DeWayne Wickham - Disturbing The Peace

Romney's election hopes shrink with lower unemployment rate

2012-02-06T21:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

In a turn of events that threatens to lay waste to the central theme of the GOP challenge to Barack Obama’s presidency, the nation’s economy appears to be solidly on a path to recovery.

The unemployment rate in January dropped to 8.3%, the fifth consecutive month that it has declined and the lowest it has been in three years. Last month, 243,000 jobs were created. That’s significantly more than the 155,000 new jobs economists predicted, according to the Associated Press.

In the wake of this report of an improving jobs market, Mitt Romney, the front-runner in the campaign to win the GOP’s presidential nomination, tried to put a bad face on this good picture.

“This recovery has been slower than it should have been,” he said while trolling the Silver State for votes on the eve of Nevada’s Republican caucuses last weekend. “People have been suffering for longer than they should have had to suffer. Will it get better? I think it’ll get better. But this president has not helped the process. He’s hurt it.”

After months of blaming Obama for the nation’s bad economic news, Romney now gives him no credit for the turnabout that seems to be underway. Instead, the former Massachusetts governor and one-time head of a private equity firm, argues that he — not Obama — has the business acumen to speed up the recovery from the economic recession.

This is the same Romney who in November 2008 opposed giving U.S. automakers about $85 billion of bailout money to avoid their collapse and a devastating ripple effect of other business failures. “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday,” Romney predicted in a New York Times op-ed, “you can kiss the American automobile industry goodbye.”

He was wrong. GM is again the world’s top automaker with sales of more than 9 million cars worldwide in 2011. And Chrysler, which also is back in the black, saw its U.S. sales increase 44% in January. Ford, which overtook Toyota as the nation’s second leading seller in 2010, had earnings of $20.2 billion in 2011 — its second highest earnings year ever. Even Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, credits the bailout for the auto industry’s resurrection.

Having largely made his case for replacing Obama by claiming he’d be a better steward of the nation’s economy, Romney has, at least for now, been reduced to arguing nebulously that the improving economy would be even better if he were at the nation’s helm.

Of course, a lot can change between now and November. The decline in the jobless rate could stall. The forecasted turnaround in the housing market, which is tied to the growing economic confidence of Americans, might not materialize. Or a game-changing event, such as an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, could dramatically alter the focus of the presidential campaign from domestic to foreign affairs.

Romney wants voters to think Obama is in over his head when it comes to lifting this nation’s recovery from the deep economic hole that George W. Bush, his Republican predecessor, dug. He’s betting that despite the president’s deft handling of the war on terror, which was once a greater concern than the nation’s unemployment rate, the state of the nation’s economy will determine the outcome of the November election.

For many voters, the job market is the leading indicator of economic recovery. And as the unemployment rate shrinks, so too does Romney’s chance of defeating Obama.

Arizona gov. uses old racist dodge to explain bad treatment of President Obama

2012-01-30T21:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

I really wanted to ignore the dust up over President Obama’s recent ugly encounter with Arizona’s Republican Gov. Jan Brewer. As troubling as it was to see the picture of her wagging her finger in his face, the shock value of such a showing of disrespect towards the president has by now worn off on me.

Brewer was just the most recent in a growing list of right-wingers to publicly display their contempt for him. My outrage over how she got up in Obama’s face like an irate mother lecturing an overgrown son also was tempered by the president’s attempt to downplay the incident, which centered on how he was portrayed in Brewer’s recent book.

“This is not a big deal,” Obama told ABC News’ Diane Sawyer about the incident that occurred on the tarmac of Phoenix’s airport moments after he stepped off of Air Force One a few days ago. “I think this is a classic example of things getting blown out of proportion.”

Brewer’s actions would have been disrespectful to any president, but the fact that Obama is our first black president raises questions of her real motives. That’s because the Arizona governor seemed to be channeling Willa Jean Boswell when she said she “felt a little bit threatened” by the president during her terse exchange with him, which occurred in front of two local mayors, Secret Service agents, a knot of journalists and a small group of people who stood in a nearby receiving line.

Threatened, really? I don’t think so.

Back in 1951, Boswell, a 17-year-old white girl, had Matt Ingram thrown in jail for something akin to what Brewer claims the president did. Boswell complained the 44-year-old black farmer looked at her in a frightening way. Charged with rape by leer, Ingram was found guilty by an all-white jury that convicted him of looking at Boswell in a way that constituted an assault — even though he never said a word or came within 75 feet of her.

Just as Ingram was jailed for “reckless eyeballing,” Brewer wants us to believe that in her encounter with the president — in which she appeared to do most of the talking — he somehow managed to threaten her. Maybe she was intimidated by his calm demeanor as he voiced his objection to what she wrote in her book about a White House meeting she had with the president last year.

Or maybe she was alarmed by his wry smile as she leaned into him and put her finger in his face. It could be she was frightened by Obama’s decision to walk away from her in mid-sentence as she was giving the president his comeuppance in front of a bank of news photographers?

But I suspect the feisty governor didn’t feel a pang of fear until the picture of her tongue-wagging, finger-shaking assault on the president of the United States was flashed around the world and generated a lot of negative reactions.

What she did on that airport tarmac was by any reasonable standard a gross act of disrespect to the president. But what she said in defense of her bad behavior was even worse. It was a less than subtle appeal to the well-worn racial stereotype of a black man who can assault a white woman with little more than a glance.

And for that Brewer deserves to be called out.

"Red Tails" set in an America Gingrich wants to bring back

2012-01-23T20:30:00.003-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

ORLANDO — By the time Newt Gingrich claimed victory in the South Carolina primary, I was in a crowded theater watching the movie about a kind of untold “American exceptionalism” that the Republican candidate seems to dismiss, if not disdain.

The newly released Red Tails tells the story of the black pilots of the 332nd Fighter Group, who before facing Hitler’s Luftwaffe had to overcome their countrymen’s implacable and groundless belief that they lacked the intelligence and courage to be fighter pilots during World War II. Overcoming an obstacle no white trainee faced, the pilots of the 332nd dealt the Luftwaffe a blow that once again underscored the vital contributions of blacks to America ’s greatness.

This is not what Gingrich “the historian” seems to have in mind when he speaks of “returning to the America we love.” If you listen to the former Georgia congressman’s campaign rhetoric, he makes subtle but unmistakable references to race, whether labeling the nation’s first black president a “food-stamp president” or insinuating that African Americans don’t have a work ethic. His solution? Let urban school children be in-house janitors. But of course.

Ahhh, the good ol’ days, when whites had job security and white picket fences and couldn’t be bossed around by uppity blacks, and African-Americans had to suffer gross indignities in order to put their lives on the line to defend their country. Gingrich doesn’t say this, but he doesn’t have to. A not-too-distant history, as seen in Red Tails, takes us back to that time. We don’t need Gingrich’s help.

The film documents the Tuskegee Airmen, Army aviators who were part of a U.S. government experiment to train black combat pilots in the 1940s. They were initially forced to fly second-hand planes and then derided by white superiors who thought blacks were unfit for duty. Eventually the airmen were allowed to fly better fighters and given critical missions.

Red Tails is a fictional account of this unit that gives moviegoers a basic lesson in the courage and heroism of these young black pilots. Heroically, several Tuskegee Airmen who stayed in the military after the war rose to the rank of general, including Daniel “Chappie” James, who became this nation’s first black four-star general — the kind of “exceptionalism” few of any race who serve in the U.S. military ever achieve.

In his effort to replace Obama as president, Gingrich pledges to his right-wing backers that, if elected, he will “rebuild the America we love.” He paints Obama as an enemy of “the classical America ” from which he draws his understanding of what it is to be an American. Think Leave It To Beaver.

As movies go, Red Tails, which Obama recently viewed at the White House along with some of the film’s cast, is an enthralling look at a history many Americans would rather forget. But we can’t and shouldn’t. The thing that is truly exceptional about America is not its democratic idealism, but the willingness of those who have been denied its promise to still believe in the vision of the “more perfect union” enshrined in the Constitution’s preamble, if not in the actual text.

What is truly exceptional about this country is that just two generations after many questioned the ability of blacks to come to the nation’s defense, Americans elected a black man to lead them.

That’s a history lesson Gingrich seems determined to undo at any cost.

Barbour deserves praise, not silence for pardons that restored voting rights

2012-01-16T20:53:00.003-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

When former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour got around to offering an explanation for the pardons and clemencies he granted 215 convicted felons shortly before leaving office this month, you'd think there might have been a few loud voices of support.

But despite the claim that his actions were motivated, at least in part, by a desire to let the felons — 27 of whom were convicted of manslaughter or murder — regain their right to vote, not a discernible peep has been heard from proponents of returning that most precious of American rights to ex-convicts.

"The pardons were intended to allow them to find gainful employment or acquire professional licenses as well as hunt and vote," said Barbour, a once-idolized conservative who once served as Republican National Committee chairman

Mississippi is one of 13 states where convicted felons do not automatically regain the right to vote after being released from incarceration, probation or parole. Undoing this obstacle to voting is a cause célèbre for many left-wing activists. Last month, two civil rights groups — the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund Inc. —jointly released a report on barriers to voting. Denying felons the right to vote "is one of the most significant barriers to political participation in this country," the report concluded.

Of the 5.3 million American felons who have lost the right to vote, nearly 2 million are black, the report states. Though Barbour's pardons and clemencies won't put a dent in that number, they could have an impact of a different sort. They are a break in the ideological picket lines between left-wing opponents of voter disenfranchisement and right-wing advocates of permanently stripping ex-convicts of the right to vote.

By resorting to an extraordinary use of executive power to return the right to vote to some of Mississippi's citizens, Barbour seems to agree with the NAACP groups that in our democracy, voting is an immutable right. Whether that was his intended message or not, voting rights proponents should have scrambled to his side. Instead, they have remained silent.

That's a pity.

In place of their voices, we now hear Jim Hood, Mississippi's Democratic attorney general, who is challenging the constitutionality of Barbour's action. Piling on, Democratic state lawmakers are pushing legislation that would make it harder for a governor to grant pardons and clemencies.

There may be reason to object to the process by which Barbour exercised his clemency and pardoning authority, but voting rights advocates should separate that from his intent. They shouldn't abandon a Southern conservative who sides with them on this issue because they agree with him on little else.

They shouldn't have to be reminded that while blacks are 37% of Mississippi's population, they're 66% of its prison inmates. So anything that's done to make it harder for ex-convicts to regain their voting rights will have a disproportionately negative impact on the political fortunes of Mississippi blacks.

Restoring the voting rights of the 2 million blacks nationwide who have a felony conviction is a fight that must be waged state by state. Common sense, rather than ideology, should be the driving force in this effort.

Unfortunately, the battle over Barbour's action is just the latest proof that in America today, partisan hang-ups too often keep people who ought to know better from doing the right thing.

Ron Paul exposes GOP tolerance for unequal justice

2012-01-10T21:55:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Ron Paul must have known the question was coming. For weeks, he had been dogged by charges that newsletters published in his name in the 1980s and 1990s contained racist content.

So he probably wasn't surprised when ABC News' George Stephanopoulos asked him during a televised debate three days before the New Hampshire primary how that could have happened without his knowledge. But no one on the stage with the Texas congressman — not the other contenders for the Republican Party's presidential nomination who bristle with contempt for their libertarian colleague or the panel of journalists wielding the questions — was ready for Paul's answer.

Dwelling on something he didn't write but has assumed responsibility for and apologized, Paul said, diverts attention away from the "true racism" in this nation's judicial system that disproportionately imprisons blacks for their involvement in drug crimes.

And when Paul finished what the Associated Press later called "a positively leftist rant," there were no follow-up questions, no clamoring from the other candidates to have their say on the issue. There was just a moment of uneasy silence — and then a commercial break. When the debate resumed, there was no return to Paul's charge of unequal justice, an indifference that is a haunting metaphor for the nation's failure to address an issue that is even worse than Paul suggests.

In 2010, 69 percent of all people arrested in this country for committing crimes were white. Blacks were just 28 percent, according to the FBI. These percentages have remained steady every year of the past decade. During this same period, roughly twice as many whites as blacks were arrested each year for drug crimes, according to the FBI annual Crime in the United States report.

Despite this, nearly half of all persons incarcerated throughout the first decade of this century were black. More than a liberal rant, that's the ugly reality of a criminal justice system that, as Paul correctly noted, prosecutes and imprisons blacks in disproportionate numbers.

That none of the other Republicans — who are champing at the bit for the right to challenge President Obama's re-election — would align themselves with Paul on this issue doesn't surprise me. The GOP's strategy for winning back the White House is devoid of any serious appeal to black voters and lacks any real concern about the lingering vestiges of racism inflicted upon blacks, who are overwhelmingly Democrats.

Forget all their pious talk about being Americans first. Paul's unanswered "rant" exposed them all —Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry— as crass partisans who won't risk upending the conventional wisdom about crime and punishment in this country when their political butts are on the line. They don't want to derail their campaigns by giving any credence to an issue that many right-wing voters they are courting would likely discount.

“If we truly want to be concerned about racism, you ought to look at a few of those issues and look at the drug laws, which are being so unfairly enforced,” Paul said as the network cut to commercials, and all the presidential wannabes on stage with him undoubtedly heaved a big sigh of relief.

Homegrown cult leader is a terrorist we should fear

2012-01-03T06:00:00.001-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

The terrorist who worries me most in this New Year is not one of this nation's avowed enemies who is being stalked by American forces abroad. It is Warren Jeffs, the homegrown cult leader and imprisoned pedophile.

From his Texas prison cell, Jeffs — who is serving a life sentence for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl and a consecutive 20-year sentence for raping a 15-year-old girl — is demanding even sheep-like behavior from members of his 10,000-member fundamentalist church.

And he is, apparently, getting it.

Jeffs has banned his followers from having sex until he is released, Joni Holm, who has relatives in the cult, told the Salt Lake City Deseret News. That’s not likely to happen anytime soon since Jeffs, 56, must serve at least 45 years before he can be paroled. Still, Jeffs has ordered his followers to reaffirm their faith (and loyalty to him) by handing over control of most of their worldly possessions to his lieutenants.
Children must give up their toys, girls under 18 aren’t allowed to work or have a cellphone, and access to media outlets and the Internet is banned, the Deseret News also reported.

Many of Jeffs’ followers were told to give his cult $5,000 by New Year’s Eve or face expulsion from his Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which is a breakaway faction of the Mormon Church. Jeffs’ edicts would be laughable — especially his ban on sex in a cult where men are allowed to take multiple wives — if it were not the product of a twisted mind that is capable of much worse.

Jeffs is starting to behave a lot like Jim Jones, the religious cult leader who coaxed more than 900 of his followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide and sedatives in 1978. The mass suicide came shortly after the ambush killing of Rep. Leo Ryan, D- Calif., who went to Jonestown, the commune Jones created in Guyana, to help some disenchanted followers leave.

The prospect of losing control of his flock while spending the rest of his life behind bars appears to have Jeffs ratcheting up his demands for sacrifices from his followers, particularly given reports of a growing exodus.

Jeffs claims to be God’s prophet. I don’t know if such talk is the hustle of a con man, or the ranting of a religious zealot. But it’s a good bet that if God is saying anything to him it is: “Cut it out.”

Like all cult leaders, Jeffs demands a blind allegiance to him that is the measure of his followers’ religious faith. And when his dominance of those who succumb to his questionable teachings is imperiled, he tries to tighten his control of them. That’s what Jones did when he moved the members of his Peoples Temple from San Francisco to Guyana.

And it is what Jeffs, who allegedly has forced young girls into illegal sexual liaisons with older men, appears to be doing now from his prison cell as he commands his followers to greater acts of acquiescence.

What worries me is that if prison officials don’t find a way to stop him, Jeffs — who has predicted the end of the world — could order his followers into some kind of Jonestown-like act of self-destruction.

Gingrich and Trump at war with GOP

2011-12-13T06:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

When it became clear the Republican presidential debate for which he had been tapped to serve as ringmaster would have few participants, Donald Trump started plotting revenge.

Only two of the party’s seven top presidential contenders – Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum – agreed to show up for Trump's December 27 debate in Des Moines, Iowa. Trump blamed the unwillingness of the others to attend on their concern that he wouldn’t be a fair manager of the event. That’s a fear Trump has delighted in stoking.

"If they pick somebody who I think can't win and if they pick somebody who is, in my opinion, the wrong person … and if the economy continues to be bad, I might run as an independent," Trump told USA TODAY a few days ago, repeating the hollow threat he made in June, shortly after announcing he would not seek the Republican presidential nomination.

He’s bluffing. With an ego as big as his, Trump would never submit himself to the judgment of this nation’s voters. For all is tough talk, he can’t stomach the possibility of finishing a distant third in next year’s presidential contest. So instead he has burrowed his way into the center of a fight within the GOP that endangers the party’s chances of retaking the White House in 2012. This struggle is a battle between the GOP’s center-right and the senseless right.

The center-right is led by people like Republican political strategist Karl Rove, Sen. Tom Coburn, R- Okla., and Joe Scarborough, the former Republican congressman who now cross-dresses as a morning talk show host. They are unnerved by prospect of the erratic Gingrich winning the GOP presidential nomination and then losing badly in the general election to President Obama. Such a defeat would likely drag a lot of other Republicans down to defeat.

Trump and Gingrich are the most visible leaders of the senseless right. They’re the GOP’s Harold & Kumar. They long ago overdosed on their inflated sense of self – and are intoxicated by their contempt for anyone who fails to acknowledge their greatness. Their brashness appeals to the Republican Party’s right-wing base but would almost certainly offend many of the swing voters who decide the outcome of general elections.

Early in the campaign members of the GOP’s center-right saw Trump as a political carnival barker who got people excited but would never be the main show. Gingrich was a gadfly with too many well-publicized bad acts to be a serious contender for the Republican nomination. But it seems members of the GOP’s senseless right see them as bare-knuckle fighters, who aren’t afraid of bloodying Obama’s nose.

Gingrich is their candidate for president. But to the Republican’s center-right, he is an ideological-loose-cannon whose only real commitment is to his own wealth and ambition, not the conservatism they champion – and to which he pays only lip service.

"The Republican establishment will never make peace with Newt Gingrich," Scarborough said on a recent airing of his MSNBC show Morning Joe. But with a growing lead over the other contenders in national polls – and the prospect of him racking up early victories in three of the first four states where the Republicans will hold caucuses or primaries in January, Gingrich is starting to look like the guy to beat for the GOP presidential nomination.

But to beat Gingrich, his center right opponents who have forsworn peace will have to make war on him. And to stop Trump’s troublesome grandstanding they must call his third-party bluff.

Would-be presidential assassin not ready for freedom

2011-12-07T09:26:00.002-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

John Hinckley may not be insane, but I think he’s still more than a bit crazy.

Insanity is a legal determination of mental unsoundness. Hinckley ambushed Ronald Reagan as he was leaving a Washington hotel 30 years ago. The hail of gunfire seriously wounded the president and three other men. A jury ultimately found Hinckley “not guilty by reason of insanity” and sent him off to a mental institution.

Crazy, to me, is a madness that falls short of the legal definition of insanity.

The government is trying to convince a federal judge that Hinckley, who was diagnosed as psychotic and narcissistic, should not be allowed to have longer, unsupervised visits to his aging mother’s Virginia home.

In 2009, that judge gave Hinckley permission to make 12 such visits of 10 days each. Now his doctors are asking approval for Hinckley to make two visits of 17-days; and six of 24-days duration. If they go well, they want the judge to give them the authority to permanently release him from the mental hospital.

But if what the Secret Service tells us about Hinckley’s recent behavior is true — he seems to be too disturbingly cunning to be set free. Instead of going to a movie as he was supposed to during a visit with his mother earlier this year, Hinckley slipped into a bookstore where Secret Service agents said they saw him looking at books on Reagan and presidential assassinations.

When his mother came back to pick him up, Hinckley was standing in the theater lobby as if he’d gone to a movie, according to the government’s account. Hinckley later compounded this deception by recommending the film he was supposed to have seen to hospital staffers, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Chasson said during the court hearing on giving him more freedom of movement.

That sounds pretty narcissistic to me. Sure some people who are judged mentally incompetent can, with medication and the proper therapy, experience an improvement in their mental health. His doctor says Hinckley’s psychosis and narcissism have been in remission for years.

But it is also the case that the insane sometimes can appear deceivingly normal — or at least not insane. I don’t know into which category Hinckley rightly falls, but given his violent history it makes no sense to take an even greater chance with him. Allowing Hinckley to spend time with his 85-year-old mother, who could hardly be expected to properly monitor the actions of her now 56-year-old son, is a questionable test of his mental fitness.

Was Hinckley’s bookstore detour the action of a rational man who wanted to connect with his troubled past, or proof that he is still not fully sane? Does it suggest that he continues to think of himself, even if only fleetingly, like the mentally ill character he was obsessed with in the 1976 movie Taxi Driver – who wanted to kill the president? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does. Not those who clamor for him to be allowed to spend more time outside the mental institution to which he was committed; nor those who argue against it.

