(Akiit.com) A conversation made her mind up…

I am a black Republican. I have a confession to make. I am an Obama “girl.” Most black Republicans who support John McCain won’t tell you this — but if Barack Obama is the nominee for the Democratic ticket, they will go into the voting booth in November and vote for Obama.

In 2005, when I was in Chicago on business, I attended NFL Hall of Famer Richard Dent’s annual foundation fundraiser. My business associate, also a Republican and former executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party, said he wanted me to meet a friend of his who was going places.

His friend was Sen. Barack Obama. All I knew about this light-skinned, cute boyish face-looking, kind of tall, lanky man was his great speech at the Democratic national convention and his position against the war in Iraq.

When we met, I identified myself as a Republican and began to discuss with him the work I did around the world on behalf of our government. I also told him I served President Bush as an appointee and had known him since 1998.

Obama nodded, taking it all in. He asked a few questions about my international experience. He asked me to be in touch with his office. When we finished talking, I walked away like a fan who met her favorite rock star after a concert. Giggly, I said to myself: “Yes, he is in the wrong party, but wouldn’t that be great if he ran for president someday?”

Watching Obama run for the presidency from the other side has been hard for me. I support most of the Republican platform. However, the most difficult thing for me has been to watch this black man fight to prove his legitimacy to become president of the United States.

It is often very emotional for me. When he is attacked racially, I think of the times my father, grandfather and other close black men have been attacked, and I take it personally. When he first struggled through his explanation about his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., I felt the emotion. I knew this would not be good enough for white America. He always has to balance his blackness, and this is hard. Obama, like many of us, still has to go above and beyond to prove himself.
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(Akiit.com) Clinton and Obama’s divvy up of North Carolina and Indiana between them further deepens the two perils the Democrats face. One is that neither heavy hitter can deliver the knockout punch that the Democrats desperately need to get on with the business of mounting a united front against McCain. The other is the much talked and much worried about peril of a divided party and what that means.

There are two big reasons that preordained that the Democrats would find themselves in this muddled, confused and frustrating danger. The Democrat’s winner-not-take-all proportional delegate system and the system of super delegates that they dumped onto the primaries was a prescription for disaster. The idea behind this was to bring democracy with a small d to the vote process and snatch the decision about who gets the big prize out of deal making party bosses at the national convention. This supposedly would insure a smooth oiled, happy faced, party convention, and a coronation for the party’s pick.

The result has been just the opposite. The fractious, contentious, and much too long drawn out battle between Clinton and Obama has ploughed open a split among the Democrats that goes beyond the standard cheering that voters give to their favorite candidate. This split has exposed fundamental class, race and even personality differences between the Democrats.

Blacks, young, college educated voters, and young women in near record numbers back Obama. Latinos, blue collar whites, Jews and older women heavily back Clinton. The Democrats can’t win without these groups hitting the polls in big numbers. They also have to hit the polls with passion and zeal.

In every election back to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s smash victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964, blacks have been the most loyal foot soldiers for the Democrats. With the surge in Latino voting numbers in the past two decades, Latinos are now just as important to the Democrats and have been nearly as loyal to them as blacks.

African-American voters have virtually turned their support of Obama into a messianic crusade. If Clinton ultimately gets the nod, the usual eighty to ninety percent of black voters that back Democratic presidential candidates, no matter who the candidate is, will back her. But they won’t back her with anywhere near the same fervor and worse for the Democrats with the same massive numbers that they would Obama. And many say so. They grumble loudly that if it’s Clinton they’ll vote for McCain or stay home. That’s not an idol threat. In exit polls, nearly one fourth of Obama supporters say that if their guy doesn’t get it they’ll vote for McCain or sit it out.
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(Akiit.com) For weeks, Delores Smith, membership coordinator at the Madame C. J. Walker Theater in Indianapolis, has e-mailed and called Sen. Barack Obama’s representatives, hoping he’ll hold a campaign event at the 937-seat theater. It is, after all, named in honor of one of the nation’s first black millionaires. And its place in the heart of one of Indianapolis’ oldest black neighborhoods makes it a key stop for candidates seeking this city’s nearly quarter-million African-American voters — the largest concentration in Indiana. But so far, Smith says, “I haven’t heard anything.”

Even before the major distraction this week caused by the remarks of black liberation theologist and former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright, black voters in Indiana have been feeling ignored. While both Democratic presidential candidates have been jockeying for the rural, working-class white voters who make up much of Indiana’s electorate, they have been largely absent from predominantly black neighborhoods that have historically been among the party’s strongholds. For much of the campaign in Indiana, as well as around the country, many black voters feel there has been little effort to engage them on issues that have particular impact in the black community, such as the home foreclosure and HIV crises.

Amos Brown III, one of Indianapolis’ most popular black talk radio hosts, says many African Americans here, like elsewhere in the country, were buoyed by Obama’s success in overwhelmingly white states like Iowa and Idaho. Obama generated even more local excitement with his March 15 visit to a suburban Indianapolis high school. But since then, Brown says many of his listeners are asking, “Where is he? And, is he going to come to the ‘hood or not?’ Hoosiers, black or white,” Brown adds, “like to be courted. It’s important to go to the smaller towns, but it’s just as important to go out into the neighborhoods of the big city. I haven’t seen that with Barack or Hillary.”

