simpson was the civil trial that followed this criminal case. There Simpson was found liable in the deaths of Nicole Simpson and Ronald Goldman and ordered to compensate their families.
The former player moved to Florida, where the legal system has allowed him to shelter assets away from the victims' families. Through it all, Simpson continues to surface periodically, often in controversial situations. He has had a number of brushes with the law.
Now comes the most serious. He stands accused in Las Vegas of armed robbery and kidnapping in association with an incident at a hotel in which Simpson says he was attempting to recover collectibles and memorabilia that belong to him. With guns allegedly involved, the situation is serious.
Simpson's arrest is no less controversial than seemingly everything that bears his name. The parties to the case are of questionable integrity -- and even those associated with Simpson apparently are ready to turn on him to lessen their legal problems.
Couple that with Simpson being in jail awaiting bond while others went free, plus questions about why the entire episode was audiotaped, and the conspiracy talk is cranking up.
Simpson is again getting sympathy -- and his latest case again is prompting people to question whether he is the victim of a biased system determined to get him on something.
How sad. O.J. Simpson is a wealthy ex-football star who has shown time and time again he has no association with broader social issues impacting African-Americans -- or all Americans for that matter.
He has turned his chin up at the system of justice and seemingly believes he is above the law. He is not an individual whose case should become the measure of justice.
As much as there are serious questions about the case against him in Nevada, there will be answers forthcoming in legal proceedings.
Regardless of the outcome, there should no more be celebration over Simpson again going free than over him being jailed in this latest episode.
Edwards says that "fortunately, we also still have in this country the desire for racial justice, understanding and tolerance."
Indeed. And O.J. Simpson and his troubles are the measure of none of the above.
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STEVENSON: Can Obama win skin game over Hillary?
By Chris Stevenson
Niagara Gazette [09.21.07]
— A lot of black columnists and talk radio hosts have analyzed, scrutinized, and prophesied about Sen. Barack Obama. Few of them really understand him and they get paid to do nothing else but understand the brother. Ghetto-type resentments and hatin’ kicks in and spills saliva and coffee over their journalism degrees at the mere mention of the name. I guess you can’t fight Father Nature — who is an absentee father hanging out on Genesee Street.
I’m not claiming I was with him on this from day one; hell I started out intending to support Hillary. But as time went on, Obama seemed to grow from novice to apprentice to journeyman but fortunately never a contractor (like Hillary). An apprentice can be dazzling and impressive outwardly, but part of what makes an apprentice transform into a journeyman is his being open to learn. Recently the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education (JBHE) ran an essay by Theodore Cross titled “Barack Obama is the Superior Choice for African American Voters” (www.jbhe.com/obamaprint.html ) that turns out to be one of the best comparative takes on Hillary vs. Obama and makes a great argument for blacks on why we should vote for him. First, he points out our long romance with Hillary: “National polls show that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are drawing about equal shares of the black vote ... Hillary Clinton is the inherited winner of solid numbers of black voters because of the tremendous popularity of her husband among African Americans.” Cross acknowledges the former First Lady’s own appeal to black voters, the number of top black professionals and advisors on her team starting with campaign legal counsel Cheryl Mills. And then he unmasks Hillary, challenging some of her winning scores with blacks and having some seeming touchdowns called back: “she makes regular appearances at black churches ... Last spring Hillary Clinton won glowing praise from the black press when she joined dozens of America’s most famous black leaders in singing ‘We shall overcome.’ ” The message was clear, blacks “don’t feel no ways tired” of Hil.
During the June debate at Howard University when she made that slamming comment that the country would be more concerned about HIV/AIDS if the numbers affected by the disease were overwhelmingly white, Cross examined when back on Aug. 6, “Clinton was the only one of 20 senators of the Republican-controlled Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee to vote to gut a plan that would have redirected more AIDS funds to heavily black communities in the South.” Make no mistake about it, this race is about the black voters because of their pivotal position in the ’08 primary and he or she whom addresses the black issues should go the nod.
Cross even has a chart of inequality and a page of Obama’s “campaign position paper,” and state-by-state black demographics. Though Hillary is evading specific race issues, she remains a tough opponent because she makes so many blacks feel important (women in particular) It’s not that I left Hillary, she left me. I was never one to back candidates that played it too cautious and her distance on black issues will grow the more she sings with black leaders in church. This is a skins game she was trained to play ever since Bill was in office, but you have the power to decide.
Chris Stevenson is a columnist for the Buffalo Criterion. Contact him at pointblankdta@yahoo.com.
http://www.niagara-gazette.com/opinion/local_story_264133118.html
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Republican Presidential Candidates Spurn Debates Sponsored By People Of Color
North America September 22nd, 2007
The Democratic presidential candidates are a symbol of the racial and cultural diversity of America. I look at Sen. Barack Obama (African American), Gov. Bill Richardson (Hispanic), Sen. Hillary Clinton (female) and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Martian?), and I’m persuaded that anyone can become President of the United States.