Hinckley's deceptive viewing of books about presidential assassinations when he said he’d be at a movie suggests he needs more supervision — not less, because his actions say he could very well be crazy like a fox.

Yahya Jammeh is Africa's biggest psychopath

2011-11-29T06:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

It would be easy to dismiss the recent presidential election in Gambia, a sliver of a nation on Africa's west coast, as a matter of little concern to the United States.

But if we've learned any lesson from ignoring megalomaniac leaders of corrupt states, it is that their mischief has a good chance of eventually affecting America's national interest.

And Yahya Jammeh, who just won a fourth term as Gambia's president, could well be Africa's biggest psychopath.

Like the late Idi Amin, the former Ugandan president who generously proclaimed himself "Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea," Jammeh has an otherworldly sense of self. Two years ago, he sent "witch doctors" and his security forces to round up about 1,000 people whom he believed to be witches responsible for the death of his aunt. They were taken to the president's farm and forced to drink a hallucinogenic liquid that left two people dead and many others with serious liver damage, according to a report in the British newspaper The Telegraph.

Claiming special powers of his own, Jammeh announced in 2007 that he had discovered an AIDS cure, which he said his ancestors gave him in a dream. Jammeh personally administered this cure to hopeful AIDS patients — but only on Thursdays. The Gambian president also says he has fixes for obesity and erectile dysfunction. Africa needs a fix for him.

More than the slapstick leader of the smallest country on the African mainland, Jammeh is a serious mischief maker. He is accused of condoning the shipment of Iranian weapons through Gambia to rebels in the Casamance region of neighboring Senegal. Crates of these weapons, marked as construction materials, were seized at a port in Nigeria last year.

Pressured to explain this discovery, the Iranian government has said that the weapons were products of a military assistance agreement it struck with Gambia — a deal that violated United Nations sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran. Jammeh denied any knowledge of the weapons shipment, but such talk rings hollow with a leading American advocate for Africa.

"The U.S. can't ignore what's going on in Gambia. It is a growing transshipment point for drugs to Europe and is on its way to becoming a destabilizing force for the western region of Africa," says Melvin Foote, president of the Washington-based Constituency for Africa. "A lot of people over there see him (Jammeh) as an instigator."

Foote, who was in Gambia last year on a State Department-sponsored trip to West Africa to help nurture democratic values among the area's emerging young leaders, told me that there's a lot of grumbling about Jammeh in the region — but so far, no action. That's too bad.

While the U.S. has an interest in seeing to it that Jammeh doesn't undermine Senegal or other neighboring states in West Africa and create a base of operation there for Iran's adventurism, the Gambian president is a problem Africans must be encouraged to solve themselves.

With drone bases in the African nations of Ethiopia and Djibouti — and military advisers on the ground in other parts of the continent — the U.S. doesn't need to enlarge its footprint in Africa. What it needs is for Africa's growing number of democratic governments to find a way to ensure that the leader of the area's smallest country isn't allowed to become one of its biggest headaches.

They have to police their continent or run the risk of it becoming, as Africa did during the Cold War, a bloody surrogate for the fights of others.

GOP's Southern Strategy to blame for black legislators loss of political clout in South

2011-11-22T06:00:00.001-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

The lead to a recent Associated Press story about the declining influence of black lawmakers in the South reads like something written by the late Lee Atwater, the race-baiting former Republican Party chairman and GOP spin-doctor.

"(An) overwhelming allegiance to the Democratic Party has left them (black lawmakers in the South) without power in increasingly GOP-controlled state legislatures," the AP said, citing a report by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

In the early 1980s, Atwater was a master manipulator of the news media and crafty manager of the GOP's Southern Strategy, which uses racial fear to herd white Democrats into the Republican Party. He - like Richard Nixon before him - understood that a subtle appeal to racism would, over time, change the political landscape of the South.

This is what he said during a 1981 interview about how the GOP could marginalize blacks:

"You start out in 1954 by saying 'nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' - that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now (that) you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than 'nigger, nigger."

The AP story, which was published by news media outlets across the country, left out this critical context. The constant is the allegiance of blacks to the Democratic Party. That isn't news. It's the impact on these black lawmakers of the mass migration of Southern whites to the GOP that is the news.

David Bositis, a political scientist and the author of the Joint Center report, seemed to make just this point: "In most Southern states, the 46-year transition from a multiracial Democratic (Party) political dominance to a white conservative Republican political dominance is almost complete."

But while this change has taken place over nearly half a century, it has moved at warp speed over the past two years. Before the 2010 election, 51% of black legislators in the South were a part of a state legislative majority. After elections that year and this year, the number dropped to just under 5%, according to Bositis.

These changes have come in a political climate in which Republicans have craftily used the abstractions of "states' rights" and calls for lower taxes to bring more white voters into the GOP fold.

An even bigger missed story in the analysis of Bositis' report might be the connection between the 2008 election of Barack Obama and the increased pace with which Southern Democrats lost control of state legislatures - and nearly all black legislators in the old Confederacy became members of the minority party.

Instead of ushering in the post-racial era, the election of this nation's first black president has seemingly widened racial fault lines, most noticeably in the South. The Joint Center report is just the most recent evidence of this.

But just as the unchanged voting habits of black Southerners aren't responsible for the loss of political influence for black legislators in that region, Obama's election didn't forestall the end of the Jim Crow era that Republicans made an integral part of this nation's politics with their Southern Strategy - and which they continue to use as a political abstraction.

Somewhere, Atwater - who offered a suspect apology for his bad acts before his death in 1991 - must be smiling.

Republicans couldn't find Obama foreign policy soft spot

2011-11-15T06:00:00.001-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

The most revealing moment of the Republican presidential debate in Spartanburg, S.C., came just after that political stage show lost a big chunk of its national television audience.

It was at the beginning of the final 30 minutes of the 90-minute debate (just the first 60 minutes was aired nationally) that the moderator, CBS News anchor Scott Pelley — in a pandering abdication of his role — gave Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a chance to lob a softball foreign policy question to his GOP brethren.

Graham wanted to know whether any of his party's presidential hopefuls would continue President Obama's policy of not using enhanced interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects; using civilian courts in some instances to try suspected enemy combatants; and not sending future captives from the war on terror to the Navy base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

That question was more of a GOP civics test than an attempt at serious journalism. Less than three weeks earlier, 45 of the 47 GOP senators voted to ban civilian trials for enemy combatants, an action that was narrowly defeated by the Democratic majority. Just as Senate Republicans had circled their wagons on this issue, Graham's question was intended to get all of the party's presidential contenders publicly inside that loop.

When it comes to the war on terror, the GOP has struggled to find an Obama soft spot. It was the president who ordered Navy SEALs to storm Osama bin Laden's Pakistan hideout — a raid that resulted in his death. And it has been on Obama's watch that the body count of al-Qaeda and other anti-American terrorists has grown dramatically.

Obama ended the war in Iraq and has ordered all U.S. troops out by the end of this year. Al-Qaeda has been defeated in Afghanistan, and the Taliban is on the ropes. The president has wisely decided that most of the nation-building work that largely remains in Afghanistan must be done by that country's political leaders, police and military. He has ordered a steady withdrawal of U.S. troops from that quagmire that will bring most of them home by 2014 — an action that sits well with most Americans.

So when it comes to the war on terror, Senate Republicans have massed to attack Obama over the question of what this nation should do with terrorism suspects — something on which they haven't always agreed.

Before Obama won the presidency in 2008, two prominent Republicans — President George W. Bush and the man who tried to succeed him, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. — both backed closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center. And just last year, Graham expressed reservations about a bill that would ban civilian trials for enemy combatants. "I just don't feel comfortable with it.

There is a role for the civilian courts to play," Graham said about the bill introduced by McCain and Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn. But now that Republicans are in presidential campaign mode, they're all getting in lockstep behind a foreign policy issue they think might resonate with voters. It probably won't, but it did with most of the GOP's presidential wannabes.

Only Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, the irascible libertarian legislator, balked at the idea, reminding the audience that more than 300 terrorism suspects have been tried in this country's civilian courts and most of them were convicted.
But, of course, truth and reason are no match for the GOP's determination to make Obama a one-term president.

When it comes of GOP's outreach to Jews, it's bad acts speak louder than good words

2011-11-01T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Just when it seemed that Republicans had a chance to break the Democratic Party's lopsided hold on the Jewish vote, Republicans started acting like, well, Republicans.

Democrats have been scrambling to shore up support for Barack Obama among Jewish voters whose backing for the president began to slip earlier this year when he said Israel's 1967 borders should be the starting point in peace talks between Palestinians and the Jewish state.

The depth of this slide became apparent in September when a politically unknown GOP businessman, Robert Turner, won a special election in New York's Ninth Congressional District - a seat that had been held by Democrats since 1923. That local contest was billed by Republicans as a referendum on Obama's support of Israel, not a voter backlash against the texting scandal that forced Democrat Anthony Weiner to resign that congressional seat.

Even a reasoned defense of the president in New York magazine, shortly after the special election, that called Obama "The First Jewish President" and Israel's best friend, didn't stop the bleeding. Obama's approval rating among Jewish Americans has slipped to 45%, a 12-point drop from 2010, according to a poll released in late September by the American Jewish Committee, which The New York Times branded "the dean of American Jewish organizations."

But instead of mining this advantage, Republicans trampled upon it. In a largely party-line vote, GOP House members blocked an effort by Democrats to scuttle a bill that would allow a company in Arizona to operate this nation's largest copper mine.

What's the connection between this mining company and the Jewish vote? The firm, Resolution Copper, is partnered with an Iranian government-owned firm that is mining uranium in Namibia. Connecting these dots, the Iranian nuclear threat to Israel - one fed by Tehran's access to enriched uranium - is of grave concern to American Jews. These strange bedfellows should at the very least give American Jews pause.

Republicans said their action is not just good for Resolution Copper; it's also good for this nation's ailing economy. They argue it will create 4,000 jobs and pump billions of dollars into Arizona's economy. They also say Rio Tinto, the London-based company that owns Resolution Copper, has assured them that its Iranian partner is banned from removing uranium from the African mine and says it is in full compliance with all sanctions and laws.

Most of the resistance to the deal, in fact, has been on the environmental front rather than over the Iranian connection.

But critics question why Congress should do anything that strengthens a firm in the uranium business with Iran, a sworn enemy of Israel and widely believed to be trying to obtain nuclear weapons in violation of United Nations sanctions.

Of course, none of this links the uranium mine in Namibia to such an effort. But if you believe Iran has a rogue weapons program, it's hard to imagine it wouldn't treat that uranium mine as low-hanging fruit.

By voting to pass this bill, which the Obama administration opposes and the president would likely veto, House Republicans are putting the economic interests of Arizona ahead of the defense of Israel.

That kind of shortsightedness not only puts Israel at risk, it almost certainly will cause a lot of Jews in this country to hew more closely to the Democratic Party - and to the Democrat who currently occupies the Oval Office.

Herman Cain is more lyrical than sensible

2011-10-25T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

What is the magnetism of Herman Cain?

How has this former pizza company executive with no prior political experience, relatively little campaign funds and a small staff of political neophytes been able to surge into the front ranks of the candidates vying for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination?

Nothing signals the GOP’s disarray more than the rise of Cain, a man whose confounding views apparently mean less to Republicans than his simple answers to complex questions. And nothing should worry the managers of President Obama’s re-election campaign more than the growing appeal of a would-be opponent whose solutions to this nation’s perplexing problems are more lyrical than sensible.

Cain is an anti-politician — a White House candidate whose greatest appeals seems be his pizza parlor view of the world. While such a description might appeal to those who think nothing short of a revolutionary change will make the nation’s capital more responsive to the needs of the American people, the possibility of Cain ending up in the Oval Office has to alarm thoughtful people on both sides of this country’s political divide.

Like any good salesman, Cain pushes what sells. To a nation frustrated by Congress’ inability to reform the federal tax laws, he’s offered his “9-9-9” tax plan, which would replace the current federal tax codes with a 9% tax on income, sales and businesses. That seems like a good idea to a lot of people frustrated by the federal government’s complicated tax laws.

Cain’s proposal to build an electrified fence along the U.S.-Mexican border — which he has mentioned several times — had a similar kind of appeal. As far back as May, that pitch was a good applause line for Cain, who once said he’d put an alligator filled moat next to that barrier.

Cain, however, stumbled a bit following Israel’s decision to release more than 1,000 Palestinians for a single Israeli soldier held by Hamas. During a CNN interview, Cain said he would consider exchanging a large number of prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to gain the freedom for an American soldier.

“I could see myself authorizing that kind of transfer,” he said. But when Cain came under attack from fellow Republicans for this view, he said he misspoke. He would not negotiate with terrorists, Cain said later during a GOP presidential debate. Then in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Cain — who once said some people think he just has pepperoni between his ears — backtracked again. His talk about building an electrified fence to keep illegal immigrants from crossing into the U.S. from Mexico, he said, was a long-running joke.

Even so, none of Cain’s backtracking has knocked him out of the front ranks of GOP presidential hopefuls. This may be because his retreat on the Mexican fence issue sounded more like waffling than surrender; more media-driven than heartfelt. His pullback on the prisoner exchange question — and from an answer he gave to a question about abortion in which he seemed to suggest it is OK for a rape victim to end a pregnancy — was an embrace of right-wing dogma.

For many members of the conservative rank-and-file, Cain is one of them. He’s a frank-talking, grass-roots guy whose best credential is that he isn’t a career politician. Of course, the nation could use a big infusion of people in elected office who aren’t career politicians.

But the lack of political experience can be a double-edged sword – one that makes a person appealing, yet unsuitable for the presidency.

Thanks to Obama, America is safer than it was four years ago

2011-10-18T19:23:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Given the state of this nation's troubled economy — which has spawned a grass-roots movement against economic inequities and corporate greed — it's no surprise President Obama's economic policies have gotten more attention than his war on terrorism.

While a traditional reading of the political tea leaves suggests America's financial health will weigh more heavily on voters in next year's presidential election than the hunt for Osama bin Laden's linear successors, the president deserves a lot more credit than he's been given for the war he's waging.

No, Obama hasn't undone the economic mess he inherited from his predecessor, but he has decimated the ranks of the terrorist leaders who commanded the 9/11 attacks. In doing so, Obama has made America a lot safer than it was four years ago — which should also weigh heavily on voters' minds in 2012.

The pinnacle of the Obama-led war on terrorism (though the president pointedly avoids this term) has been the killing of bin Laden by a team of Navy SEALs who attacked his compound in Pakistan. Over the past decade, the near-mythical al-Qaeda mastermind taunted this country with video and tape-recorded messages that threatened more attacks.

And let us not forget that bin Laden was free to do so for a decade after the managers of George W. Bush's war on terrorism let him escape from Afghanistan in the battle of Tora Bora. Though the threats proved to be more talk than action, they elevated the fear level in this country.

In authorizing that attack on bin Laden, Obama made good on his presidential campaign pledge to strike our terrorist enemies wherever he found them — even in Pakistan, a conflicted U.S. ally.

In fact, since Obama took office, the body count of senior al-Qaeda leaders has grown dramatically, often from the president's weapon of choice, pilotless drones. This smart use of air power also puts fewer U.S. troops at risk.

While Obama has continued Bush's ill-conceived nation-building campaign in Afghanistan, he has not made that mistake in places like North Waziristan, Yemen, Somalia and other parts of Africa. Instead, he has wisely chosen to use drones and small units of highly skilled military advisers to combat terrorists that threaten America or its allies.

At the very least, Obama's relentless pursuit of these zealots has disrupted their ability to calmly plan the next hit. Understandably, the president might not get the full credit he deserves from voters more concerned about the nation's high unemployment rate. The stubbornly bad jobs market and their declining wealth are a far greater threat than the terrorist leadership Obama has turned into an endangered species.

Many Americans, I suspect, will take for granted the relative peace this country now enjoys. In a strange way that may be the only reward Obama gets from voters. Anything less parochial might have to await history's judgment.

Why one woman overcame fear and anxiety to join Occupy Wall Street

2011-10-11T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Stacey Patton knows better than most people who've joined the Occupy Wall Street protest about the perils of such a decision.

Eleven years before, she joined demonstrators in New York City's Foley Square to protest against corporate greed and wealth disparities, Patton was arrested while taking part in a march following the not-guilty verdict for the four New York policemen who killed Amadou Diallo.

The African immigrant was shot 19 times in the vestibule of his apartment after the cops mistook his wallet for a gun. That protest ended for Patton when she was arrested and jailed overnight after a clash with police that left her with a severely injured leg — and nightmares.

Back then, Patton was an idealistic 22-year-old undergraduate at New York University. Now 33, she recently earned a doctorate from Rutgers University and was reluctant to join the loosely organized protests that began Sept. 17 and have spread from Boston to San Francisco.

"I never thought I'd be a part of something like this," she told me. Not after the price she paid for her snap decision to join that protest in 2000. Though that past haunts her, Patton said she worries about the future.

"I got out there because I still believe in democracy," she explained. "I think this is a movement about economic justice. I think it's pretty obvious what people are protesting. They are protesting greed, recklessness, illegal behavior, home foreclosures and rising student debt. We can't get jobs, but we have mounting student debt."

Patton said the Occupy Wall Street protest is the counter-narrative to the Tea Party movement, which is demanding that government become smaller and less involved in people's lives. But many Wall Street protesters want government to do more to end home foreclosures, generate jobs and punish those whose greed brought this nation to the verge of economic collapse.

While it's not clear exactly what will satisfy this movement — or for that matter who its leaders are — this much seems certain: The Arab Spring has come to America.

Unlike the Tea Party movement that seeks to remake the political process through elections, Occupy Wall Street is more of a revolt than political takeover. The people who have taken to the streets under this banner are demanding a more responsive government, not plotting a government takeover.

For Patton, Foley Square isn't very far removed from Egypt's Tahrir Square as a staging ground for a second American Revolution — not a violent struggle, but one of ideas about good governance. For all this nation's greatness, too many Americans live below the poverty line. And for too many people who are unemployed, underemployed or about to lose their home, the American dream is a nightmare.

The protest has awakened in a wide swath of Americans the kind of passion for change that earlier this year drove millions of Arabs into the streets of Cairo, Tunis and Damascus. Ironically, Foley Square is just a short walk from a park named for Thomas Paine, a Revolutionary War leader who once wrote of that American crisis: "These are the times that try men's souls."

The same, it seems, can be said of the protests that forced Patton to suspend her fears and anxieties to join a street demonstration in New York City that threatens to engulf the nation.

Cain's attack on black voters gives GOP racial absolution

2011-10-04T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Energized by his surprise victory in Florida’s GOP straw poll, Herman Cain quickly sought to strengthen his standing among conservatives by giving them something that no other GOP presidential candidate can — absolution on the haunting issue of race.

“Many African Americans have been brainwashed into not being open-minded, not even considering a conservative point of view,” Cain, the only black in the field of announced Republican presidential contenders, said during an interview on CNN.

By pinning the overwhelming support blacks give Democratic presidential candidates on some Svengali-like, forced manipulation of their minds, Cain relieves GOP conservatives of any responsibility for chasing the majority of black voters out of the party of Abraham Lincoln.

By blaming black mindlessness for this flight, Cain ignores the race-baiting “Southern strategy” that virtually every Republican presidential candidate since Richard Nixon has used as a wedge issue to win the backing of Southern whites.

By suggesting that most black voters are herded to the polls like sheep by liberal Democrats, he leaves no need for the GOP to explain why blacks, who have a strong conservative streak, have largely abandoned the Republican Party.

Instead of telling the GOP voters he courts some hard truths, Cain courts them with doublespeak about black voters, who he later told CNN “more and more” are thinking for themselves and would likely vote for him in large numbers if he ends up in a general election showdown with Barack Obama.

The truth is, most blacks are conservative on issues of religion, education and crime. But for the vast majority of blacks, race is a survival issue that trumps all others. To most blacks, the GOP push for more “states’ rights” (a battle cry of the Confederacy) and a smaller federal government (which many blacks believe will threaten their hard-won civil rights protections) is an assault on them.

I suspect Cain knows this. But as with just about every Republican black elected official, he’s more interested in courting white voters than black voters. The last time a black Republican won election to a national office from a majority black district was in 1932, when voters in Illinois’ first congressional district re-elected Oscar De Priest to his third — and final — term in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Most black Republicans elected to Congress since then have done so with the embrace of the conservative GOP voters they had to court. And most of those black Republican officeseekers, in one way or another, sought to immunize their party against the charge of racism — often in the face of compelling evidence of its intolerant treatment of blacks.

Cain is the latest in this long line of black Republicans. What distinguishes him from the rest are the impressive showing he made in an early voter test of the GOP’s presidential candidates and his claim that a sizable number of blacks would abandon the Democratic Party and vote for him in 2012. The first may say more about the weakness of GOP opponents than Cain’s strength. The other would be laughable if it were not beneath the dignity of satire.