Except for a brief visit last Sunday to Country Kitchen, a popular soul food restaurant here, Obama hasn’t made a significant appearance in any black neighborhood in Indianapolis, or elsewhere in the state. Last weekend, Sen. Hillary Clinton assembled a modest crowd at a Bennigan’s in largely black Gary, in Indiana’s northwest corner. Chelsea Clinton has been dispatched to many of Indiana’s colleges, but not Martin University, a small, predominantly black school here. “If her job is to work the college crowd,” says Brown, “why not go there?”

Cornell Burris, the 72-year-old president of the 1,000-member NAACP branch in Indianapolis, said he couldn’t bring himself to be present at Sen. Obama’s visit last month to Plainfield. “To be honest,” Burris said last week, carefully choosing his words, “I didn’t like the idea that it was out there in that particular sector of Marion County. It’s a predominately white neighborhood. I’d hoped to see him in the inner city of Indianapolis, not in the suburbs.”

To some degree, Obama has been constrained by a desire to not be marginalized as a black candidate — a concern, of course, that lay behind his distress over the comments by Rev. Wright. Furthermore, speaking about black-specific issues to African-American audiences carries some risk. “If he starts talking about these things in meaningful terms directly to the black community, white people will be disaffected by that,” says Ron Walters, political science professor at the University of Maryland.
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(Akiit.com) Whoever on Team Obama keeps feeding into Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s seeming compulsive need to speak out on the Reverend Jeremiah Wright should get the swift boot. When Wright went on his latest public and media tear, Obama should have simply issued a statement saying this: Wright is no longer my pastor. And as I have said repeatedly, his views do not reflect mine, and then move on.

But no, Obama’s Wright compulsion drove him to deliver a defensive and apologetic so-called race speech in which Wright was the centerpiece. Next, he denounced Wright’s views in an interview. Now he holds a halting, stumbling, anguished voice press conference to denounce Wright again. Here’s the effect of all this. He’s given a slew of gossipy, media talking heads more salacious grist for the gossip and rumor mill about Wright, the church and Obama’s long term relationship with both.

He’s elevated Wright from a relatively obscure, local preacher to a nationally known polarizing figure. He’s deepened the suspicions of those who all along felt that he was a closet radical and race panderer. This hurt him with white voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and almost certainly it will hurt him in Indiana. It has pecked away at the razor thin lead he had over Clinton among Democrats, and dropped him behind McCain in the general election. (Hillary beats McCain by ten points).

He created clouds of doubt among some of his non-rabid, and non-true believer supporters that maybe it’s time to take a second look at him and his candidacy. He’s given political analysts and pundits boundless ammunition to fire the jibe that maybe he is unelectable. After all, if he bombs with blue collar, rural, and less educated white voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania who are Democrats, what chance does he have of getting a big swatch of the must win independents who fit that same vote demographic in the South, the Midwest and the West to back him in a head to head showdown with McCain? He’s gotten so bogged down with the obsessive need to slam Wright that he’s managed to self-derail his campaign from the issues that should matter to debating Wright on of all things as to whether Wright and the black church as Wright claims are one and the same.
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(Akiit.com) Whether by calculation or coincidence, Hillary Clinton and Republicans who have attacked Barack Obama for elitism have struck a chord in a long-standing symphony of racial codes. It is a rebuke that gets magnified by historic beliefs about what blacks are and what they have no right to be.

Clinton is no racist, and Obama has made some real missteps, including his remark last week that “bitter” small-town Americans facing economic hardship and government indifference “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Perhaps he was being more sociological than political, and more sympathetic than condescending. But when his opponents branded him an elitist and an outsider, his race made it easier to drive a wedge between him and the white, rural voters he has courted. As an African American, he was supposedly looking down from a place he didn’t belong and looking in from a distance he could not cross.

This could not happen as dramatically were it not for embedded racial attitudes. “Elitist” is another word for “arrogant,” which is another word for “uppity,” that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.

At the bottom of the American psyche, race is still about power, and blacks who move up risk triggering discomfort among some whites. I’ve met black men who, when stopped by white cops at night, think the best protection is to act dumb and deferential.

Furthermore, casting Obama as “out of touch” plays harmoniously with the traditional notion of blacks as “others” at the edge of the mainstream, separate from the whole. Despite his ability to articulate the frustration and yearning of broad segments of Americans, his “otherness” has been highlighted effectively by right-wingers who harp on his Kenyan father and spread false rumors that he’s a clandestine Muslim.

In a country so changed that a biracial man who is considered black has a shot at the presidency, the subterranean biases are much less discernible now than when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They are subtle, unacknowledged and unacceptable in polite company. But they lurk below, lending resonance to the criticisms of Obama. Black professionals know the double standard. They are often labeled negatively for traits deemed positive in whites: A white is assertive, a black is aggressive; a white is resolute, a black is pushy; a white is candid, a black is abrasive; a white is independent, a black is not a team player. Prejudice is a shape shifter, adapting to acceptable forms.

So although Obama’s brilliance defies the stubborn stereotype of African Americans as unintelligent, there is a companion to that image — doubts about blacks’ true capabilities — that may heighten concerns about his inexperience. Through the racial lens, a defect can be enlarged into a disability. He is “not ready,” a phrase employed often when blacks are up for promotion.
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