November 4, 2008 — Here are some themes to look for while watching the returns that will determine the outcome of the election.

Posted at The Root.

Like millions of Americans, I’m attending an election return party with friends tonight. One of my closest friends is hosting it, and I’ve been told that the only reason I was invited is because I study American politics professionally. What my friend should know is that political scientists are not the best prognosticators, because collectively our heads are usually either stuck in the sand or among the clouds. But I’m also a political junkie, which might be a much sounder credential for an analyst. So from both perspectives, but especially the latter, here are some themes to look for while watching the returns that will determine the outcome of the election.

October 29, 2008 — McCain and his surrogates have shown that nothing is beyond the pale in their desperate effort to derail Obama.

Posted at The Root.

Half a century ago, Malcolm X warned that when “we” started winning by their rules, “they” would change the rules. The desperate and despicable tactics of the McCain-Palin campaign have vividly illustrated the lengths that the reactionaries who have dominated for most the last decade will go in order to maintain power. There is less than one week left, but here are some of the problems we should be monitoring. Many of these are not only a threat to Obama’s campaign, but much more importantly, a threat to a just participatory democracy and an anti-racist civil society. Even if Obama does win, which I fully expect, there is a real danger that long-lasting damage has been done to the American polity by some of the reactionary tactics of the GOP.

May 6, 2008 — How the black pawns got pushed off the board.

Posted at The Root.

The Democratic Party’s primary race has reached a dangerous stage for black people. It has come to this. Both the Obama and Clinton campaigns are apparently willing to sacrifice black citizenship rights in order to win the Democratic nomination for president.

April 24, 2008 — The Potential Pitfalls of an Obama Presidency

Posted at The Root.

How will black voters react if Obama retains the lead in delegates, popular votes, states won and money raised, but the superdelegates give Clinton the nomination?

March 5, 2008 — The Potential Pitfalls of an Obama Presidency

Posted at The Root.

Abigail Thernstrom, the conservative commentator on race in the U.S., once called me a member of the “doom and gloom” contingent among black political scholars. So, that probably makes me overqualified to make this assertion, but here goes. An Obama presidency could seriously backfire on African Americans.

Why Obama’s brilliant speech may not help him.

Posted at The Root.

It was an amazing speech, a brilliant speech. It was brilliant both in substance and in delivery. He told a convincing, moving story about his own racial history. He was able to paint a truly hopeful, but pragmatic, picture of why people should come together across races.

He attempted to explain why he would not renounce Rev. Jeremiah Wright, because renouncing Rev. Wright meant renouncing the black church and the black community. He tried to shift the conversation at the end to the set of critical domestic and foreign policy issues that progressives have wanted to tackle for years.

But I’m worried it was it too little, too late.

Among black Americans, Jeremiah Wright may not be that far out of the mainstream.

Posted at The Root.

Senator Obama is mistaken. The problem with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago minister who is the Obama family’s pastor and the subject of recent fierce attacks in the media, is not, as Obama has stated, that “he has a lot of the…baggage of those times,” (those times being the 1960s).

The problem is also not, as one paper characterized Obama’s position on his minister, that Wright is stuck in a “time warp,” in a period defined by racial division.

No, the problem is that Wright’s opinions are well within the mainstream of those of black America. As public opinion researchers know, the problem is that despite all the oratory about racial unity and transcending race, this country remains deeply racially divided, especially in the realm of politics.

It could get ugly if the Dems settle the presidential nomination in an undemocratic way.

Posted at The Root.

Several weeks ago we were presented with the surreal specter of two iconic figures from the civil rights movement battling each other in the name of “democracy.”

Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP, wrote a letter in early February to the head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) demanding that the delegates “elected” by voters in the Michigan and Florida primaries be seated at the Democratic Convention. Otherwise, he argued, “millions of voters” would have their votes discounted, thus undermining the democratic process. A few days later Al Sharpton argued in his own letter to DNC chair Howard Dean, that it would be a “grave injustice” to seat the delegates from Florida and Michigan. What’s going on here?