Republicans who want their party to be more a part of this nation’s future than its past would do well to reject the absolution Cain offers them — and the self-denial that has plagued their relations with this nation’s black electorate.

A reason why Democrats should turn out in droves for Obama

2011-09-27T05:59:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

When President Obama rose to address the mostly black crowd at the Congressional Black Caucus’ awards dinner on Saturday, he knew the damage he wanted to mend with his speech extended far beyond the CBC’s 43 members and their black constituents.

Hoisted into the Oval Office three years ago by a well-crafted coalition of black, Hispanic, Asian and white voters, Obama’s message to the large gathering at the convention center, a short drive from the White House, was the opening salvo of an effort to re-energize his core supporters.

“Change,” was the mantra of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. But for many who voted for him then, the change hasn’t come fast enough — or has been missed by those who expect trumpets to blare every time Obama moves this nation closer to his goal of a more just society.

With a recent CBS News/New York Times Poll showing an 18 point gap between the enthusiasm of Democrats (26%) and Republicans (44%) for next year’s presidential election, Obama used his address to tout some of the things he has done for blacks, who have been hit hard by the current economic downturn. He pointed to the impact on blacks of the payroll tax cut he pushed through Congress for all workers; the Department of Education’s “Promise Neighborhoods,” an education-centered, community-based approach to ending poverty, and the ripple effect of his efforts to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income workers.

And then, invoking the memory of the civil rights struggle that made it possible for him and thousands of other blacks to obtain political office, the president told CBC members — some of whom have criticized him for not doing more to reduce a black unemployment rate that’s double that of whites — to help him beat back Republican opposition to his administration.

“Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We’ve got to work to do,” Obama said in a rousing charge that he’ll probably repeat to other wavering supporters. And he should, if for just one compelling reason.

The president’s greatest accomplishment, which he ought to mention in every speech to his core supporters, is what he’s done to reshape the federal judiciary. Nothing is likely to have a longer lasting impact on the interests of the people who put him in office than his appointments of federal judges. Nearly half of his nominees who have been confirmed to federal judgeships are women; 21% are African American; 11% Hispanic and 7% are Asian. Less than 30% of his judicial appointments have gone to white men, who hold the lion’s share of federal judgeships.

In the more than two centuries since the U.S. Supreme Court was created just four women have won confirmation to a seat on the nation’s highest court. Half of those women were nominated by Obama. He’s put the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court and doubled the number of Asians who are currently sitting on the federal bench.

This far exceeds the percentage of women and minorities George W. Bush put on the federal bench during his two terms in the White House and increases the chances that more balanced federal courts will protect civil rights gains, abortion rights and give a fairer hearing to immigration issues.

All of this, and the fear of a Republican president watering down these important gains, should be enough to get Obama’s core constituents to stop whining and turn out in record numbers on Election Day.

Obama is a smart, not weak, politician

2011-09-13T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

For much of his time in the White House, the rap against Barack Obama has been that he is a weak leader — a man who is a much better talker than doer when it comes to managing the nation’s affairs.

Don’t believe it.

For many of his critics, this knock against the nation’s first black president stems from his low-key approach to combating Republican opposition to virtually everything he does — and his passive response to the disrespect of GOP members, like those who called him a liar during a speech on the House floor, who wouldn’t take his call in middle of the debt ceiling crisis, and who referred to him as a “boy” and “tar baby.”

But while Obama ducked these skirmishes, he’s a more tenacious — and smarter in-fighter — than a lot of people think. Proof of this can be found in his recent address to a joint session of Congress, in which the president spelled out his plan to combat this nation’s painfully high unemployment rate.

Obama’s proposal — called the American Jobs Act — is good policy and a smart political tactic. In a disarming move, he took elements of the tax cuts Republicans obsess over and blended them in with an aggressive plan to spend $447 billion to help put people back to work.

Among other things, his plan calls for a payroll tax cut for small businesses, a tax credit for firms that hire military veterans and people who have been looking for work for more than six months. All of which will be paid for, Obama said, by federal spending cuts.

“There’s a bridge that needs repair between Ohio and Kentucky that’s on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America,” he said of a major rebuilding project that needs to be done on a road that connects the states of Congress’ top Republicans — House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

And there’s a “public transit project in Houston that will help clear up one of the worst areas of traffic in the country,” Obama said in urging Congress “to pass this jobs bill.”

How petty — and uncaring — will Republicans be if they block the president’s proposal from getting a fair hearing and a vote in both houses of Congress? How much harm will they do their party if they try to extract an ideological victory from Obama’s push for passage of his jobs bill? That’s the trap Obama has set for his foes.

While Obama hasn’t always fought the battles some of his constituents wanted him to wage, his reluctance — I’m convinced — has been a matter of strategy, not weakness. He ran as a candidate of “change” and once in office tried to temper the political backbiting in the nation’s capital.

But the GOP’s intransigence during the recent debt ceiling crisis has forced the president to be less conciliatory and more strategic in his dealing with congressional Republicans. Now Obama is taking the fight to them. And the contest for the hearts and minds of a nation frustrated by the partisan war in Washington is being framed by his plan to put America back to work.

“Regardless of the arguments we’ve had in the past, regardless of the arguments we will have in the future, this plan is the right thing to do right now. You should pass it,” Obama told Congress.

Like a commander who has outflanked an advancing enemy army, the president now waits to see if his opponents will seek a truce, or fight a suicidal battle.

U.S. should cut deal for return of man tricked into being a spy

2011-09-06T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

When the FBI arrested 10 Russian spies last year, this country quickly traded them for four ailing men held by Russia and accused of being espionage agents for the United States and Britain.

It took just over a week for the U.S. government to cut the deal that sent the Russian agents, who had been in this country for more than a decade, to Moscow. After a brief appearance in a federal courtroom to plead guilty to a single charge of conspiring “to act as an agent of a foreign country” the Russian spooks were whisked from the country.

Of the four men who were released to the U.S. — all of them Russians — in return for this grand gesture, two were taken to Britain; the others landed in Washington and then disappeared in a caravan of black SUVs.

The U.S government should do the same for Alan Gross.

Seven months before the U.S.-Russia spy swap, Gross was arrested in Cuba and charged with committing “acts against the independence and territorial integrity” of that Communist nation. Gross worked for Development Alternatives, Inc., a U.S. State Department contractor. The charge against him stems from his efforts to provide satellite phones and unrestricted Internet access to some people in Cuba, whose government the United States has tried for more than half a century to topple.

Sentenced to 15 years in prison, Gross told an appeals court he had been a “trusting fool” and didn’t know his actions violated Cuban law, according to a transcript released recently by his American lawyer.

Maybe he didn’t, but the State Department must have.

By engaging the company that hired Gross to help implement its “Cuba democracy program,” the diplomats in Foggy Bottom surely knew the risks they were running in privatizing a portion of their efforts to bring regime change to that island nation. They had to have known, if caught, Gross would be treated like a spy.

Now, nearly two years after his arrest, Gross — reportedly in poor health — languishes in a Cuban prison. But he could be home in a few days if the U.S. will exchange the five Cuban spies it imprisoned 13 years ago for the 62-year-old Gross.

The so-called “Cuban Five” — espionage agents that Cuba had sent here to spy on Cuban exiles that want to overthrow the Castro regime — received sentences ranging from life to 15 years. One of them was accused of conspiracy in the 1996 shoot down of two U.S.-based civilian planes by Cuban MIG fighters. Cuba says those planes violated its air space — a claim that is denied by Brothers to the Rescue, the Cuban exile group that operated those flights.

Spying is a nasty business that, unfortunately, produces a lot of collateral damage. Keeping the Cuban Five in prison won’t bring back the lives lost in that shoot down. But swapping them for the ailing Gross could spare the life of a man who says he was tricked into the spy game.

Such a humanitarian gesture, probably, will only generate widespread resistance from those Cuba exiles who clamor for the U.S. to do for them what dissidents in Syria and Libya have taken to the streets of those countries to do for themselves. They mount their attacks on the Castro regime from trendy clubs in Miami Beach and the coffee shops of Miami’s Little Havana.

Gross should not be left to suffer a long prison term for their sake. He should be swapped for the Cuban Five with as much dispatch as was used to get those ailing spies out of Russia.

Florida's justice evading governor treats welfare mothers like criminals

2011-08-30T09:26:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham
During his 2010 gubernatorial campaign, Rick Scott – who many think is a criminal who evaded justice – promised to keep drug abuse lawbreakers off of Florida’s welfare rolls.

Scott, who on the stump called for drug testing of welfare applicants with Elmer Gantry-like fervor and credibility, got his way earlier this year when the state’s GOP-dominated legislature passed a law requiring such examinations.

“Studies show that people on welfare are using (illegal) drugs much higher than the population,” the Florida governor said on CNN shortly before the law took effect in July. While there are also studies that dispute Scott’s contention, his push for drug testing has inspired copy-cat efforts in a growing number of states.

It has also hit an unexpected snag.

So far, just 2% of Florida’s welfare applicants have tested positive for illegal drug use, 2% failed to complete the application process and 96% were found to be drug free. While every applicant is required to pay for their drug test, the state must reimburse those who pass.

Even so, Scott — who invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination 75 times during a 2000 civil suit brought against him and Columbia/HCA, the troubled company he led — has shown no misgivings about treating poor Floridians like criminals. That’s what happens when ideology overtakes good sense.

Scott’s drug testing program, like those being pushed in other states, is part of a right-wing effort to reduce the size and role of government. It is a fishing expedition to find a reason to cut the welfare rolls. It's premised on little more than just a hunch that women with children who are destitute enough to ask a state for temporary cash assistance are more inclined than others to abuse drugs.

The Florida law offer’s poor mothers with needy children no “Fifth Amendment” opportunity to avoid being tested for illegal drug use. And it gives those who are found to be drug users no chance to enter a drug treatment program to keep from being denied the financial assistance they need for their children. So, in essence, Florida’s law punishes children for the sins of their parent.

Scott says his law is meant to prevent the misuse of taxpayers’ money. But he makes no allowance for the fate of those needy children to whom it denies welfare assistance.

Drug testing that is not based on reasonable suspicion smacks of an unconstitutional search, the kind of government intrusion upon an individual’s rights that conservatives usually rail against.

But Scott’s assault on welfare mothers plays to an ever bigger right-wing obsession: that big government is the playground of left-wing radicals – and a crutch for shiftless people. Scott rode this position to victory in the governor’s race in the Sunshine State, which will be a key battleground in next year’s presidential election.

By treating mothers who apply for welfare benefits as a criminal class who must disprove a suspicion of drug abuse before obtaining badly-needed support, Scott panders to the soft bigotry of class warfare.

And he becomes an integral part of the rot that is eating away at this nation’s body politics.

Voters should make Rick Perry "inconsequential"

2011-08-22T21:34:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

When Texas Gov. Rick Perry said the day he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination that he’d “work every day to make Washington, D.C., as inconsequential in your life as I can,” did he mean he wants the presidency to be as powerless as the job he now holds?

When Perry lobbed this pot shot at President Obama: “You can’t win the future by selling America off to foreign creditors,” was he thinking of his own failed attempt to use foreign investments and tolls to finance a controversial $175 billion road project in the Lone Star State?

When he said at the end of this speech that “the people are not subjects of the government,” government “is subject to the people,” was Perry channeling the rage of the Texas farmers who successfully fought off his effort to seize their land to build that 4,000-mile Trans-Texas Corridor?

The newest addition to the long list of Republican presidential wannabes, Perry is the longest serving chief executive of Texas, a state in which the lieutenant governor and House Speaker, arguably, have more control over the economy than does the governor. This unusual distribution of power is the product of a state constitution that was written in the wake of the Reconstruction period when governors, often chosen by the federal government, ran Texas and other former Confederate states with a heavy hand.

If he wins the presidency, Perry wants us to believe, he’ll strip that office of some of its power. Don’t believe it. Perry wants us to think that if he ends up in the Oval Office he’ll usher in an era of smaller government. That’s probably not going to happen.

What’s more likely is that he’ll roll back those federal government roles he objects to and expand federal authority in areas that will advance his personal right-wing rights agenda.

How might he do this?

In his 2010 book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry abandons the “strict constructionist” view of the Constitution many Republican cling to by arguing for an amendment that strips federal judges of their lifetime appointments. He also wants to tip the constitutional balance of power in favor of Congress by tweaking the Constitution to give federal lawmakers the power to overturn Supreme Court decisions.

If you think this makes Perry a champion of those who want to bring the reins of power closer to this nation’s people consider this: the tough talking Texas governor wants to repeal the constitutional amendment that made it possible for voters of every state to elect their U.S. senators. Until the 17th amendment was ratified in 1913, senators were elected by state legislatures.

And remember, it was Perry who wanted to use his state’s power of eminent domain to take land from Texas farmers to build the Trans-Texas Corridor. Also, in an act that many right-wing advocates of individual rights saw as political blasphemy, Perry issued an executive order in 2007 mandating that all sixth-graders in the state to get vaccinated against HPV (human papillomavirus), which is a sexually transmitted disease.

While he seeks to portray himself as a Tea Party devotee, Perry is more of a have-it-my-way conservative who’s committed to nothing so compelling as his own mixed messages on the role of government in people’s lives – and nothing more worrisome than the degree to which a Perry presidency would be consequential to the life of this nation.

What Obama should say to Bachmann: "Bring it on!"

2011-08-16T13:48:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Michele Bachmann’s win in the straw poll of Republican Party faithfuls in Iowa — the first voter test of the 2012 presidential campaign — had to be good news to a White House battered by a downturn in the economy and an uptick in war casualties.

The Minnesota congresswoman’s victory in the nonbinding contest, which historically has not been a major factor in picking the GOP nominee, increases the possibility that she will be her party’s standard-bearer, given the Tea Party’s muscle flexing in this political season. Bachmann is leader of that kamikaze wing of Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Although the Tea Party’s approval rating has been in a steady decline, it still holds great sway over the GOP. The no-compromise stance that it forced on congressional Republicans during the debt limit debate has pushed the Tea Party onto the tundra of American politics, a position from which Bachmann cannot mount a successful assault on Obama’s presidency.

If the Tea Party’s stranglehold on the GOP propels Bachmann to the party’s presidential nomination, something many pundits think is still a long shot, Bachmann will be soundly defeated in the general election and drag other Republicans down to defeat, as well. In such a campaign, voters will be constantly reminded that Bachmann opposed raising the debt ceiling at a time when many Democrats and Republicans said doing so would court economic catastrophe.

“It was very important (to me) that we not raise the debt ceiling. The worst thing that you can do is continue to borrow money and spend money that we don’t have,” Bachmann said during a televised debate. While Bachmann endears herself to the Tea Party crowd with talk like that, she mortally wounds her chances of ever being more than a footnote of presidential election history.

A former Jimmy Carter Democrat, Bachmann is an unwavering social conservative whose faceoff with Obama would energize black voters, whose support for the president has waned. This drop is probably spurred by the nation’s high black unemployment rate (nearly double that of whites) and the failure of the president’s communications team to get the word out about the things he’s doing to better the lives of disadvantaged blacks for fear of a white backlash.

Black rage over Bachmann’s assertion in January that the founding fathers ended slavery — which they didn’t — would help get disillusioned blacks back into the Obama fold and to the polls on Election Day.
So, too, would another Bachmann faux pas.
In a mindless attempt to win over right-wingers in Iowa, Bachmann signed a Marriage Vow document that suggested black children were better off when they were born into slavery “and raised by (a) mother and father in a two-parent household” than are black children who were born after Obama took office.

Both the premise and accuracy of that claim were debunked in Wilma Dunaway’s 2005 book, The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. But even if there were more intact black families during slavery, it takes a callous disregard for the brutalities of that “peculiar institution” to believe that life for blacks was somehow better then than it is now.

While all of this has made Bachmann a Tea Party favorite, it won’t win her enough support beyond the trench lines of that right-wing clique — surely not enough to defeat Obama. And that’s got to have Democrats rooting for her to become the GOP standard-bearer.

How Obama can turn around falling poll numbers: tout education record

2011-08-08T22:08:00.004-04:00

PHILADELPHIA — Russlynn Ali came here to the National Association of Black Journalists convention to talk about the black-white achievement gap in public education, but what she had to say could also help close the achievement gap that worries Barack Obama's key supporters.

Ali has spent most of her professional life on the front line of the struggle to improve educational opportunities — and results — for poor and minority schoolchildren. As the top civil rights enforcer in the U.S. Department of Education, she's the cop on the block when it comes to making sure state and local school districts don't violate anti-discrimination rules.

In the little more than two years she has been on this beat— once patrolled less effectively by Clarence Thomas — Ali has amassed an impressive record.

"We have launched more investigations than ever before. Much broader, bigger investigations" into whether school officials are unfairly disciplining black kids and shoving them "into the cradle-to-prison pipeline instead of the cradle-to-career pipeline," she told me.

By that she means the Obama administration is robustly challenging school systems that deny black and Hispanic high school students access to science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses that would improve their chances for college admission. It's also questioning disciplinary practices that treat black students more harshly than whites for similar offenses.

In fact, the Obama administration has launched more than 70 Title VI investigations (for race, color and national origin discrimination) in a little over two years, according to Education Department data. That's more than the Bush administration did in the prior eight years. And while it has stepped up probes in this long-neglected area, the department has not wavered in its pursuit of sex and disability discrimination cases, Ali said.

This impressive performance is something Obama's communications team has failed to trumpet. The biggest hurdle for the president to overcome en route to a second term isn't the Tea Party-led Republican scorched-earth attempt to unseat him; it's the erosion of support for him among members of his political base.

Obama won the presidency with the overwhelming support of black voters (95%), the strong backing of Hispanics (67%) and a sizable minority of whites (43%). Surprisingly, despite the withering right-wing attacks on his policies, his religion and birthright, Obama's approval rating among whites is just 4 percentage points lower than the white vote he received in 2008.

But the falloff of support among blacks and Hispanics has been much steeper. Obama's approval rating among blacks (85%) and Hispanics (54%) is significantly lower than the vote percentage these groups gave him in 2008. Much of this decline, I suspect, is due to the failure of his administration to tout the good things it has done for them for fear of a white backlash.

This silence — especially in the area of education, where the potential results can improve the lives of millions of blacks and Hispanics — has produced a loss of confidence among this vital core of Obama's political base.

Ali's aggressive efforts to close the achievement gap and combat discrimination in the nation's schools ought to help reverse this downslide. But that won't happen if the president's image managers don't get over their fear of touting the good things his administration is doing for this long-suffering, educationally disadvantaged part of the coalition that put him in office.

Republicans' disrepect for Obama is palpable

2011-08-01T22:42:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

What should be clear to the whole world watching the debt-ceiling battle is that the Republicans are far more intent on taking the president's scalp than balancing the nation's books. They had ample opportunities to do the latter during the eight years of George W. Bush.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader with the greatest cunning and sharpest knife, signaled his party's true purpose last year when he proclaimed: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." It was not to undo the health care legislation Obama signed into law, or to block another debt limit increase. Even then, two years out from the next presidential election, the Alabama-born senator said the top goal of GOP lawmakers to oust Obama.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., has been especially relentless in the debt-ceiling fight. He attacked this first African-American president with a palpable disrespect not only for Obama personally, but also for his esteemed office.

Following what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Cantor's "childish" display during a meeting with Obama, the House majority leader complained that the president had cut short the meeting and stormed out of the room. "He shoved back and said, 'I'll see you tomorrow' and walked out," Cantor snidely told reporters— as though the president needs his permission to end a White House gathering.

That encounter might have reminded Obama of the open letter Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave and abolitionist who became one of this nation's first black diplomats, wrote to his slave master.
It would be "a privilege" to show you "how mankind ought to treat each other," Douglass told the man who had badly mistreated him. "I am your fellow man, but not your slave."

Douglass' words might have prompted another reflection when, during a critical point in the debt negotiations, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, contemptuously waited more than half a day to return a call from the president.

Or, Obama might have heard Douglass' words ringing in his ears after acting House Speaker Steve LaTourette of Ohio had to warn his GOP colleagues during a heated debt-reduction debate on the House floor to stop making disparaging remarks about Obama.

This total lack of respect is downright contemptible — if not unpatriotic. Such contempt, I'm convinced, is rooted in something other than political differences. In their actions you might not see the overt actions of 1960s racist southern governors Ross Barnett or George Wallace. But the presence of Jim Crow, Jr. — a more subtle form of racism — is there.

Douglass viewed such behavior as "an outrage upon the soul." In this present case it is the soul of our nation, which still struggles to get beyond the awful ripple effects of its haunting history of human bondage.

McConnell, Boehner and Cantor are the vanguard of a political force of a dying era — one that looks more like the nation's past than its future.

Obama is the second president of this millennium, but the first chief executive of the America of new possibilities — a multiracial, multicultural nation whose emergence the old order is working mightily to forestall in its desperate attack on his presidency.