But then I look at the all-male, all-white GOP candidates, and I’m dismayed and depressed about how far we still have to go to achieve racial equality.
Some Republicans argue that the Republican presidential hopefuls may all be white men, but that doesn’t mean they don’t care about issues important to minorities.
Bullcrap!
“The candidates for the Republican party’s presidential nod are building quite a track record–of snubbing prospective voters. This week the four leading candidates–Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, Rudolph Giuliani and John McCain, added the PBS-sponsored debate at Baltimore’s historically-black Morgan State University to their “I’ll-pass” list. That list now includes the National Urban League, Univision, the Spanish-language television network, the National Association of Latino Elected Officials and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It’s getting to be a long list.”
Vernon Jordan Writing for the Huffington Post
Jordan is right, the GOP’s “Big Tent” has a “Whites-Only sign. The Republican presidential aspirants don’t even pretend to care about people of color. They openly show their disgust at the institutions and organizations that are respected and beloved by minorities.
None of the Republican candidates traveled to Jena to protest the sad state of unequal justice. You won’t hear any of the Republicans emphasize issues like unemployment that resonate with minorities. And they avoid like the plague any debates sponsored by minority organizations.
For any person of color to vote for a Republican is an exercise in absurdity. I know when I’m being “dissed”, and I have no intentions of voting for Romney, Giuliani or any other Republican candidate for the White House.
If a neighbor claims to share your values and morals, but he won’t come to your church for your child’s baptism, and he won’t set foot inside your fraternal organization — he might be full of it.
The Republican’s might give lip service to racial equality, but their deeds speak louder than their words. This is one minority who will vote for a Democrat in Nov 08.
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http://www.kansascity.com/445/story/286785.html
Florida Dems to keep Jan. 29 primary
By BRENDAN FARRINGTON
Associated Press Writer
The Florida Democratic Party will stick with a Jan. 29 presidential primary even if it means losing all its nominating convention delegates, a party source said Saturday.
The Democratic National Committee gave the state party until Sept. 29 to come up with an alternative delegate selection plan to stay within party rules, such as caucuses or a vote-by-mail primary, but party leadership has rejected that idea.
State party Chairman Karen Thurman, members of the congressional delegation and state legislative leaders were scheduling a news conference Sunday to announce their position. State party staff has been polling executive committee members and determined at least 75 percent support for the early primary, the source said. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because executive committee members were still be notified.
"On Jan. 29, 2.5 million Floridians are going to go to the polls, and that's more telling than any caucus in Iowa," said Miami-Dade County Democratic Party Chairman Joe Garcia. "We'll be damned for it by some, but I think we're doing the right thing."
Broward County state committeewoman Diane Glasser, who also serves as state party first chair, said that she is fine with the decision as long as the state selects delegates in the event that they can go to the convention in Denver next summer.
"I'm not concerned with the DNC," she said.
The DNC Rules Committee voted last month to strip Florida of its 210 delegates if the state party held a primary before Feb. 5. Major Democratic presidential candidates have signed a pledge to restrict campaigning in Florida if it violates party rules.
That may mean candidates won't come to the state convention next month, but Garcia points out that high-profile supporters could replace them, such as New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's husband, former President Clinton.
"Who knows, we may get surprised and (Illinois Sen. Barack) Obama sends Oprah (Winfrey) down here," Garcia said.
Democratic Party rules say states cannot hold their 2008 primary contests before Feb. 5, except for Iowa on Jan. 14, Nevada on Jan. 19, New Hampshire on Jan. 22 and South Carolina on Jan. 29. Michigan has scheduled a Jan. 15 primary.
Phone calls and e-mails to the DNC weren't immediately returned.
Florida's Republican Legislature voted last spring to set the Jan. 29 primary date, and Republican Gov. Charlie Crist signed it into law. In June, the state Democratic Party voted to go along with the date, saying it was the best chance to get as many people involved in the process as possible. It reaffirmed the vote in August.
Even though Florida won't have delegates at the nominating convention, party leaders felt that the Jan. 29 date will let the rest of the country know who the state supports one week before an expected 25 states go to the polls, including big prizes like California and New York.
Also, Florida will vote on a constitutional amendment during its primary election that could significantly cut property taxes. Democratic party leaders felt pushing their delegate selection plan past Feb. 5 would have affected turnout in the ballot question.
Florida Republicans back a Jan. 29 primary, knowing that the national party could strip the state of half its delegates.
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Hillary Clinton for President
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