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.

The Clinton campaign is playing the race card, but we still can’t vote for McCain.

Posted at The Root.

Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has leveled an odd charge against Barack Obama. He accuses the Illinois senator’s campaign of trying to hijack the Democratic presidential nomination by arguing it has a stronger claim on the nomination because Obama has more pledged delegates than Sen. Hillary Clinton and larger percentage of the popular vote. Wilentz argues Clinton should be regarded the winner of the nomination contest because she would have won easily if the rules had been different.

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?

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” — Sun Tzu: Ancient Chinese warrior-philosopher, The Art of War

Mike Huckabee will not win the Republican nomination for President, but he has won several states, particularly in the South, including Louisiana and Kansas this past Saturday. Ron Paul is not a factor in the Republican race, but even still, he won 20 percent of the vote in the Washington caucuses on Saturday. Many African Americans and progressives more generally have been captivated by the protracted struggle for the Democratic party’s nomination. They have paid scant attention to developments and candidates on the Republican side, except for worrying about a McCain candidacy. As Sun Tzu and many other strategists remind us, knowing your enemy is critical for obtaining victory.

Huckabee and particularly Paul have supported racists, racist organizations and racist issues. While campaigning in South Carolina Huckabee invoked the hoary old racist shibboleth of state rights in defending the right of white South Carolinians to fly the Confederate Battle Flag. As Christopher Hitchens writes on Slate, Huckabee’s statement was “unambiguously racist” for several reasons. The Confederate Battle Flag is not the state flag of South Carolina. Segregationist started flying the “Stars and Bars” at the State capitol in 1962 as an act of defiance against the Civil Rights Movement. The segregationists also fiercely opposed any measure suggesting that once again the Federal government, the Union, would intervene on the side of rights for black citizens. Indeed, the only purpose for Huckabee’s invoking the battle flag was to appeal to and energize racist sentiments among white South Carolina Republicans. This was not a first for Huckabee. In 1993 he made a videotape which was played at a meeting of the Council of Conservative Citizens-a group which declares, “”We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called “affirmative action” and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.” For all of his good old boy charm, Huckabee is very comfortable in making appeals to the most racist segments of the nation.

The views that Paul are associated with are worse. Paul, a member of Congress from Texas, and a darling of libertarian professionals in the high tech sector (thus his strong performance in Washington state, home of Microsoft), published a newsletter in the 1980s and 1990s that was straight up racist. Paul’s newsletter over the past several years, has claimed that “only five percent of blacks have sensible political opinions.” James Kirchick, writing for the New Republic about Paul, bluntly states when describing back issues of Paul’s newsletter, “What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays.” The newsletter referred to MLK Day as “Hate Whitey Day,” and denounced the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa as “the destruction of civilization.” It also stated that the reason that the 1992 urban conflagration in Los Angeles only ended when it did was because it was “time for blacks to pick up their welfare checks.” Although Paul has denied writing these racist stories and claims no knowledge of them, it is still the case that they went out under his name over the course of several years. (In interviews during his presidential campaigns he has denounced the racist content of the newsletters.)

The common thread is that both Governor Huckabee and Congressman Paul are exceedingly comfortable associating with individuals and organizations that espouse the racist beliefs and policies. Further, Huckabee has shown no hesitation in evoking racist symbols in order to arouse racist sentiments if it will afford him electoral advantage. We should never forget that the basest racist sentiments still churn just below the surface among some conservatives. That constituency represents a political tradition in American political culture that continues to produce enemies for black people and all citizens who desire equality for all regardless or race, sexuality, gender, or religion.