To fix Washington's troubled schools, try combat pay

2011-07-20T18:36:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

What would think if the person tapped to replace Afghan war commander Gen. David Petraeus announced he was firing scores of officers, in a part of that bedeviled country where the fighting is fiercest, for poor performance on the battlefield?

How would you react if he said he’s giving medals to officers in another part of Afghanistan , where the fighting was never as intense, for doing an outstanding job – but rejects the idea of sending some of these medal winners to replace those who were sacked?

What would you say if I told you such a scenario is actually unfolding in Washington , D.C. , not Kandahar and Kabul ?

A few days ago, the school system in the nation’s capital announced it fired 206 teachers for poor performance, using an evaluation system that had the biggest negative impact on teachers at schools in the city’s most poverty-ridden neighborhoods.

And disproportionately those teachers who were recognized for being “highly effective” in the classroom were in schools located in the toniest sections of Washington , according to The Washington Post.

While “good” teachers are allowed to transfer out of low-performing schools in poor neighborhoods, The Post reported back in November, reassignment to those troubled schools in the past has been used as a way of punishing some teachers.

Maybe that’s true; maybe not. What’s certain is this: the fight in Washington – and other urban school districts – to educate children needs our best field commanders in those places where the problems are most intense.

But Kaya Henderson, the head of Washington ’s school system said she won’t reassign top performing teachers against their will to troubled schools.

The battle plan Henderson is using to reward some teachers and punish others was written by Michelle Rhee, the controversial educator who preceded her in the job. Rhee, the darling of a long list of right-wing Republican governors and education reformers who believe the increases in student performance on standardized tests during her stormy tenure at the helm of Washington ’s schools is proof that her tactics work.

Far less attention has been paid to a USA TODAY investigation of the rise of those test scores on Rhee’s watch. More than half of Washington ’s schools had an abnormally high “erasure rate “resulting in answers being changed from wrong to right. “The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance,” statisticians told this paper.

Instead of clinging to Rhee’s questionable strategy – and results – Henderson needs a better war plan.

She should reward good teachers who agree to work in low-performing schools in much the same way the military gives combat pay to soldiers who serve in war zones. While bonuses up to $25,000 are paid to “highly effective” teachers, too few of them teach in the neediest schools.

The incentive pay should go to those who are willing to make the biggest sacrifice – to good teachers who are willing to brave the toughest assignments. Teachers who excel in schools where the job of educating students is not negatively affected by external factors are simply earning their pay.

Those good teachers who take on the job of educating young people in neighborhoods where the body count of underachieving students rivals that of Afghanistan ’s killing fields deserve combat pay.

As their commander, Henderson has to find a way to get her best troops into the fight, or risk defeat in her part of a war America can ill afford to lose.

On South Sudan feuding sides got it right, maybe?

2011-07-11T14:23:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Finally, Republicans, Democrats and the religious right have come together and gotten something done. Now the question is whether they will work together to keep the breakthrough they helped create from unraveling.

What I’m talking about is not the warring in Washington, D.C. over raising this nation’s debt limit, but rather the peace that has a chance of emerging from the creation of a new nation on the African continent.

South Sudan officially joined the ranks of the world’s nation states on July 9 with an independence ceremony in Juba, the capital of that war-torn, poverty-ridden country that was forged from the southern tip of Sudan, Africa’s largest nation. It was 50 years in the making and is the direct result of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement the Bush administration helped broker in 2005 – and the Obama administration’s determination to see that the six-year power sharing deal spelled out in that agreement resulted in South Sudan’s independence.

South Sudan also has Franklin Graham to thank for its emergence as the world’s 196th nation. The right-wing clergyman’s has played an important role in supporting the secession of South Sudan, whose 8 million people are mostly Christians, from Muslim-dominated Sudan.

“We must stand with South Sudan as this infant democratic nation struggles to secure its own,” Graham, whose organization, Samaritan’s Purse, has built schools and churches in South Sudan, wrote for FoxNews.com shortly before leaving to attend the independence ceremony.

He’s right. But if those who clamored for South Sudan’s creation don’t put as much effort into nurturing this new nation as they did in creating it, the world’s newest country may turn out to be stillborn.

Already, along the border that divides the two Sudans the half-century civil war, which took the lives of millions of people, continues to fester. Even as Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir attended the independence ceremony of his nation’s breakaway region and declared support for the new state, rebel forces believed to be backed by his government have sparked violence. More than 2,300 people have been killed in that region this year.

“Is the U.S. going to stay engaged? Is the West going to stay engaged? If they don’t, I think they have created the potential for two failed states,” Mel Foote, president of the Constituency for Africa, a Washington-based organization that lobbies for the empowerment of African nations and their people.

Foote’s pessimism comes, in part, from the unfinished business of deciding how revenue from the region’s oil will be divided. Most of the oil fields are in South Sudan, which is landlocked. The pipelines used to export it run to a Sudanese port on the Red Sea. Also, the border that separates the two countries still has not been finalized and some oil fields lie within contested areas.

The economic survival of both states could depend on a peaceful – and equitable – resolution of this issue. But to play a meaningful role in the outcome of these disputes, the Obama administration will need the support of congressional Republicans whose obsession with spending cuts may undermine the president’s ability to give the fledgling nation the economic support it needs to weather any struggles that come from it tug-of-war with Sudan over oil revenues.

And Graham, the evangelical preacher, who earlier this year scurrilously charged that the Obama administration has been infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, may have to swallow hard and join with the president in trying to convince reluctant Republicans the U.S. has to help South Sudan survive its infancy.

Jacksonville's first black mayor plows road to new political heights

2011-06-28T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Alvin Brown, the Democrat who will be sworn in as mayor of this longtime Republican stronghold on July 1, is a political enigma.

He beat the Tea Party’s candidate in the runoff for the job with the help of more than $500,000 from Florida’s Democratic Party and $300,000 that was raised for him by Peter Rummell, one of this area’s most prominent Republicans fund-raisers.

Brown brandishes his faith like a card-carrying member of the religious right. He wouldn’t move into the mayor’s office he won last month until his pastor went there to bless it and pray with him. But on the issue of crime — which he wants to fight with education and after-school programs — he sounds more liberal than conservative.

Brown shuns tax increases like a disciple of Grover Norquist, but says he is committed to “closing the poverty gap and the opportunity gap” even as he works to balance Jacksonville’s budget that’s due two weeks after he takes office.

“We can’t cut our way out of” the city’s budget woes, Brown told leaders of non-profit organizations shortly before the mayor’s office was blessed by the Rev. Henry T. Rhim. “We’ve got to grow our way out of it” with new jobs and the economic activity they spawn, he said.

In a political world in which the divide between Republicans and Democrats has turned many politicians into stuttering, ideological parrots, Brown is neither fish nor fowl. He’s a new breed of elected official — one who has improved upon the multiracial, multiethnic coalition that hoisted Barack Obama into the White House three years ago.

Obama, the nation’s first black president, built his coalition with talk of change that energized his liberal base and won him a strong following among independent voters — but alienated congressional Republicans. Brown, 48, the first black mayor of Florida’s largest city, won election with a surprising fusion of Democrats and Republicans.

He won the support of influential Republicans like Rummell and Adam Herbert, who Brown called Florida’s Colin Powell. And while he claims race never surfaced as an issue in the mayoral campaign, Brown — who was a finalist for the NAACP’s top job in 2008 — said he’s never been accused of not being “black enough” because he has “always stayed connected to the black community.”

Winning the support of a sizeable block of white voters while holding onto a black base is a difficult political balancing act. But getting leading Republicans to publicly champion such a campaign is something even Alvin Toffler, who authored Future Shock — the 1970 book that envisioned the societal changes the new millennium would bring — never contemplated.

It may not be long before we know if Brown can take full advantage of the groundbreaking political alliance he’s forged. He’s appointed Audrey Moran, one of the Republican candidates in the mayoral race, and Democratic state Sen. Tony Hill, as co-chairs of his transition team.

“My campaign wasn’t about Democrats or Republicans. And it wasn’t about me. I made it about Jacksonville: one vision, one city, opportunity for all,” he told me, using words that were the mantra of his successful campaign to become mayor of the nation’s 11th largest city.

If Brown is able to make what he’s trying to do work; if he succeeds in creating a new governing alliance in a city that was once deeply wedded to partisan firefights, he will have plowed a road that can transform American politics — and carry him to an even loftier political height.

Obama: Don't let Afghanistan become your Waterloo

2011-06-22T20:26:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Afghanistan isn’t Barack Obama’s war, but it might well be his Waterloo.

While campaigning for the presidency as a candidate of change, then-Sen. Obama’s position on the Afghan war was closer to that of the neocons than the progressive Democrats who hoisted him into the White House.

But that war was launched by George W. Bush, and there was always a belief among Obama’s supporters that he wouldn’t succumb to the jingoism that made his predecessor see war as the first, instead of the last, resort in Afghanistan and Iraq. Since taking office, Obama has dramatically increased the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan and spent billions of dollars rebuilding that war-ravaged country and Iraq, while this nation's economy teeters on the brink of a double-dip recession.

If you think that’s left-wing heresy on my part, consider this: A few days ago, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa backed a call from a group of mayors for Congress to redirect the billions of dollars being spent every week on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to domestic priorities. “That we would build bridges in Baghdad and Kandahar and not Baltimore and Kansas City absolutely boggles the mind,” Villaraigosa, the new head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, said at a news conference during that organization’s annual meeting.

In 2008, Villaraigosa rallied Hispanics in support of Obama’s presidential campaign. Now, he is asking Congress to cut off the flow of dollars to wars Obama has made a higher priority than helping the nation’s ailing cities.

GOP sets election trap

It is among congressional Republicans that Obama’s war policies have the most support. But in what appears to be a political pincer move, several GOP presidential candidates expressed doubt about those wars and Obama’s leadership of them during the first Republican Party presidential debate last week.

Obama shouldn’t let Republicans use this political trap to defeat his re-election bid. Instead, the president ought to withdraw to a more defensible position.

On Iraq, Obama should say we went there to uncover weapons of mass destruction and didn’t find any. Mistakenly, we stayed around and got drawn into a bloody civil war. It’s now time for the U.S. to withdraw completely from that still-simmering conflict.

On Afghanistan, he should remind Americans that we went there to get the people who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks and have pretty much done that. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of that awful crime, is in a U.S. military jail cell awaiting trial; and Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader, was killed during a raid of his Pakistani hideout by Navy SEALs. With fewer than 100 al-Qaida members remaining in Afghanistan, according to the CIA, Obama should declare victory there and bring home all U.S. servicemen and women. American drones and the threat of international isolation should be used to deal with any residual force of enemies that surface there.

This won’t make the neocons and other members of the GOP pincer happy, but it will give Obama and this nation’s mayors a chance to reap a “peace dividend” from the end of our central role in two wars. It will also put Obama on the right side of history, and in a good position to win re-election.

New York City's schools need a revolution, not just a revolt

2011-06-13T22:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

The NAACP is being attacked by parents of New York City schoolchildren who are angered by the civil rights group’s support of a lawsuit that seeks to keep 20 charter schools out of buildings that already are occupied by traditional public schools.

The suit also attempts to block the closing of some of the city’s underperforming public schools, the kind of schools that make many parents clamor for a way out. In the 20 years since Minnesota enacted the first law allowing this hybrid approach to public education, charter schools have become an increasingly popular escape hatch, especially for black students.

While blacks are 30% of New York City’s 1 million public school children, they are 60% of the youngsters enrolled in the Big Apple’s 125 charter schools. So, black parents of charter school students in the city think the NAACP’s support of the lawsuit, which was filed last month by the United Federation of Teachers, amounts to an act of racial treason.

But it’s not. It is an act of revolution. In his 1957 book, The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi explored the injustices of colonization and concluded that it would take a revolution, not just a revolt to end this form of human oppression.
Charter schools in New York City — and elsewhere in this country — are a revolt against public school systems that fail to properly educate black and Hispanic schoolchildren. While revolts bring about reforms, Memmi explained, revolution is needed to wipe out a system of oppression.

For far too many black children, public school systems oppress more than they educate. They place these students in underachieving, poorly funded schools. And when parents demand better, what they get is steam control — a way to vent their anger, not fix the problem.

In New York City, charter schools — where only 4% of its 1 million public school students can get in — are steam control. They keep the revolt over poor performing public schools from becoming a revolution by distracting parents with the slender reed of hope of getting their child into a better school.

In New York, the choice of who gets in the city’s charter schools is made by lottery — which is to say the luck of the draw. Notwithstanding the indignity of the selection process, there are more than 50,000 students on the waiting list to get into a charter school.

In suing city school officials, the NAACP has a better idea. It wants New York to improve all of its schools, especially its most troubled ones. That’s a revolutionary idea that will require the state of New York to take the lead in meeting its constitutional responsibility to provide “a system of free common schools, wherein all the children of this state may be educated.”

The civil rights organization doesn’t want an escape hatch for 4% of New York City’s schoolchildren; it wants a high-quality education for all of them. It rightfully opposes a two-tiered system of public education that pits charter schools against traditional schools and demands instead better schools for all the children in New York’s school system.

What the NAACP wants is a revolutionary change, not the incrementalism — and misdirections — that offer black students the kind of meager educational gains that were a staple of the colonialism Memmi said colonized people the world over must struggle against.

In South Africa, Michelle Obama can teach young Americans an important lesson

2011-06-07T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

First lady Michelle Obama is going to South Africa and Botswana later this month to tout the value of education and promote her worldwide campaign to encourage young people to assume leadership roles in their countries.

This is the kind of good work that Obama, who overcame the perils of poverty to earn degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School , is well suited to do. She knows better than a lot of diplomats what it takes to scale the hurdles too many young people face.

This trip is an opportunity for Obama “to teach her daughters about how we survive or fail based upon our global connectedness,” Charles Ogletree, a Harvard Law School professor who taught both President Obama and his wife, told me.

It’s an opportunity to do that and much more.

A few days before Obama is scheduled to arrive in South Africa, the most important stop of her six-day trip, that country will observe the 35th anniversary of what was arguably the most important moment in the struggle to end apartheid — the brutal system of white-minority rule that lasted more than four decades.

What happened in South Africa on June 16, 1976, is now acknowledged there with a national holiday that is innocently called “Youth Day.” It was then that a spasm of violence by government forces erupted, taking the lives of more than 700 black South Africans, most of them schoolchildren.

These killings in Soweto, a black township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, were sparked by the government’s decision to force black children to learn Afrikaans, the language of the Dutch descendants who were oppressing the country’s black majority.

The students regarded English as a passport to higher education and the world beyond South Africa, investigative reporter Les Payne wrote in an 11-part series that Newsday published in 1977. They learned the value of education through the depravation they were forced to endure; outdated textbooks, unqualified teachers and inferior school facilities taught them that lesson.

And it was out of a determination to get a better education that many young black schoolchildren joined a protest whose violent suppression fueled an anti-apartheid movement that eventually sapped the life out of South Africa’s pigmentocracy.

The story of the willingness of these students to risk their lives for a better education — and their courage to challenge the armed goons South Africa’s apartheid-era government sent into Soweto to silence them — is a history lesson every generation of American children ought to be taught. It’s also something Obama should acknowledge during her visit.

Sadly, Payne’s groundbreaking stories on the Soweto student uprising didn’t get the recognition they deserve. In 1976, he spent nearly three months in that township. He eluded his government handlers to interview student leaders who were in hiding — and went from funeral homes, to churches, to gatherings of grieving families to document a level of carnage much higher than what the South African government claimed.

For his efforts, Payne was the first choice of the judges to receive the 1978 Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting. But in a controversial act, that decision was overridden by the Pulitzer’s ruling body and given to the judges’ fourth choice.

Obama would do much to inspire young people here and abroad by acknowledging the heroic sacrifices South African students made in 1976 — and the great effort Payne made to tell the world their story.

U.S. Cuba policy is stuck in the past

2011-05-31T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

HAVANA — Hillary Clinton should have dinner with Jony Jones. I did.

Shortly before I arrived in Cuba’s capital, the U.S. secretary of State dined with six former Latin American presidents in Washington to discuss what it will take to fix what’s broken in America’s relations with its hemispheric neighbors. For half a century, a major stumbling block to this repair job has been the United States’ obsessive efforts to topple Cuba’s communist government.

Soon after I got here, I had dinner with Jones at La Moneda Cubana, a new, privately owned restaurant in the old colonial section of this city. She’s a 38-year-old biomedical researcher whose father fled Cuba during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. The restaurant is an inviting symbol of Cuba’s movement away from a rigid Communist economy. Both are part of a Cuba that the Obama administration doesn’t seem to understand.

Our meal came at the end of a day in which I’d spent several hours trolling the impoverished Central Havana neighborhood of La California. The place is made up of 32 apartments that have been carved out of an old rectangular-shaped building with an ignominious past. Once slave quarters, it was later a military barracks for the regime that Fidel Castro ousted from power in 1959.

It is from places like La California that the foot soldiers of rebellions that overthrow governments usually come. But like Jones, the people who live there say they only want the kind of change Barack Obama promised American voters in 2008, not the regime change his administration has in mind for Cuba.

“It’s complicated,” Jones said of what Cubans crave for themselves — and their country. “There is a dichotomy between the sense of belonging to Cuba and with being personally satisfied. Maybe all Cubans aren’t revolutionaries, but most Cubans love Cuba,” she told me.

Back in April, Cuba’s Communist Party Congress announced a series of economic reforms that permit self-employment in 178 areas of work, including restaurants, carpentry, barbers, hair dressers, electricians and taxi drivers. In 83 of these jobs people will be allowed to create small businesses and hire workers. Under the announced reforms, Cubans also will be able to buy and sell cars and homes for the first time in half a century.

For most Cubans, this is a long-awaited movement in the right direction. But instead of applauding it, the U.S. State Department criticized Cuba for not making improvements in other areas. “We remain focused on getting Cuban people more access to freedom of information and other aspects,” spokesman Mark Toner deadpanned. That’s another way of saying, when it comes to Cuba, the State Department remains stuck in the past.

In conversations with Cuban government officials, members of this country’s emerging middle class and people on the lowest rungs of its economic ladder, I got repeated acknowledgements of the failures of the economic system and a determination to overcome the country’s most daunting problems.

“In Cuba we have to hope that things are going to change, but nobody knows how,” Jones admitted.

Still, like so many others here, she welcomes the changes that have occurred, even if they don’t go far enough. The Obama administration can help increase the pace of change in Cuba by moving aggressively to end the embargo.

What’s clear is that there is no widespread support here for a “Cuba spring” — no looming upheaval like those that toppled a government in Egypt and threatens to do the same in Libya.

If Hillary Clinton doesn’t believe me, she should come here and have dinner with Jony Jones.

Obama should give tough love response to Netanyahu's arrogant lecture

2011-05-24T16:34:00.005-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Putting aside Mark Twain’s sage observation that “no nation…occupies a foot of land that was not stolen,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to let a return to his country’s 1967 borders become the basis for a peace settlement is foolhardy for another reason.

It sees the future as the past.

Netanyahu’s objection is stubbornly rooted in a belief that the Jewish state and its neighbors will be forever in a perpetual state of war. That myopia is a prescription for continued stalemate, and more conflict, not a meaningful peace agreement.

This intransigence is exactly what Netanyahu signaled when he arrogantly lectured Barack Obama before television cameras during his recent White House visit. The president’s call for a return to the borders that existed before the 1967 Six-Day War, as a starting point for a renewed effort to broker a peace deal between Israel and its Arab neighbors, is unacceptable for two reasons, the Israeli leader said.

One is because Israel’s old borders are “indefensible,” and the other is that it “doesn’t take into account…demographic changes that have taken place over the last 44 years,” Netanyahu said.

But, as Obama surely understands, peace is the best protector of any country’s borders, not some sort of geographic Maginot Line – which the katyusha rocket and Arab sappers have shown to be no less impregnable than the physical one France built to stave off World War II.

The other reason for Netanyahu’s unyielding position on Obama’s peace proposal is Israel’s longstanding policy of building Jewish settlements – in violation of United Nations resolutions – in territory it seized during the 1967 war. Those old borders, Netanyahu told Obama, “were the boundaries of repeated war.” These settlements are a human buffer that Netanyahu thinks will ensure Israel’s survival – and the real flashpoint of any effort to end the quasi war that now exists.

“The Obama administration has been encouraging Netanyahu to give them something to work with” in its effort to broker a peace deal. Netanyahu gave them nothing,” Daniel Levy, a senior research fellow and co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation, told me.

The president’s call for peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians based “on the 1967 (borders) with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both sides is a laudable attempt to break new ground that takes Netanyahu “out of his comfort zone,” said Levy, who was a special adviser to former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.

That’s because Netanyahu is a war leader for whom peace is an armistice, not a quest for harmony.

To allow Netanyahu’s uncompromising position to prevail is to permit the egrat to command the rhinoceros. It is a longstanding American policy, as old as the Jewish state itself, that Israel has a right to exist. Obama has reaffirmed this commitment to Israel’s survival. “Our commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable,” Obama said in a major Middle East foreign policy speech at the State Department shortly before Netanyahu arrived in the United State.

But Israel undermines this commitment with its settlement program and its refusal to even contemplate a peace agreement that recognizes the pre-1967 territorial borders of Palestine as the beginning point of the search for a lasting peace.

On this issue Netanyahu has dug in his heels. Obama must respond with a tough love insistence that the Israeli prime minister ensures Israel’s future by giving peace a chance now.

Sophia Nelson's book a NeNe Leakes antidote

2011-05-16T21:59:00.004-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

I really hope what Sophia Nelson is saying will muffle the voice of NeNe Leakes, whose growing presence on TV surreality shows sullies the image of black women.

A former stripper, Leakes is a hulking, loud-mouth whose profanity-laced outburst on a recent episode of NBC’s The Celebrity Apprentice was the most APPALLING of her bad-girl acts on a genre of TV shows that falsely claims to reflect real life. She’s also a mainstay of Bravo’s Real Housewives of Atlanta, where she regularly behaves like an overgrown schoolyard bully on estrogen.

Nelson is the author of a new book that seeks to debunk the image of accomplished black women as angry and unfulfilled —a stereotype that Leakes feeds. While Nelson doesn’t say her book is the antidote to Leakes and the proliferation of other dysfunctional, angry black women who populate TV surreality shows built around black female characters like her, I hope it is.

In a recent Celebrity Apprentice episode, Leakes, who rose to TV fame as a well-to-do Atlanta housewife in the Bravo show, confronted fellow black contestant Star Jones with an expletive-laced tirade that had to make a lot of television viewers cringe.

“You talked a good game. Now bring your street game, because that what I’m bringing,” Leakes said to Jones in a ghetto bravado that she flashes just about every time a camera focuses in on her. And usually for no good reason, Leakes threatens to pounce upon someone.

In her book, Black Woman Redefines: Dispelling Myths and Discovering Fulfillment in the Age of Michelle Obama, Nelson holds out the nation’s first lady as someone who is dispelling the stereotypes about black women. “You humanize us. You soften us … You make us approachable, feminine, sexy, warm, compassionate, smart, affirmed, accomplished, and full-filled all at once,” she writes about Obama in the book’s prologue.

Her point, of course, is not that the wife of this nation’s first black president possesses positive qualities that few other black women have. It is, instead, that her husband’s elevation in the White House has put a spotlight on Michelle Obama — who is a high-profile, counterbalancing image to people like NeNe Leakes.

More than anything else, Nelson’s work is a how-to book, a feel-good tome that offers black women prescriptions for personal and professional success that empower them without tearing down someone else. For her, the president’s wife is the most obvious and inspirational example of a successful black woman who refuses to be negatively defined by others. But, as Nelson points out, she is by no means the only one.

Black women have long struggled to define themselves in ways that others would understand and respect. From Sojourner Truth’s 1851 plaintive “Ain’t I a Woman” speech, to Zora Neale Hurston’s reporting on the 1953 murder trial of Ruby McCollum (a married black woman who killed a white doctor that fathered one of her children), to the Agriculture Department’s controversial dismissal of Shirley Sherrod, this fight has taken many forms.

Nelson’s book is another skirmish in this battle — one she hopes will bring about a transformative victory. She wants it to help black women be defined by something more representative of them than NeNe Leakes. Because as Hurston — the most prolific black female writer of the first half of the 20th century — once said, “All of my skinfolk ain’t my kinfolk.”

Donald Trump is a chicken hawk

2011-05-07T18:01:00.004-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Remember that profanity-laced speech Donald Trump gave in Las Vegas not so long ago?

I'm talking about the one in which he referred to Obama as a weak, pathetic leader. In that speech "The Donald" talked tough about how, if he were president, he wouldn't let oil producing nations jack up the price of gas. "You’re not going to raise that fucking price," is what Trump told his audience he'd tell them.

Remember that?

Trump got a standing ovation from his audience – and an awful lot of media coverage of that speech in which he portrayed himself as a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners badass dude who would bring a new toughness to the White House.

Well it turns out that when he had an opportunity to REALLY fight for this country; Trump didn't have the guts to do it.

During the Vietnam War Trump did what a lot of rich boys did back then: he got one deferment after another to duck military service. Between 1964 and 1972, when more than a million men were drafted into the U.S. military, Trump got six deferments to keep him out of the nation's Armed Services, according to TheSmokingGun.com.

But don't expect Trump to own up to ducking military service. When asked why he wasn't drafted during the Vietnam War, "The Donald," according to CBS, never admitted getting all those deferments. Instead, he said lamely: "Well, I actually got lucky. I had a very, very high number, and they never got up to that number."

That makes Donald Trump a chicken hawk; someone who talks tough, but lacks the courage to serve his country in time of war.

Trump is a shameless huckster and racist

2011-05-03T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Sadly, neither the release of Barack Obama’s original birth certificate, nor the verbal beat down the president dealt Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday will likely end the real estate mogul’s personal attacks on the president’s qualifications.

That’s because Trump is more of a ghostly cross between P.T. Barnum and James K. Vardaman, than a serious contender for this nation’s highest office. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” is the credo Barnum is widely believed to have given the world. Vardaman, the firebrand former Mississippi governor and senator — and unabashed racist — offered that blacks were unfit even to eat in the White House.

When Booker T. Washington dined with Theodore Roosevelt in 1901 as the first black ever so entertained in the presidential residence, Vardaman was not so guarded as Trump in showing his contempt for blacks. The White House, he said, was “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.”

Strapping an elephant to a plow, Barnum had the pachyderm till the soil of his Bridgeport , Conn. , farm every time a train passed by. The 1851 trick was employed to stoke interest in his American Museum , the flagship of Barnum’s entertainment empire. The stunt indeed got the American showman worldwide attention.

In his shameless shill, “The Donald” has hitched himself to the GOP elephant by holding out the possibility that he might seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. It’s far more likely that, instead of the White House, Trump is aiming at an even larger audience for his highly rated NBC show, The Apprentice.

When his “birther’s” challenge withered after the president proved his citizenship by release of his long-form birth certificate, Trump pivoted to question Obama’s academic acumen. The alleged billionaire seems determined to prove H.L. Mencken right when he said “enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed.”

When a reporter asked Trump if he is now willing to accept that the president “is who he says he is,” the reigning political huckster demanded that Obama produce his college transcript.

“I don’t know why he doesn’t release his (college) records,” Trump deadpanned. “The word is that he wasn’t a good student and he ended up getting into Columbia and Harvard. And I’d like to know how does he get into Harvard; how does he get into Columbia , if he wasn’t a good student,” Trump said, putting himself at the head of another scurrilous assault on this nation’s first black president.

As Vardaman was unconvinced that blacks were “fit to perform the supreme function of citizenship,” Trump now seems just as unconvinced that the first African-American president is qualified to occupy the White House.

If his factless assault on Obama’s citizenship isn’t proof enough of Trump’s racism then his attempt to brand the president as the undeserving beneficiary of affirmative action in higher education –— an old saw of modern-day bigots –— should remove all doubt.

Trump hopes to extend his time on the nation’s political stage by pandering to opponents of affirmative action — and by convincing the bigots he courts that his rolling personal attacks on Obama just might uncover something that would render him unworthy of re-election.

Trump, too, apparently believes there’s a sucker born every minute.

I like Barack Obama, but...

2011-04-26T06:00:00.003-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

This is not an easy column for me to write.

It’s never easy to tell someone you like that they’re a disappointment. I like Barack Obama. I liked him the first time we met back in 2006 when I took a small group of journalism students to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with the then-freshly-minted U.S. senator.

I liked Obama even more when an aide to his presidential campaign invited me to a July 2007 speech he gave laying out his commitment to improve life for people in urban America – which for most politicians is a euphemism for black America.

“Today’s economy has made it easier to fall into poverty…Every American is vulnerable to the insecurities and anxieties of this new economy. And that’s why the single most important focus of my economic agenda as President will be to pursue policies that create jobs and make work pay,” Obama said that day to his mostly-black audience.

At that time the nation’s overall unemployment rate was 4.7 percent. Whites had a jobless rate of 4.2 percent while the black unemployment rate stood at 8.1 percent. Today the black rate is 15.5 percent, nearly double that of white job seekers.

I don’t blame Obama for the economic conditions that are responsible for so many blacks being out of work. The seeds of this problem were planted long before he moved into the Oval Office. But I do fault him for not doing more to fix this problem.

The poor in urban America, he said in that 2007 speech, “suffer most from a politics that has been tipped in favor of those with the most money, and influence, and power.” And then he asked rhetorically: “How can a country like this allow it.” To which he answered: “We can’t.”

But so far, under his leadership, it has allowed it.

Finding work for the jobless is the best anti-poverty program this nation can mount. But while the Obama administration spends $2 billion dollars a week fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan; and spent $608 million during the first 17 days of its involvement in Libya’s civil war; it can muster neither the money nor the will to combat black unemployment.

The president’s failure to fight this problem as vigorously as he wages war abroad gets a pass from black leaders, many of whom complain to me privately, but remain silent in public. They’re reluctant to challenge Obama the way Martin Luther King, Jr., did Lyndon Johnson in 1967.

America “would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor” so long as it was involved in the Vietnam War, King said in a speech in which he called for an end to that bloody conflict.

Last month, as the Obama administration applauded the creation of 216,000 new jobs and a slight dip in the overall unemployment rate, the gap between whites and blacks without work widened as the black unemployment rate inched up.

Back in December 2009, when the black unemployment rate was just 64 percent higher than the national rate, Obama told USA TODAY he didn’t think he needed to do anything special to close this gap. Now that it is 75 percent higher, black leaders should demand that the president target as much attention on this problem as he has on ending the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and in pushing for immigration reform.

They should demand an end to the wasteful spending on wars that can’t be won and use of the resulting peace dividend to finance the urban policy Obama once promised would be the focus of his economic agenda.

Civil War anniversary evokes personal journey down memory lane

2011-04-19T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

For much of the next four years this nation will relive the Civil War. It was 150 years ago this month that rebel gunners opened fire on U.S. military garrison at Ft. Sumter, S.C. That brief fight launched America’s bloodiest conflict, a war that raged from 1861 to 1865.

Historians usually talk about the Civil War in broad terms. They view it as a fight that pitted this country’s industrial North against its agrarian South; a clash between free and slave-holding states, or a war fought by the proponents of a strong central government and the advocates of states’ rights.

I see it in a far more personal way.

While I’m convinced the underlying cause of the Civil War was the South’s determination to perpetuate slavery, in a narrower sense it is, for me, a family matter in which the central figure was my grandfather, Trevillian Wickham. He didn’t fight in the Civil War, though nearly 200,000 blacks served in the Union Army. He wasn’t born until 1890.

The son of a slave named Casius Wickham, who was born in 1847 in Hanover County, Va., my grandfather is my most enduring history lesson on the Civil War. He was named Trevillian after a train depot not far from the plantation where his father once lived. Called Trevilian Station (the spelling was changed to Trevilians or Trevillians after the war); it was the scene of a major cavalry battle in 1864.

Among the Union generals in that fight was George Armstrong Custer, whose Michigan cavalry unit clashed with Virginia cavalry troops commanded by Gen. Williams Carter Wickham. The Confederate general was the patriarch of Hickory Hill, a 3,200 acre planation in Hanover County, a short distance from the Louisa County battleground. At its peak the plantation had 275 slaves. One of them is believed to have been my great-grandfather, Casius Wickham.

Knowing all of this connects me – and my family – to the Civil War in ways that are far more personal than the view many historians have of this great conflict. It also helps me make sense of my grandfather’s fascination with Camden Station, a railroad hub in Baltimore where he worked as a porter when I was a young boy.

Once, when my grandfather took me there I heard him and some of the other black men who worked menial jobs at the station talk about how “Abraham Lincoln used to come through here.” It was for them a matter of great pride that the president who set off a series of events that ended slavery had been in the same space that they occupied.

While my grandfather talked about how his work at Camden Station connected him to Lincoln, he never mentioned his linkage to the Wickhams of Hanover County, or his connection to the Battle of Trevilian Station, which Union troops lost. And he never said anything to me about another chapter of the Baltimore station’s history that unfolded shortly after Lincoln was sworn in as president.

On April 19, 1861 a mob of Southern sympathizers attacked federal troops marching through Baltimore. They were on their way to Camden Station to take a train to Washington, D.C. to reinforce the capital. The first casualty of this clash – and the Civil War – was Nicholas Biddle, a black man who was the personal aide of the unit’s commander.

Maybe my grandfather didn’t know this bit of history. But his connection to the place where it happened – and my family’s connection to one of the South’s wartime commanders – makes the memory of the Civil War more of a personal reflection than a sterile journey down history’s lane.

Donald Trump, not President Obama's birth certificate, is a scam

2011-04-12T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Donald Trump isn’t a birther, he’s just pimping off of them.

Recently the surreality show host and billionaire blowhard has been making the rounds of TV talk shows parroting the long ago debunked assertion that President Obama was born in the African nation of Kenya — not the state of Hawaii.

If true, which it isn’t, that would make Obama ineligible to be president. To give this stale “odor of mendacity” a fresh whiff, Trump announced with a straight face on NBC’s “Today” that he’s dispatched his own investigators to Hawaii to ferret out his version of the truth about Obama’s birthplace.

“I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they are finding,” he said about the birth records Hawaii officials have for Obama. Trump, who hosts Celebrity Apprentice — the Peacock network’s top rated show — got away with that conspiracy theorist tease during an interview with NBC’s Today show host Meredith Vieira without being asked what his sleuths found.

Nevermind that both Hawaii’s current governor, Democrat Neil Abercrombie, and his predecessor, Republican Linda Lingle, have said state records show Obama was born in Hawaii. Trump persists in demanding that the president personally satisfy him that he was born in America.

“If he weren’t lying why wouldn’t he just solve it?” Trump said on the Today show. “I would like to have him show his birth certificate.”

Why Trump is doing this is unclear. He wraps his questions about the authenticity of Obama’s official birth record with chest-thumping talk of how he might run for president to save us from Obama’s mismanagement of the nation’s affairs. But that decision won’t come before this season’s final episode of his TV show airs in late May. To enter the race sooner wouldn’t be fair to NBC, which has to take his TV show off the air once he becomes a presidential candidate. Now that’s a guy who has his priorities in the right order. Right?

Of course, the other possibility is that by fanning the flames of the birther movement, Trump is using this issue to build an even larger audience for his NBC show with appearances on other broadcast and cable networks that are being duped into treating what he says as something that is newsworthy.

It isn’t.

However, Trump’s harangue about Obama’s birth record appears to have made him the darling of a sizeable chunk of would-be Republican Party primary voters. He’s tied for second place (17%) with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal survey of GOP voters who were asked who they favored for the party’s presidential nomination. Mitt Romney, the ex-Massachusetts governor, finished first with the support of 21% of the respondents.

I suspect Trump is, at heart, neither a Republican nor a birther. He’s a mountebank — a flamboyant and deceptive hawker of his own interests. He’s a guy who has managed to amass enormous wealth while attaching his name to multimillion dollar real estate deals that went bad and billion-dollar casinos that ended up in bankruptcy.

In a recent letter to The New York Times, Trump accused the media of shielding Obama from the charge that he is not an American citizen. “What they don’t realize is that if he was not born in the United States ,” he said, “they would have uncovered the greatest ‘scam’ in the history of our country.”

But, in truth, the great scam journalists and others in the media have yet to uncover is the one that keeps Donald Trump in the national spotlight.

Exile may not be a good option for Moammar Ghadafi; just ask Charles Taylor

2011-04-05T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Now that the U.S.-led air war has failed to produce a quick collapse of Moammar Gadhafi’s government, and his forces are beating back the advances of Libya’s feckless rebels, the word “exile” is being bandied about as something Gadhafi is seriously considering.

Uganda says it will give him exile. Italy is contemplating it, too, for Gadhafi and his family. Even Hillary Clinton, secretary of State, and Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, have said allowing Gadhafi to go off into exile might be necessary to stop the bloodshed.

But nobody is saying exile will guarantee Gadhafi immunity from prosecution. And without an assurance that he won’t end up like former Liberian president Charles Taylor, whose three-year war crimes trial just ended, it’s a good bet Gadhafi will fight on until the bitter end. Taylor went into exile in 2003 as part of a deal to end Liberia’s 14-year-old civil war.

But three years later, he was handed over to a special international court for prosecution for his support of the bloody civil war in Sierra Leone, which borders Liberia. Taylor faces the possibility of life in prison, a fate he didn’t contemplate when he agreed to go into exile in Nigeria.

Gadhafi, who many people think is delusional, would have to be out of his mind to accept an exile offer that leaves open the possibility that he, too, will be hauled before an international tribunal. But that’s exactly what the U.S. seems to want in the not-so-small print of any exile deal.

“Exile may be an option that he looks at, and obviously that’s not one t hat we would rule out,” Rice told CBS News last month. “But very importantly, from the point of view of the United States and the international community, is accountability and justice for the crimes he and those closest to him have committed,” she quickly added.

If that doublespeak is meant to lure Gadhafi out of Libya and into the docket of an international court, it probably won’t work with the Libyan leader. And worse, it will make many of the world’s other dictators work harder to suppress dissent, rather than give in to it.

Nobody knows this better than Charles Stith, the former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, who now heads the African Presidential Archives and Research Center at Boston University, which studies democracy movements in Africa.

“One of the difficulties in negotiating any settlement to get (Gadhafi) to leave voluntarily has to be viewed against the backdrop of what happened to Charles Taylor,” Stith told me. “Unless these guys have a way to transition out that doesn’t amount to suicide, you don’t have a way to talk them into giving up power without a struggle.”

Put another way, the international community has to decide whether holding out for an exile agreement that gives it the chance to eventually lock up Gadhafi for the rest of his life is worth it while the fighting — and dying — continues in Libya. It has to determine whether demanding that Gadhafi succumb to such a deal will make it easier, or harder, for it to dislodge despots in other countries where the humanitarian crisis is greater than what the people of Libya face.

Short of a decision — which the U.S. and its allies have disavowed — to try to kill Gadhafi, something must be done quickly to end the carnage in Libya. And as hard as it is for many to swallow, an offer of exile that includes immunity from prosecution for Gadhafi could be what it takes.

Ivory Coast dictator gets away with murder while U.S. attacks Gadhafi's forces in Libya

2011-03-29T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

In the run-up to the war the United States is waging against the forces of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, the drumbeat for this fight was a call for action to stop the dictator from committing atrocities against his own people.

“When the entire international community almost unanimously says that there is a potential humanitarian crisis about to take place, we can’t simply stand by we have to take some sort of action,” President Obama told reporters during his recent trip to Chile.

“This guy’s days are numbered,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said before American Tomahawk missiles rained down on Libya ’s air defenses. The question is can we shorten them even more “to save people’s lives because it’s clear he is going to kill whoever he thinks he can in order to stay in power,” the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee said of Gadhafi.

And when the United Nations Security Council voted to authorize the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libyan airspace, it was acting, it said, “to protect civilians and civilian-populated areas under threat of attack” from Gadhafi’s forces, which had killed hundreds of people in its attempt to end anti-government demonstrations.

But when it comes to using America ’s military might to protect innocents, the Obama administration needs to explain why it has chosen to do so in the North African nation of Libya , while disavowing it in the Ivory Coast , a sub-Sahara African nation where a greater “potential humanitarian crisis” is unfolding.

Nearly 500 people have been killed by forces loyal to Laurent Gbagbo, the Ivory Coast president who lost a re-election bid in November but refuses to give up control. Many more people have been wounded in the fighting spawned by Gbagbo’s refusal to leave office. An estimated 500,000 have been displaced, and 90,000 more have fled the West African country, according to the Associated Press.

Recently, Gbagbo’s forces began attacking immigrants from neighboring African countries whose governments have refused to recognize his illegitimate regime. Some have been the victims of necklacing — a brutal practice in which a car tire filled with gasoline is forced over a person’s body and then ignited. When a group of unarmed women marched to protest Gbagbo’s power grab, an army tank fired upon them.

The violence in the Ivory Coast, a nation of nearly 22 million people, threatens to become a far bigger humanitarian crisis than the one the U.S. and its allies went to war to prevent in Libya, which has slightly less than 7 million people. But instead of threatening to use its military might to end the butchery in the Ivory Coast, the Obama administration says it “remains committed to finding a peaceful resolution” to that crisis.

“I don’t see a double standard; I think the U.S. is concerned about the Ivory Coast . I think it just wants the African Union to step up first,” said Melvin Foote, president of the Constituency for Africa, a Washington-based organization that works to build support for African causes in the United States .

He doesn’t, but I do.

In December, the African Union stepped up when it suspended the Ivory Coast from membership in the 53-nation organization after Gbagbo refused to accept the election results. He responded by ordering U.N. and French peacekeepers to leave to country and by imposing his own no-fly zone: He refused to let planes from the world body and France land in the Ivory Coast , while his forces wratched up attacks on his opponents.

If preventing a humanitarian crisis is the tripwire for American intervention, then U.S. Tomahawk missiles and war planes should have pummeled targets in the Ivory Coast long before they entered Libyan airspace.

Jalen Rose should "man up" and admit the road to success has many on-ramps

2011-03-22T06:00:00.004-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

I wish Jalen Rose hadn’t said that. I wish he’d “man up” and take back the ugly thing he said about Grant Hill.

An ESPN Sports analyst and former NBA star, Rose is an executive producer of the “Fab Five,” the controversial ESPN documentary that has tongues wagging throughout the world of sports. Meant to tell the story of the five freshmen who took the University of Michigan’s basketball team to two consecutive NCAA title games, the documentary takes an ugly turn when Rose is seen on screen suggesting the black players on the Duke University team that defeated Michigan in the 1992 title game were “Uncle Toms.”

“For me, Duke was a person," Rose says in the documentary. “I hated Duke and I hated everything Duke stood for. Schools like Duke don't recruit players like me. I felt like they only recruited black players that were Uncle Toms.”

Hill, whose response to the documentary was published in The New York Times, said Rose seemed to be saying black athletes from two-parent families who went to Duke were lackeys for whites – which is what the term “Uncle Tom” has come to mean. The documentary’s characterization of Duke’s players was “a sad and somewhat pathetic turn of events,” Hill wrote.

Even worse than that, it is a message to young blacks that Rose needs to not just take back, but denounce.

I say this as someone who has a lot more in common with the childhood that drove Rose to utter that opinion, than the early life Hill lived. Rose was one of four kids raised in poverty by a single mother. He grew up poor in Detroit and never met his father. I was in the third grader in Baltimore when my parents died. I have precious few memories of either of them.

Their deaths split up me and my siblings. Members of my mother’s family divided us up among them based on how much of that burden they could afford to shoulder. One of my brothers and I were sent to live with an aunt who had six children of her own. Soon after we arrived her husband left the two-bedroom public housing unit we crowded into. I spend the next 20 of my life in subsidized housing.

Grant Hill grew up well off in a Virginia home with two successful parents. His father, Calvin Hill, was an NFL star running back. His mother was a lawyer. He lived a comfortable, upper middle-class life that led him to Duke University. Rose emerged from his impoverished childhood to attend the University of Michigan, which is hardly a third-rate degree mill.

Since the first airing of his documentary, Rose has offered a tepid explanation of the “Uncle Tom” label he brandishes in the documentary. He says that’s what he thought of the black Duke players in the 1990s, not what he thinks of them now. That’s not good enough.

He needs to say he was wrong at age 18 to have thought that of the Duke players. He ought to say that toxic label should be reserved for people who truly sellout the race, not those whose success opens real doors of opportunity for other blacks.

In the college basketball teams they played for, there is little real difference between Rose and Hill. Each belonged to a prestigious, mostly-white higher education institution. What Rose really needs say about the blacks who played alongside him at Michigan and against him at Duke – as I’ve learned in my life – is that the road to success has many on-ramps.

GOP wage "shock and awe" campaign is effort to unseat Obama

2011-03-15T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

If you’re anxious to see the 2012 presidential race get underway, don’t be fooled by slowness of Republican wannabes to officially enter the campaign. It’s already in high gear.

In their attempt to deny Democrat Barack Obama a second term in the White House, Republicans appear to be using the same “shock and awe” strategy employed by the U.S. military to confuse the forces of Saddam Hussein at the beginning of the Iraq War. While Saddam’s troops prepared to repel an American-led invasion, U.S. naval vessels fired hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles at key targets throughout Iraq.

The destruction of those targets crippled any chance Saddam had of putting up a good fight –before a major engagement between Iraqi and American forces was fought.
Republicans are employing a similar “shock and awe” campaign. And as with the targets hit by those Tomahawk missiles, the preemptive strikes the GOP is launching aren’t so much a direct attack on Obama as they are intended to destroy the base of his support before the 2012 presidential race formally begins.

Proof of this strategy surfaced in the wake of the attack Republicans launched against public employee unions in Wisconsin. With an effort now underway to recall eight of the Republican state senators who joined the GOP majority in passing a bill that stripped away most of these union’s bargaining rights, the state’s senate top Republican made it clear the GOP’s goal was to weaken those union’s ability to give financial support to Obama.

“If they flip the state Senate…they can take control of the labor unions. If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions, certainly what you’re going to find is President Obama is going to have a much difficult, much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin,” Senate President Scott Fitzgerald told Fox News.

Unions, Hispanics, minorities and college students are as essential to Obama’s reelection hopes as the targets destroyed by the Tomahawk attack was to Saddam Hussein’s survival.

While much of the nation’s attention was focused on the GOP’s attach on public employee unions in Wisconsin, Republicans were hurling their political missiles at Democratic targets in other states. In New Hampshire, the new GOP House speaker defended his party’s effort to pass a law that would make it difficult for many college students to register and vote.“They’re foolish,” William O’Brien told a Tea Party gathering because they’re “liberal” and “just vote their feelings.”

In fact, Republicans are using their legislative majorities in dozens of states to push legislation that would sharply curtail the ability of students and minorities – the Democrat Party base – to vote. In Florida, newly-elected Republican Gov. Rick Scott imposed a five-year waiting period before non-violent felons can vote after their release from prison. Asked why he did it, Scott offered this simple (if not simple-minded) explanation: “Seemed reasonable.”

In states like Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, Republicans are pushing anti-immigration bills that critics believe are meant to curb the growing voting strength of Hispanics.

If this strategy succeeds, any one of the frontrunners among the current crop of potential GOP presidential candidates would have their prospect of defeating Obama dramatically improved. As it stands now, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, ex-governors Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty are longshot presidential candidates.

To unseat Obama, the eventual Republican Party standard-bearer will need lawmakers in GOP-dominated state legislatures to largely succeed in their efforts to weaken the president’s base. Short of that, Obama’s road to victory will look a lot like the one American troops traveled to Baghdad.

Pastor's pastor not afraid of Bible thieves

2011-03-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

As soon as I heard about the passing of the Rev. Peter Gomes, I wondered how many Bible thieves he came across when he arrived in heaven. Whatever the number, I’m sure he was glad to see them.

Gomes, the longtime Harvard Divinity School professor of Christian morals, died a few days ago of complications from a stroke. His life spanned just 68 years, but his professed understanding of God and the Bible is the kind of knowledge that transcended a single lifetime — and challenged the orthodoxy of religious purists.

In The Good Book, a best-seller he wrote in 1996, Gomes told the story of how some of his colleagues reacted when an anonymous donor offered to fill the pews of The Memorial Church at Harvard with a gift of Bibles. They warned that putting The Holy Book throughout the sanctuary would be an invitation to steal them.

Disregarding that concern, Gomes accepted the Bibles, which he said over the years were “happily” lost to quite a few thieves.

That, in essence, was the nature of Gomes’ ministry. He was more pastor than preacher; more interpreter of The Good Book than a literal enforcer of its every word. He’d rather have someone come to church and steal a Bible than stay away and never explore its pages. But as important as the Bible was to him, Gomes realized the harmful impact of its misuse. He constantly warned of those who either “trivialize” or “idolize” the Bible. Both, he said, “miss its dynamic, living, and transforming quality.”

In fact, many of the world’s enduring conflicts are waged in the name of religion, with each party claiming to have God on its side.

But Gomes said God doesn’t pick the winners of wars, presidential elections, sports championships or music awards. When I asked him during a 1996 interview that I did for CBS News why people so often thank God when good things happen to them, Gomes turned the question on its head. “The great question is, ‘What happens when you lose?’ Did God abandon you, or did God cause you to lose? Or did God go over to the other side?” God, Gomes told me, doesn’t take sides.

A Massachusetts-born conservative Baptist, Gomes was nothing if not a contrarian. For much of his life he was a black Republican who in 1991 announced that he was gay. Fifteen years later, he became a Democrat and backed the election of Deval Patrick, Massachusetts’ first black governor.

A past president of the Pilgrim Society, Gomes spoke with the authority and cadence of a New England Yankee and the passion of a black intellectual — an emotion that was nurtured during his stint on the faculty of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, one of the nation’s most prestigious black schools.

In a 60 Minutes interview in 1997, Gomes rocked the primacy of the spiritual beliefs of many in this country. God, he answered Morley Safer, is not an American; the Bible wasn’t written in English; and when Jesus returns, he will not likely show up in Tulsa or some other American city. Gomes’ religious beliefs had no patriotic anchor and established no supremacy of one secular group of people over another.

In this life, he believed, those who would steal a Bible from church were just as likely to find a place in heaven as the people who worried that stocking pews with The Good Book would tempt a sinner to take one.

I'm the next one, I hope he’s proven right.

Attack on Planned Parenthood could increase dangerous abortions

2011-03-01T06:00:00.005-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

How crazy is this? Abortion opponents in the House of Representatives and their allies among conservative activists want to stop Planned Parenthood from getting federal funds to provide family planning assistance to low-income women.

Their reasoning – their twisted logic – is that blocking Planned Parenthood from receiving federal support for the organization’s effort to prevent unintended pregnancies they will impair its ability to use its other funds for abortions. That was the motivation behind the House of Representatives recent vote to defund Planned Parenthood’s nationwide network of clinics.

It is “morally wrong to take the tax dollars of millions of pro-life Americans and use them to fund organizations that provide and promote abortions,” Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said in a posting on his congressional website following passage of the amendment he offered to stop federal funds from going to Planned Parenthood.
Pence’s argument would be laughable if the damage his legislation could do, if it ever becomes law, wasn’t so frightening.

It’s Laughable because it is already illegal for federal money to be used to fund an abortion – and because If Pence really wants to dole out federal aid based on the level of support something receives from the American people, Spence should be a champion of a woman’s right to undergo an abortion. According to a 2010 Gallup Poll, a whopping 78% of Americans (28% under any circumstances; 54% under limited circumstances) think abortions should be legal? Just 19% said it should be illegal, a number that has not risen above 23% since Gallup first started asking Americans this question way back in 1975.

Pence’s disingenuous defense of his attack on Planned Parenthood is frightening because nearly half of all pregnancies in this country were not planned, and 40% of them end in abortion. Of the women who get an abortion, 61% have one or more children, and 45% have never been married and do not live with their sexual partner, And 75% of the women who have an abortion said they cannot afford a child, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which does research and policy analysis on reproductive sex and health issues.

Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of sex and reproductive health care services, also counsels women on the use of abstinence and contraceptives as ways to prevent unintended pregnancies. And for those women who chose to end an unintended pregnancy, it provides them a safe and affordable alternative to the backroom butchery that more women might turn to if Planned Parenthood goes out of business.

A doctor who performed abortions from his storefront office in a Philadelphia inner city neighborhood was arrested in January and charged with the death of a woman and seven infants. His alleged gruesome practice thrived on poor women who were desperate to end a pregnancy. An increasing number of women will end up in the clutches of a badly run abortion clinic if Pence’s crippling attack on Planned Parenthood succeeds.

Shortly after the Republican-dominated House passed Pence’s legislation by a vote of 240 to 185, anti-abortion billboards went up in Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York City as part of the Black History Month campaign to decry the disproportionately high number of abortions among black women. A spokesman for Life Always, the group behind the New York billboard, said it was meant to discredit Planned Parenthood.

But the people who deserve to be discredited are those who would kill off funding for Planned Parenthood. In doing so, they cynically undermine its efforts to reduce unintended pregnancies - a goal that should unite us, not divide us.

Wisconsin governor's attack on unions is part of GOP war on Democrats

2011-02-22T06:00:00.003-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

The standoff between Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the Democratic senators that caused a massing of protesters in the state capital isn't just about the bargaining rights of public employees. Sure, that's the headline much of the news media is putting on this controversy. But it's far from the whole story of what is behind the conflict between the newly elected governor and Democrats who lost control of the state Senate in the last election.

Whether they know it or not, the state's 14 Democratic senators who fled Wisconsin to deny Republicans the quorum they needed to ram through a bill that would emasculate all of the state's public employee unions (except the three that endorsed Walker) are part of a bigger fight.

They're at the front of the political war Republicans launched since winning control of a majority of the nation's statehouses in November, including victories in the one-time union strongholds of Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. This turnabout has emboldened GOP governors to push legislation that could cripple Democrats in state and national elections.

Evidence of this strategy can be seen in Walker 's insistence on trying to strip away the collective bargaining rights of many public employees - at least on health care, pension benefits and working conditions - even after they've agreed to the financial concessions the governor said are needed to balance the state's budget.

Walker's bill is a shoot-the-wounded assault on the Democratic Party's base, which when combined with a voter ID law that's also being pushed through Wisconsin's Republican-controlled legislature could put The Badger State firmly in GOP hands for decades.

The proposed ID law would restrict the right to vote to people with military IDs, drivers' licenses and a state-issued ID card. Passports and photo ID cards issued to college students (even those from state universities) would not be acceptable.

College students and public unions are pillars of the Democratic base. Wisconsin's ID law would suppress voter participation among students. A 2005 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Employment and Training Institute study found that 82% of 18-, 19-, 20-year-olds did not have a driver's license in the ZIP codes for neighborhoods near Marquette University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. The study also showed that statewide, the majority of college-age blacks and Hispanics lacked drivers' licenses.

Walker's budget repair bill also will severely weaken - if not fatally wound - the state's public employee unions. And in that effort he is not alone. Republicans governors in Indiana and Ohio also are moving to weaken the bargaining rights of public unions. The tactic will make it harder for unions to influence state and national elections. All of this is happening while GOP-controlled legislatures in Missouri, Ohio and Texas are pushing their own voter ID laws.

Late last month Texas' Senate passed a voter ID law that requires people in that state to show a driver's license, military ID, a passport, a state or citizenship ID card or a concealed handgun license before being allowed to vote. Over the past decade Texas' population grew to more than 25 million people. Hispanics were 65%, blacks 22% and whites just 4.2% of that population surge. Whites now make up less than half of all Texans and tend to be older. So not surprisingly, the Republican-controlled Senate made an exception to the ID law for people older than 70. Those voters only need to show a voter registration card to vote.

This is the nature of the war the GOP is waging. It's a quest for political hegemony - and a fight Democrats cannot afford to lose.

Republicans turn on their own

2011-02-15T04:31:00.005-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

When the history of her time on the political stage is written, it's a good bet that Olympia Snowe will be seen as the linear successor to Margaret Chase Smith, not Mike Castle.

Castle, the nine-term moderate Republican congressman, was defeated by Christine O'Donnell last year in his bid for Delaware's GOP Senate nomination. O'Donnell was backed BY the Tea Party movement, which pilloried Castle for his willingness to work with congressional Democrats to win passage of legislation.

O'Donnell was soundly beaten by Democrat Chris Coons in the general election.

Snowe, a moderate GOP senator from Maine, also has tried to bring some sanity to the political divide between congressional Democrats and Republicans during her three terms in the Senate. For her efforts she too has drawn the wrath of the Tea Party, an uncompromising fringe of the GOP's right wing.

Now, Andrew Ian Dodge, the head of Maine's Tea Party organization, says he'll challenge Snowe's bid next year to win the Republican Party's Senate nomination in the Pine Tree State. That's a mistake because Maine's voters have a long history of backing candidates who look out for them rather than cowtow to others.

Like Smith, who was the first woman from Maine to serve in the Senate, Snowe refuses to be a GOP pawn in its ideological tug-of-war with Democrats. When Republicans and Democrats were locked in a standoff over the health care bill, Snowe joined the Gang of Six (a group of centrist and moderate Republicans and Democrats) and tried to produce a compromise. She's also a leader of the Centrist Coalition, moderate members of the two parties who seek compromise on issues which too often reduce the Senate to a squabbling, ineffective chamber.

The Tea Party treats compromise as political heresy, and Snowe thinks the Tea Party is a destructive force within the Republican Party.

"What works in South Carolina and Delaware may not work in Maine," Snowe said last year of the group's ideological litmus test, according to CNN. "We all have different views. We're independent. I can't go back to the people of my state and say, "Excuse me, I have to be 100% ideologically pure because someone has dictated that from another state. It just wouldn't wash."

That's the kind of independent streak that Smith showed when she became the first member of the Senate to speak out against the abuses of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anticommunist crusade.

"I speak as a Republican, I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American," Smith said in her 1950 "Declaration of Conscience" speech in which she criticized the lack of backbone of Republicans and Democrats. "The United States has long enjoyed worldwide respect as the greatest deliberative body in the world. But recently that deliberative character has too often been debased to the level of a forum of hate and character assassination," she complained.

Snowe was equally courageous in bucking Republican leaders by working for compromise in the Senate. Just as Smith put the nation before party in 1950, Snowe now does the same when she joins with moderate Democrats to search for common ground.

I think Maine's GOP voters will reward Snowe's brand of New England Republicanism, just as they did Smith, who first won election to the Senate in 1948 and was re-elected three times. Her last victory came two years after she challenged conservative icon Barry Goldwater for the GOP presidential nomination in 1964.

What I don't think is that they'll repear the mistake that was made in Delaware.

Return of Aristide and Duvalier threaten Haitian democracy

2011-02-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

While the Obama administration has embraced the democracy movement that is pressuring Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak to end to his 30-year rule, it seems less certain of what to do to keep Haiti’s fragile democracy from disintegrating.

“Going back to the old ways is not going to work. Suppression’s not going to work. Engaging in violence is not going to work,” Obama said in the clearest statement from him so far that, like the tens of thousands of people who have taken to the streets of Cairo, he thinks it’s time for Mubarak to give up power.

But in Haiti , where the United States has led an international effort to raise billions of dollars to fund the recovery of that earthquake-ravaged nation, the country is increasingly at risk of giving in to “the old ways.”

Last month, as the results of the first round of Haiti ’s presidential election were being disputed, Jean Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, the right-wing dictator who was chased from the country 25 years ago, was allowed to return. Now broke after allegedly stealing $300 million from Haiti ’s treasure, Duvalier has returned to help Haiti . How? One of his American lawyers said (presumably with a straight face) that Duvalier could assist in managing the $10 billion in relief other nations have pledged to Haiti . While there’s no chance of that happening, he can cause trouble in another way.

Duvalier has “close friends and former colleagues” in the campaigns of the three candidates who were the top finishers in the first phase of the presidential election, according to The New York Times.

He was greeted by 2,000 supporters upon his return to Haiti , and while he was later arrested on charges of corruption and embezzlement, it is uncertain that he will ever be tried.

What seems a better bet is that Duvalier’s return, and the anticipated arrival of former Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide, will push Haiti closer to turmoil.

Aristide is a leftist who became Haiti ’s first democratically elected president. He was toppled by a coup in 1991 and restored to office three years later with the help of American troops. Aristide was toppled again in 2004 by rebel soldiers, who this time had a lot more support among the Haitian people and — some believe — the backing of the George W. Bush administration.

Haiti, which is still reeling from last year’s earthquake that killed more than 250,000 people, was rocked by rioting following the announcement of the results of the disputed presidential election and hit hard by a cholera epidemic that’s taken more than 4,000 lives.

With another round of voting scheduled for March 20, the thing Haiti needs more than anything else now is a level of stability and calm. But what it’s likely to get once Aristide returns — and he and Duvalier rally their old supporters to their side — will be a return to the bloody factionalism that punctuated their time at the helm of Haiti’s government.

“They (Duvalier and Aristide) want to use this situation to reinsert themselves as part of the country’s power structure,” said Jean Wilson, a Haitian-American lawyer who has been actively involved in efforts to raise recovery funds for Haiti . “It really shows the level of desperation of the Haitian people that these despots would be allowed to return.”

Worse than that, it suggests that the Obama administration — which has far more influence in Haiti than in Egypt — failed to keep these old troublemakers from returning at a time when Haiti’s democracy is most vulnerable to the havoc they almost certainly will produce.

Mother jailed for law that's the real crime

2011-02-01T06:00:00.001-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Kelley Williams-Bolar broke the law when she falsified some documents so her children would have a chance at a better education in a safer school. But that law, which has turned her into a convicted felon, breaks Ohio’s compact with its citizens.

The 40-year-old teacher’s aide was given two concurrent 5-year sentences last month after a jury found her guilty of two counts of tampering with evidence for filing forms in which she claimed her two daughters lived in a nearby suburb with her father. She did this so they could attend a school in the suburban Copley-Fairlawn district instead of one closer to the Akron, Ohio housing project where the girls actually lived with her.

Judge Patricia Cosgrove reduced Williams-Bolar’s sentence to 10 days in jail and ordered her to perform 80 hours of community service and two years of probation. She also told the distraught mother she had to serve some time “so that others who think they might defraud the school system, perhaps, will think twice.”

But, in fact, it is the state of Ohio – and the flawed system of public education it created – that has defrauded the children of Williams-Bolar.

Since its creation in 1851, the Buckeye State’s constitution has required Ohio’s General Assembly to “secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state…” But instead of doing this, state officials – like those in every other state in the union – have left it up to local school districts to manage public education.

Ohio provides only a portion of the cost of educating schoolchildren throughout the state and leaves it to local jurisdictions to come up with the rest. This has created an imbalance that, at least in part, fuels the disparities between poor inner city school districts like the one Williams-Bolar wanted her children to escape, and the better off suburban school system she lied to get them to attend.

Four times since 1997, Ohio’s Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional the state’s approach to funding public education. But despite those rulings the state provides just roughly half of the cost of a student’s education and leaves it up to a patchwork of over 600 school districts to come up with the rest.

Neither Ted Strickland, the Democrat who just vacated the Ohio statehouse, nor John Kasich, the Republican who defeated him in last year’s election, has proposed a fix that acknowledges their state’s sole responsibility to create “a thorough and efficient system of common schools.” Instead, they’ve proposed ideas that tweak the status quo system of state and local funding.

Like frustrated parents in many other underfunded, poor-performing districts around the country, Williams-Bolar wanted to get her children into a better school. In doing so, she broke a law that safeguards a system of education that treats her children as collateral damage in the tribalism produced by the state’s failure to fully fund public education.

While some might argue that school vouchers or more charter schools are the answer to Williams-Bolar’s plight, I think that debate allows states to duck a far more important – and impactful – discussion of their constitutional responsibility to provide children a quality education.

Ohio shortchanges it citizens when state officials fail to meet the state’s obligation to ensure that all children, regardless of where they live, have the same educational opportunity. As a result, Williams-Bolar was forced to deceive the guardians of Ohio’s wrongful school funding system to get her children a chance for a better education. For this she has been branded a criminal.

And that’s a crying shame.

Congressional Republicans act like members of a white citizens council

2011-01-25T04:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Just when it seemed the GOP’s pup tent was popping its stitches, Republicans have again dashed any hope that their party might become a political big tent.

The illusion of GOP inclusion came in the wake of last year’s election when black Republicans won congressional seats in South Carolina and Florida, the first time in over a century that a former Confederate state has sent a black Republican to Congress. The election of Allen West of Florida and Tim Scott of South Carolina – plus Jennifer Carroll’s election as Florida’s lieutenant governor – had some people thinking the GOP had broken free of its racial myopia.

Those breakthroughs came less than three weeks after Republicans were stung by the racially charged action of Dave Bartholomew, the Virginia Beach, Va., GOP chairman who was forced to resign after he was caught passing along an email that compared black welfare recipients to a dog.

While the election of Carroll, Scott and West overshadowed Bartholomew’s bad act, it has done little to burnish the image of the Republican Party among blacks and other minorities. That’s because when it comes to burning bridges with this nation’s minorities, the GOP can’t help itself.

Proof of its propensity now to act more like a white citizens’ council from the 1960s, rather than the political party that ended slavery in the 1860s, came earlier this month. That’s when Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives voted to stop delegates from voting on the House floor when the entire body is assembles as “a committee of the whole.”

The six delegates – minorities from the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories of Guam, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands – have historically lacked the full voting rights of House members elected from districts in the nation’s 50 states. They could vote in a committee, but not on the House floor where legislation is finally enacted.

But when Democrats took control of the House in 2007 they adopted a rule that allowed the delegates, who like full voting members of Congress represent American citizens, to have a limited vote on the House floor when the entire body acted as a committee to speed up the legislative process.

Republicans argue it violates the constitution to allow delegates such a floor vote, even though a federal appeals court upheld it in a 1994 opinion. Since 1993 when Democrats who then controlled the House first allowed delegates this limited vote, it’s been a political football. Whenever Republicans were in power it was taken away. When Democrats gained the majority it was given back.

But this time there was reason to believe things would be different.

“America is more than a country,” Republicans said in the preamble to a pledge the GOP made to voters shortly before the November election. “America is an idea – an idea that free people can govern themselves, that government’s powers are derived from the consent of the governed…”

But now that Republicans control the House they’ve decided that Americans represented by the six delegates – five Democrats and one Independent – should have their ability to give consent to government actions through their elected representatives reduced again.

“If the representatives of people in Baghdad and Kabul couldn’t vote we’d call that an incomplete democracy,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson told me.

Sure we would. And we’d accuse those responsible of being political thugs. But such harsh language is no longer acceptable at a time when many people think kinder words will produce better political behavior.

So, suffice to say, I think the GOP’s pup tent has just gotten a lot smaller.

Obama bringing sense to U.S.-Cuba policy

2011-01-18T06:00:00.003-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

It was late in the day on the Friday before the nation’s capital shutdown for the Martin Luther King Jr., holiday that the White House signaled a long awaited change in this country’s Cuba policy that has to have a lot of people cheering on both sides of the Florida Straits.

President Obama ordered administration officials “to take a series of steps to continue efforts to reach out to the Cuban people in support of their desire to freely determine their country’s future,” the White House press release declared.

The steps, which relax restrictions on travel and money transfers to Cuba, moves this nation closer to a rational foreign policy towards the communist state, which for nearly half a century a succession of American governments have tried to topple.

Cuba is the last Cold War battleground where the United States is not just at loggerheads with an old Soviet client state but is actively trying to undermine the government. This nation's with regime change in Havana has been fueled more by domestic politics (pandering for votes among anti-Castro Cubans in South Florida) than a well-reasoned foreign policy.

Obama’s decision to relax the ban on Americans traveling to Cuba is an act of political courage and good sense. Under the new rules it will be easier for academics, students, religious organizations and journalists to travel to Cuba. Also, when this change takes effect, any American can send up to $2,000 a year to someone in Cuba as long as they are not a senior member of the Cuban government or Communist Party.

Under the old rules - and this won't change - Cuban Americans had unlimited freedom to travel to Cuba and send money to people in the Caribbean island nation that’s just 90 miles off the tip of Florida. Everyone else in this country was prohibited from sending money to Cuba and severely restricted from visiting that country.

The travel ban, its supporters have long argued, is necessary to keep dollars out of the coffers of the Castro regime. That’s laughable given the exception made for Cuban Americans. But what the ban effectively has done is reward the families of the white Cubans who disproportionately immigrate to the United States – and punish the families of black Cubans who have largely remained in Cuba – Tomás Fernandez Robaina, a senior researcher at Cuba’s national library and cultural historian, told me. Without relatives in this country to send them money black families in Cuba have been hardest hit by Cuba’s economic problems, he said.

Obama’s new policy, which allows anyone in this country to legally send money to almost anyone in Cuba, makes it possible for financial aid to find its way into the homes of many more black Cubans than before. And that’s a good thing.

The president understands that, as with Vietnam and China, American engagement – open travel and trade – is the best way to usher in democratic change to Cuba. Ironically, there is little support in Cuba for the trade embargo and travel ban that have defined America’s relationship with Cuba for almost five decades.

The vast majority of Cubans that I’ve met during my many reporting trips to Cuba – including those who oppose the Castro regime – dislike the travel ban and trade embargo. Keeping Cuba sealed off from the American people and U.S. businesses does little to alter the politics of that nation. What it does do is keep Cuba and the United States locked into a foolish Cold War standoff.

Wisely, albeit slowly, Barack Obama is rolling back this bad policy.

Chris Brown still haunted by his demons

2011-01-04T06:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

This was supposed to be a column about the rehabilitation of Chris Brown, the once wildly popular R&B singer who suffered a big fall from grace in 2009 when he plead guilty to felony assault in the beating of his then-girlfriend, pop singer Rihanna.

When the story of his brutal act surfaced, I joined the chorus of commentators who trashed Brown and warned Rihanna not to give him a second chance at love. But I’ve always believed that lawbreakers who are not imprisoned for life should – if they demonstrate contrition – be given a chance to get back on the right track.

And that’s just what I thought Brown had earned late last month when he successfully completed a year-long domestic violence course mandated by the court. That good news capped more than a year of encouraging reports about the progress he has been making from the judge who is handling Brown’s case.

In February, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Patricia Schnegg complimented Brown for his diligence in complying with the terms of the plea bargain agreement that kept him out of jail. In addition to the domestic violence counseloring, Brown was ordered to perform six months community service in his home state of Virginia.
“It looks like you’re doing really, really well. That’s always good to see,” Judge Schnegg said at the time.

Then in November the judge gushed praised for him after getting another good report from probation officials. “Out of thousands of probationers, no one has done a better or more consistent job than you have, and I really want to commend you for taking responsibility and for actually working diligently to complete all the things the court has required of you,” she told Brown.

That most recent praise for the 21-year-old Brown came five months after a series of concerts he was scheduled to perform in Europe was cancelled when he was denied a visa to enter the United Kingdom. That hardly seemed fair given the progress the talented performer had made in battling his dark side.

In fact, I though Brown had earned a chance to reboot his career, which has floundered since his beating of Rihanna. He appeared to be genuinely committed to making amends for his bad behavior – and really determined to prove he is no longer a crude brute.

Then he snapped on Twitter.

In a series of tweets on the social network, Brown proved to still have a hair-trigger temper when he lashed out Raz B after the former boy band singer tweeted that he couldn’t understand why Brown had been so disrespectful of Rihanna.

Brown responded with a homophobic term to describe the molestation Raz B claimed – and later retracted – he suffered while a teenage member of the R&B music group B2K.
Brown’s crass reference to anal sex in regard to the alleged assault was mean-spirited proof that while he passed the court’s domestic abuse class he needs to take an advanced anger management course – something he seemed to acknowledge a day after his Twitter war of words with Raz B.

"Yesterday was an unfortunate lack in judgment,” Brown told TMZ.com. "Words cannot begin to express how sorry and frustrated I am over what transpired publicly on Twitter. I have learned over the past few years to not condone or represent acts of violence against anyone."

In a 2009 video apology to Rihanna and his fans, Brown said he takes “great pride in me being able to exercise self-control.” But he didn’t two years ago during his physical encounter with Rihanna and he didn’t last month in his verbal clash with Raz B.

Brown’s rehabilitation is far from complete. He’s a talented – but greatly troubled – entertainer, who appears to be closer to teetering on the brink of self-destruction than exorcising his demons.

Those demons are what Brown must confront and defeat if he wants to get others to give him a second chance.

25 Years: Reflection no. 3 on my quarter century as a columnist

2010-12-30T00:07:00.003-05:00

The following column appeared in USA TODAY on April 29, 2004.

By DeWayne Wickham

I've always liked Colin Powell. Very soon, I will like him even more.

I liked Powell the day we first met on Aug. 17, 1989, shortly after then-president George H.W. Bush nominated him to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Powell was the keynote speaker at the annual gathering of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), and, as the group's president, I introduced him that day.

In his speech, Powell made it very clear that he owed his success to the service and sacrifices of many unsung blacks. His "appointment would not be possible without the sacrifices of those black soldiers who served this great nation in war for over 200 years," he said.

I liked Powell even more in 1992, when, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he interceded to get me on a military charter flight to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I was a critic of the first Bush administration's policy of seizing Haitian refugees in international waters and interning them on the U.S. naval base in Cuba to keep them from reaching American soil.

While Powell surely knew I would not paint a rosy picture of what I'd find in Guantanamo Bay -- and I didn't -- he nonetheless got a reluctant military bureaucracy to allow me to make the trip. In doing so, he was probably mindful of his NABJ convention speech three years earlier, when he spoke of the special responsibility black journalists have.

"There's a dream in this land with its back against the wall," Powell had said, paraphrasing a Langston Hughes poem, "to save the dream for one, it must be saved for all."

My fondness for Powell turned to worry in 1995, when he came under a blistering attack from right-wing Republicans determined to keep him from becoming the GOP's presidential nominee.

"Colin Powell has the political convictions of Bill Clinton and the loyalty to the Republican Party of John Warner," said Michael Farris, one of a band of right-wingers who massed in Washington in November of that year to lob verbal shots at Powell from the safety of a National Press Club podium.

A few days later, Powell announced that he had decided against seeking the Republican nomination. I had mixed emotions. Powell would forgo the chance to become this nation's first black president, but he also would avoid being the standard-bearer of the party of Newt Gingrich.

My affection for Powell grew in 1996, when he gave a commencement address at Bowie State University. The speech made him sound like a Republican cut from the cloth that produced former Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke, a liberal and the first black senator since Reconstruction, and not from the gunnysack that bore Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a right-wing conservative.

In that address, Powell made a spirited defense of affirmative action.

"We must resist misguided government efforts that seek to shut it all down, efforts such as the California Civil Rights Initiative, which poses as an equal opportunity initiative, but which puts at risk every outreach program" he said. "It sets back the gains made by women, and puts the brakes on expanding opportunities for people who are in need."

And then on Dec. 16, 2000, when President-elect George W. Bush nominated him to become this nation's first black secretary of State, my warm feelings for Powell helped simmer the rage that boiled within me over the outcome of that election.

Like President Truman's secretary of State, George Marshall, Powell gave new meaning to the term citizen-soldier. In the short span of 11 years, Powell went from being the nation's top military officer to its top diplomat. Though the election of 2000 didn't give me the president I wanted, it gave me -- and the nation -- a secretary of State who, I thought, would rise above the ideological bog in which so many petty politicians dwell.

But during the past four years, Powell has struggled to meet the challenge of my expectations.

His failure to attend the international conference against racism in South Africa and the role he played in the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti's democratically elected president, have disappointed many blacks in this country. His mealy-mouthed defense of affirmative action, while Bush was using his bully pulpit to try to end it, exposed a frailty that Powell had not displayed earlier.

I like Colin Powell the soldier and statesman, but I have no fondness for Colin Powell the politician. That's why I rejoice at the news that he is leaving the Bush administration. Now, I think, I'll come to like him a lot more.

An anniversary that looks to the future as much as the past

2010-12-28T06:00:00.002-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

I’m not a big anniversary person, but 2010 is a benchmark in my journalism career that has me thinking as much about the future as the past.

It was 25 years ago that I started contributing to the opinion page of this and many other Gannett newspapers – a job which has allowed me to occupy space in some of the most prized real estate in the newspaper industry. And over the past quarter century I’ve had a lot of memorable experiences.

And what a quarter century it's been.

I ate dinner with Fidel Castro in Havana’s Palace of the Revolution; had lunch with L. Douglas Wilder, the nation’s first black elected governor, in a room where Confederate President Jefferson Davis used to eat his meals; and I sat in the cabinet room of the White House sipping soda and nibbling low calorie cookies with President Bill Clinton.

I flew with Secretary of State Warren Christopher on the Air Force plane that returned deposed Haitian President Jean Bertrand-Aristide to Haiti; was a member of the press corps that accompanied Nelson Mandela on an 8-city tour of the United States just a few months after his release from a 27-year imprisonment in South Africa, and flew to Montreal with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a conference on aid to Haiti after it was ravaged by an earthquake.

I was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show twice. And in 1991, I interviewed George Wallace, the former Alabama governor who proclaimed in his 1963 inaugural address “segregation now…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever.” Wallace told me his racism was driven by the politics of his state, not a feeling in his heart.

I attended the state dinner President Clinton gave South African President Thabo Mbeki. I was in Paris the day White House candidate Barack Obama met with French President Nickolas Sarkozy at the Elysee Palace, and in the Denver stadium the night Obama went there to accept the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

But with all the ringside seats I’ve had over the past 25 years, there remains much I want to see and do before my column is put out to pasture. Here’s my bucket list.

I want to interview O.J. Simpson, who is serving a 33-year sentence in a Nevada prison for armed robbery and kidnapping. I covered his 1995 double murder trial in Los Angeles. While others still debate Simpson’s guilt in that “trial of the century,” I want to talk to him about his penchant for whistling “If I Only Had a Brain” – a song for the “Wizard of Oz” – during subsequent scraps with the law. I suspect getting to the bottom of that question will reveal more about the former NFL superstar than all the books that have been written about him.

I want to spend a couple days with George W. Bush talking about the things that interest him now that he’s not “the decider” of this nation’s fate. I want to know what it’s really like to go from being the world’s most powerful leader to the afterlife of the American presidency. And I want to know what he worries about now that he no longer gets a daily briefing on the real and perceived threats to this country.

I want to interview Graca Machel, a leading African political activist and advocate for children's and women's rights, who married two African heads of state. Her first husband, former Mozambique President Samora Machel was the unelected leader of a one-party socialist state. Her current husband, Nelson Mandela, served two terms as president of a multi-party democracy in South Africa that he had a big hand in creating.I want to know what attracted her to each man – one of whom brutally suppressed his enemies while the other used a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to heal his country’s wounds.

These are the conversations that top of my “to do list” – the truth and understanding I want to pursue – as I begin this next phase of my journalism career.

25 Years: Reflection no. 2 on my quarter century as a columnist

2010-12-27T18:48:00.009-05:00

The following Q and A with the nation's first black elected governor ran in USA TODAY on January 11, 1990.

L. Douglas Wilder, 58, is governor-elect of Virginia. On Saturday, Wilder will take the oath of office to become the first black elected governor in the nation's history. Wilder, a Democrat, has held elected office in Virginia for 20 years, the last four as lieutenant governor. Wilder was interviewed by DeWayne Wickham, USA TODAY and Gannett News Service columnist.

USA TODAY: Is your election as the first black governor a sign that race is playing less of a role in politics?
WILDER: I think to put it in that context is a disservice to the seriousness of racism. Working to thwart, to defeat and to eliminate racism has been something fair-minded people have always tried to do. So it's never dead, it's never killed. It's a question of constantly working to overcome. I think my election is another instance of overcoming.

USA TODAY: There are many who point to you as the political opposite of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Does that make you uncomfortable?
WILDER: No, it doesn't make me uncomfortable, but it's not a factual appraisal. I have been in elected office for 20 years. I have chosen to hold elected office. I have chosen to effectuate compromises. I have tried to work to build coalitions to get things done. For the most part, Jesse, prior to 1984, has been an activist. There's plenty of room for the two kinds of thoughts, the two kinds of actions, to exist. I regard him as a friend.

USA TODAY: Your name is on the short list of blacks being mentioned as possible vice-presidential candidates in 1992. Do you discourage such speculation?
WILDER: Well, you've seen short lists develop before. It's always a speculation that people like to engage in. I don't discourage it or become upset by it. But I can tell you, I've got more to say prayers and grace over with reference to the issues confronting Virginia today and the leadership that's required to continue our momentum and to make sure that progress and prosperity aren't thwarted.

USA TODAY: Are there lessons to be learned by the national Democratic Party from your election?
WILDER: Oh, I think so. I think national Democrats have got to be more concerned with the perceptions. And the per-ception is that Democrats are soft on crime and weak on defense and will tax at the drop of a hat, and will spend quicker than that. I think Democrats will have to make that mainstream appeal. In the process of doing that, you might run the risk of losing some voters. You might have to lose an election in order to win one.

USA TODAY: Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, who intends to run for governor of Georgia, points to your elec-tion as a model for his campaign. Is there a Virginia model?
WILDER: I don't know that there's a Virginia model. I've discussed with Andy a couple of times the race he's involved with, and I think you'll see him going out into rural areas. As I've said to him, Atlanta isn't Georgia. He must, of neces-sity, make an appeal to voters of every description and not be seen as the black candidate.

USA TODAY: Can black candidates successfully appeal to white voters without abandoning those issues most im-portant to their black constituents?
WILDER: Oh yes, without question. You can't be a black candidate and put limitations on yourself. Blacks have an obligation to be the best we can in what fields we choose. And, in that regard, we would become more sensitized to is-sues affecting African-Americans and should reflect that. This doesn't mean, however, that our thoughts are so colored that we would be other than objective.

USA TODAY: Was there ever a time during your campaign when you thought you might not win?
WILDER: Never. Absolutely never. From the time I announced, I never had any question as to whether I would win. I never thought it would be easy, I never thought it would be a cakewalk. But I never had any doubt.

USA TODAY: After your narrow victory in November, there were some who complained that you were slow to make appointments. Were you distracted at all by the recount?
WILDER: Not at all. What I was doing was getting the best possible people I could to serve.

USA TODAY: You come into office at a time when there are demands in Virginia for road construction and higher teacher salaries, but voters also expect you to hold the line on taxes. How will you juggle that?
WILDER: By making certain that we spend what we need to spend, and only that. I believe in fiscal responsibility. We're not in a crisis, we're in a crunch, and I intend for it to be a temporary, short-lived crunch.

USA TODAY: What will be your major priorities?
WILDER: I've dedicated my administration to youth and family. We've lost some family values, we've lost opportuni-ties for seeing young people develop. I will be attacking drugs. I want help in terms of education, reaching out to young people at risk. I want more opportunities for affordable housing, which will strengthen family ties. And I intend to broaden our economic expansion.

USA TODAY: What do you want historians to say about you?
WILDER: That I was governor at a time when I could make a difference, and I did.

USA TODAY: And what do you want historians to say about the people of Virginia who elected you to office?
WILDER: I think that to the extent that the reputation of a state precedes it by so many generations, the people of Virginia have been maligned. It's so fittingly ironic that the same state to which a Dutch frigate came with some 20 black slaves, could, 380 years later, elect a descendant of one of those slaves to be in a position of leading the state. A state that preached nullification and interposition, a state that seceded from the union, the capital of the Confederacy, known then as the mother of presidents, might very well be known as that again.

____________________________________________________

To see Reflection no. 1, visit my Facebook page.

In the "Year of the Woman" here's a woman to watch

2010-12-21T06:00:00.001-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

In the world of politics, this could be called the “Year of the Woman.”
From the rise of Republican Nikki Haley, who came from nowhere and fought off a scurrilous personal attack to win South Carolina’s governorship, to the surprising staying power of Barbara Boxer, the three-term Democratic member of the U.S. Senate who handily won reelection in California, women dominated the political landscape.

There was Sarah Palin, a darling of the Tea Party Movement, shooting moose on her own reality television show; and Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand easily winning election to the New York U.S. Senate seat she was appointed to last year after Hillary Clinton resigned to become Secretary of State. Florida voters made Republican Jennifer Carroll their state’s first black lieutenant governor. And in Delaware, Christine O’Donnell – who once said she dabbled in witchcraft, but never joined a coven – captured national attention while being soundly defeated in her third attempt to win a Senate seat.

But the woman the 2010 election cycle might eventually catapult to the greatest heights is one who barely made a blip on this nation’s political radarscope this year. Her name is Kamala (pronounced Comma-la) Harris and on January 3 she’ll take the oath of office as California’s first female attorney general.

Some people have called the 46-year-old Harris, whose father is Jamaican and mother is from India, “the female Barack Obama.” But to see Harris as that would be to misjudge her badly. Obama was a Harvard-educated community organizer before he waded into the political arena. Harris, who graduated from Howard University – the Citadel of black higher education institutions – was a prosecutor for more than a decade before ran for office. Elected San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003, won a second term in 2007.

While many of the women who crowded onto the political stage this year fit comfortably into an ideological mold, Harris does not. A self-described “child of the civil rights movement” who was raised in Berkeley, the hotbed of California liberalism, Harris touts her record for putting violent offenders behind bars and getting tough on parents of elementary schoolchildren who are chronically absent from class. She also champions programs that offer non-violent first offenders job training instead of jail time and rehabilitation to people released from prison.

“I hope to serve this nation as the attorney general of California. I believe in that old adage that ‘as goes California, so goes the country,’ ” Harris said, rejecting my suggestion that she could be a new breed of national politician. Even so, I think she is destined to land in the nation’s other power center: Washington, D.C.

While O’Donnell writes a book about her most recent unsuccessful bid for a U.S. Senate seat (she lost earlier races in 2004 and 2006) and Palin morphs between her roles on a reality TV show star and a right-wing political operative, Harris is expanding her political base.

The transition team she named to oversee her move into the California attorney general’s office is headed by two former U.S. secretaries of state – Republican George Shultz and Democrat Warren Christopher. It also includes former Stanford Law School dean Kathleen Sullivan and ex-Los Angeles police chief William Bratton; and Connie Rice, a highly regarded civil rights attorney.

“It’s an incredible group of leaders and professionals and I’m really humbled that they’ve dedicated their time to work on the transition…I wanted to have people who understand California in the context of the globe,” Harris explained.

It is also the kind of team building that will lift Harris above many of the other women who are part of the political class of 2010. She’s too smart to acknowledge that her sights are set on anything other than the job she’s about to take on. She’s too politically astute to get caught looking that far ahead.

But Harris, I think, is destined to become a commanding presence in the political life of this country, and a major player in this nation’s other power center – Washington, D.C.

Obama owes Democrats this much

2010-12-14T06:00:00.001-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

In that awkward moment when President Obama left the White House press room for a holiday party while former president Bill Clinton stayed behind to defend the tax extension deal Obama struck with Republicans, the Democrats’ most vexing problem became painfully clear.

“What we’ve got here,” in the words of the reprobate captain in Paul Newman’s 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke, “is a failure to communicate.”

While ceding the White House press room podium was no outsourcing of his presidency, it was an admission from Obama that he’s having trouble communicating with key members of his own party at a critical time in his presidency.

Communication used to be one of Obama’s great strengths. It certainly was in 2004 when the then-Illinois state senator propelled himself into the national spotlight with a speech at the Democratic National Convention that stirred the imagination of those who yearned for an end to this nation’s partisan political bloodletting.

“Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” Obama said in the address that began his transformation from “a skinny kid with a funny name” to political rock star.

And four years later, when his presidential campaign was nearly derailed by some racially charged sermons by the pastor of his church, Obama gave a speech in Philadelphia that convinced millions of Americans he was a healer, not a divider. “I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together — unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction,” he said.

But now that he faces one of the toughest tests of his presidency selling the tax deal he brokered with Republicans to congressional Democrats — Obama seems unwilling to communicate directly with members of his political base. That’s a serious miscalculation.

The House Democratic Caucus has objected to the agreement, which gives the GOP a two-year extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Like Obama, House Democrats have long pushed for extending the tax cuts only for those making less than $250,000 a year.

In return for giving in to Republicans’ all-or-nothing position, Obama won GOP support for a 13-month extension of emergency unemployment insurance and a college tuition tax credit, along with some smaller and less controversial tax breaks.

Obama should come up to the Capitol and look Democrats “dead in the eye” and explain the deal he made with Republicans, longtime Obama supporter Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., told The Hill, a publication that covers Congress. Instead, Obama has used surrogates to convince congressional Democrats that his deal with the GOP is the best agreement he could get a month before Republicans retake control of the House and increase their minority in the Senate.

While Clinton is still a persuasive voice among Democrats, Obama, who met with Republicans on the tax-cut deal, ought to do the same with his own party. If you’re going to ask people to take a vote that might cost them their seats, you might be more persuasive if you look them in the eyes when you do.

Republican slams unemployed with voodoo economics

2010-12-07T06:00:00.001-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Anyone who was watching when Rep. John Shadegg, R-Ariz., tried to explain why extending jobless benefits to unemployed workers shouldn’t be Congress’ top priority has a right to fear the Republican takeover of the House. His answer was pulled right out of the voodoo economics playbook.

Shortly before the Labor Department reported the nation’s unemployment rate rose from 9.6% in October to 9.8% in November, MSNBC commentator Mike Barnicle asked Shadegg, a leading member of the right-wing Republican Study Committee, if extending the unemployment payments that were about to expire would produce a more immediate benefit to the economy than extending a tax cut for the wealthiest Americans?

“It’s the creation of jobs that drives the economy” and it is the wealthy that create jobs, Shadegg snapped. If he’d stopped there Shadegg would have had at least one leg to stand on since an argument can be made in support of that position. But instead, the eight-term congressman pushed his argument beyond the limits of good sense.

“Actually,” he said, “the truth is the unemployed will spend as little of (their jobless checks) as they possibly can.” That’s right, Shadegg, who comes from a state that pays the second lowest unemployment benefits in the nation, said that. He thinks the nearly two million jobless Americans who will lose their unemployment benefits by Christmas if Congress doesn’t extend those payments are more likely to squirrel away that money than spend it.

I think that’s nonsense. Marc Morial thinks it’s “hocus pocus” economics. “The marginal propensity for the unemployed to spend their unemployment compensation is very high,” the National Urban League president told me. “It’s pre-K economics that people will spend unemployment compensation payments on the necessities of life.”

He’s right. An extension of unemployment benefits will give jobless people some badly needed survival funds. That spending will buttress consumer demand for those essential services. And that demand will give employers an immediate infusion of money that will help grow their businesses.

Obama wants to permanently extend the 2001 Bush-era tax cuts for families making less than $250,000 a year. Republicans want the tax cuts extended for everyone. To get that, GOP legislators are holding hostage Obama’s request for money to extend the unemployment benefits of people who have lost their jobs during this recession. While the two sides appear headed to a compromise that extends the jobless benefits and tax cut Republicans want, Shadegg’s disdain for the unemployed still makes me want to holler.

He justifies the Republican’s willingness to let the jobless benefits lapse with the nonsense he spouted. He apparently didn’t hear what the chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, the world’s leading provider of research and data to capital markets, told the U.S. Senate Finance Committee back in April.

“It is also important that policymakers provide emergency benefits to those who will lose their jobs this year. No form of the fiscal stimulus has proved more effective during the past two years than emergency (unemployment insurance) benefits,” Mark Zandi said. “This economic boost is large because financially stressed unemployed workers spend benefits quickly, as opposed to saving them.”

But, of course, that’s a no-brainer to just about everyone but Shadegg and his Republican colleagues who are playing political games with the lives of millions of unemployed Americans — and using voodoo economics to justify their callousness.

Why lame-duck Congress will approve Obama's arms treaty

2010-11-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Despite the public claims that it won’t happen, there’s a very good chance the Senate will approve the nuclear arms treaty during its lame-duck session.

Democrats want it done because President Obama believes America’s national security hinges on getting the agreement he struck with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ratified. Enough Republicans ultimately will vote for it because the quid pro quo Sen. Jon Kyl, RAriz., is squeezing out of the White House is a financial deal he can’t get once the newly elected Tea Party Republicans take office in January.

Sixty-seven votes are needed in the Senate to ratify the treaty. Democrats currently control 59 and will need the support of eight Republicans to approve the treaty during the lame-duck session. But in the next Congress, the math becomes more difficult when the Democratic majority in the Senate shrinks to 53.

As the GOP whip, Kyl is responsible for mustering Republicans to vote for or against actions that come before the Senate. For much of Obama’s time in the White House, GOP senators have mostly said “no” to anything the president has wanted, a recalcitrance that has helped brand Republicans “the party of ‘no.’ ” But as Obama presses senators to ratify the nuclear arms treaty, Kyl appears to be angling to give the president what he wants in return for something the senator craves.

“I think there is no chance that a treaty can be completed in the lame-duck session,” Kyl told MSNBC shortly after Obama hosted a bipartisan gathering of high-profile supporters of the new strategic arms limitation treaty.

The agreement would cut by nearly one-third the numbers of long-range nuclear warheads Russia and the U.S. can have. It also would permit each country to inspect the other’s nuclear arsenal to ensure compliance.

Kyl is withholding his support — and that of many of the Republican senators he commands — because he wants the Obama administration to guarantee that at least $185 billion will be spent over the next 10 years on modernizing what will remain of America’s nuclear arsenal along with the submarines, bombers and missiles that are used to deliver them.

This surge in spending is a nuclear earmark, the kind of federal spending increase that will be hard to broker when Tea Partiers such as Kentucky senator-elect Rand Paul join the next Congress. “I think we need to have more discussion on it, but it doesn’t sound like I’m probably going to be in favor of that,” Paul said of the nuclear arms treaty during an appearance on ABC’s This Week With Christiane Amanpour shortly after the midterm elections.

Like other Tea Party Republicans who helped the GOP win control of the House and sharply reduce the size of the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, Paul is determined to cut the federal budget, including military spending. While national defense is important, “there’s still waste in the military budget,” which has to be smaller, he said.

Tea Party opposition to earmarks has already forced Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans to support a two-year ban on the funding of senators’ pet projects.

So, if Kyl is going to get the huge spending increase he wants in the nation’s nuclear weapons program, he’ll have to cut a deal to ratify the nuclear arms treaty during the lame-duck session, or risk having Tea Party Republicans scuttle such an agreement in the new Congress.

Left unfixed, problems of black males will hurt all Americans

2010-11-16T06:00:00.000-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

As I read the Council of the Great City Schools report on the problems of black males in urban schools, my mind raced back to a day in the fall of 2006 when I took my then-13-year-old daughter to her piano lesson.

Arriving early, we stopped at a Friendly’s restaurant to get ice cream. When the young black male who waited on us said the cones cost $3.32, I handed him a $5 bill. But as he tried to input this payment, his cash register malfunctioned and wouldn’t tell him the correct change.

The young man’s eyes glistened as he mumbled barely audible sounds of his struggle to manually compute the difference. Then, as customers in line behind us began to voice their frustration, my daughter threw him a lifeline. “You owe us $1.68,” she said softly.

Outside the store she asked quizzically: “What school does he go to? He’s a lot older than I am, and he couldn’t figure that out.” He could have gone to just about any school.

“Black males continue to perform lower than their peers throughout the country on almost every indicator,” the Washington-based Council of the Great Schools, which represents the nation’s 66 largest urban public school systems, said in a recent report.

While much of the news coverage of the council’s gut-wrenching report has focused on the failure of nearly all fourth- and eighth-grade black males to read and do math at proficiency levels, less attention has been paid to its conclusion that educational improvements alone won’t fix this problem. What’s needed, the council said, is a “concerted national effort to improve the education, social and employment outcomes of African-American males.”

If you think that’s just a warmed-over pitch for more funding of a liberal agenda, you’re being shortsighted. In 13 years, minorities will be a majority of this nation’s children younger than 18. In just 29 years, most working-age Americans will be black, Hispanic, Asian or Native American. This nation will be hard-pressed to remain the world’s leading economy if a sizeable — and growing — share of its potential workforce is slipping through the gaping holes in our education system.

“It has not become apparent to America yet that we are all in this boat together. In the past it was easier for people to think if something happened in that part of the boat occupied by blacks, it wouldn’t impact the whole ship,” Nat Irvin, a futurist at the University of Louisville, said of the council’s report.

“If people think the nation can continue to do well economically in about 30 years when minorities become the largest population group,” and nothing is done to address the black male education problem, “they’re kidding themselves,” he said.

A comprehensive plan is needed — one that recognizes the connection between the social and economic environment from which these underachieving students come and the educational setting into which they are sent.

The council wants a White House conference to address this crisis. People need to recognize this is a problem that can’t be solved with generalized education reform. It demands a targeted effort to help black males.

If the nation continues this neglect, underachieving black males will produce enough dead weight to sink the American ship of state.

Obama should fight GOP, not cave in to it

2010-11-09T06:00:00.001-05:00

By DeWayne Wickham

“Don’t wave a white flag, hoist the battle flag.”

That’s what Barack Obama should do in the wake of the drubbing Democrats got in the midterm congressional election. The president should ignore all the hand-wringing advice he’s getting from people who say he must move to the political center after Republican victories gave the GOP control of the House and narrowed the Democrats’ majority in the Senate.

Republicans won by making a hard turn to the right. They excited their base with nearly two years of legislative guerrilla tactics that frustrated the efforts of Democrats to get much done in Congress. They were buoyed by the Tea Party movement, whose call for spending cuts and smaller government resonated with middle-of-the-road voters who saw Congress’ Democratic majority as ineffective.

The lesson to be learned from this is not that Democrats should surrender to the right wing. It is that they should put up a better fight to move their agenda.
Instead of giving in to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent $32 million on issue ads that demonized him — and stigmatized congressional Democrats who didn’t distance themselves from the president. Obama should urge wealthy supporters to create a fund from anonymous donors, much like the one the chamber amassed, to challenge GOP dogma.

Rather than kowtow to Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, who said the GOP’s top priority should be to keep Obama from being re-elected, the president should put the Kentucky senator in his crosshairs. McConnell will have his hands full trying to keep newly elected Tea Party senators from undermining his leadership. Democrats should do everything they can to pour fuel on that simmering fire.

Of course there are those who would argue that if Democrats follow this course of action, Congress won’t get much done over the next two years. But that appears to be what McConnell has in mind anyway. Scuttling the Democrat’s’ legislative agenda will be a major of part of McConnell’s campaign to unseat Obama in 2012.

To win a second term, Obama must begin now to reinvigorate his base. He has to show voters who put him in the Oval Office that he’ll fight Republicans, not appease them. Moving to the center won’t do that. The political center is pipe dream, a swamp into which the GOP hopes to trap Democrats as it moves farther further to the right. On Election Day, those voters who claim to occupy the middle ground of American politics cast their lot with leftist Democrats or right-wing Republicans, not some centrist political party.

They align themselves with the party they believe has the best ideas and the ability to get something done. Over the past two years, Democrats wasted the victories they scored in 2008 with infighting and a penchant for retreating when Republicans attacked. So while the GOP rallied their its base, Democrats disappointed theirs.

The election results show that “no one party will be able to dictate where we go from here, that we must find common ground in order to set — in order to make progress on some uncommonly difficult challenges,” Obama said at his post-election press news conference.

He’s wrong. What the election results show is that voters will reward a party that fights tenaciously for what it believes — especially when the opposition waffles in the face of such a challenge and appears to reach for a white flag.

Our democracy is threatened by low voter participation

2010-11-02T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

ORLANDO — Three days before Election Day, Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson sent out an e-mail urging his supporters to place over 50,000 calls the next day to help him stave off defeat. With polls showing Grayson trailing his Republican opponent in the closing days of the campaign, the first-term Democrat was beating the bushes for votes.

Saying his backers had made 50,000 calls a week earlier, Grayson wrote: “Tomorrow, we’re going to top that.” But the great test for Grayson and Daniel Webster, his Republican challenger, was not how many people their campaign workers talked to, but rather how many of them they could get to actually vote.

In the 2008 presidential election that swept Barack Obama into the White House, just 63 percent of Americans who were eligible to vote cast ballots, according to Curtis Gans, director of American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate.

And get this: 2008 was a good year. In fact, you have to go all the way back to 1960 when a greater percentage of Americans of voting age – 64.8 percent – took part in a presidential election. Voter turnout in midterm elections, Gans told me, is usually a lot lower.

Despite the seismic shift in the political landscape that pundits predicted the midterm election would bring, Gans held out little hope for a corresponding increase in political participation in the world’s greatest democracy. That’s because one in four Americans hasn’t registered to vote, and more than a third of citizens who are eligible to vote have failed to do so in every presidential election since 1920.

When you dissect the numbers, as Gans does with great precision, it’s easy to understand why he worries about the balkanization of America’s body politic. “It suggests that as voter participation declines our politics becomes increasingly the providence of the interested and the zealous,” he said.

Gans worries about the fraying of the bonds that link this nation’s governed to our government. I worry that government will increasingly derive its powers not from “the consent of the governed,” but from the apathy and quiescence of non-voters. I worry that government by the fringe is fast replacing the “government of the people, by the people, for the people” that Abraham Lincoln spoke of so eloquently in his Gettysburg Address.

I fear that as voter participation dwindles, America’s democracy will give way to a government that’s controlled by those who shout the loudest, are the most intimidating or angriest members of society. It’ll become the providence of the winners of an ideological tug-of-war that has little to do with democracy and a lot to do with uncompromising people wanting to have their way.

Sadly, there is no middle ground among American voters. There are just avowed liberals and conservatives and the so-called independents, who waver between these two poles until they pick sides on Election Day.

The outcome of this year’s midterm election, like that of the 2008 presidential contest, will produce short-term gain. But the warring between political parties that follows chips away at the underpinnings of our democracy — an erosion that threatens its collapse.

Greater voter participation can keep our democracy from imploding. It’ll bring more diversity — ideological, racial and cultural — to the voting booth. And it can force the extremes of the left and right to put the good of the nation ahead of their selfish quest for political gain.

Tea Party may sink with Republican ship

2010-10-26T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

I just read the NAACP’s report on the links between racial and religious bigots and the Tea Party, and there’s nothing in it that makes my skin begin to crawl, but I still think there’s good reason for concern.

“We know the majority of Tea Party supporters are sincere, principled people of good will,” NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous said in the opening line of his forward to this 94-page report. In other words, the Tea Party is not the Ku Klux Klan.

Of course, it’s the job of the NAACP, which was created 101 years ago to combat racism, to keep track of things like this and to sound the alarm when it believes bigots have reached a critical mass anywhere in this society.

The Tea Party has some bigots in its ranks, the civil rights group’s report concludes, but there’s no evidence that they have a commanding presence in the group. In fact, Jealous said Tea Party leaders have taken welcome “first steps” to weed out racist images and actions at their gatherings.

That’s the good news about this fringe political movement.

The bad news is that it is less an independent voice for political reform than an appendage of the Republican Party, to which it has attached itself like barnacles to the bottom of a rusting ship. The Tea Party is the GOP’s life raft.

Don’t be fooled by the political gains Republicans are expected to make in the midterm elections. The GOP is on the critical list. The wins it will score, possibly enough to give it control of the House of Representatives, will be short lived. They are the dying gasp of a political party that has become too intolerant and too white in a nation whose population soon will be dominated by Hispanics, blacks and Asians.

Today’s Republican Party looks — and sometimes acts — more like the National Party that foisted apartheid on South Africa back in 1948, than the GOP that won 32% of the black vote in the 1960 presidential election.

It is the nation’s deep-seated economic problems that have given life to the Tea Party movement, which in turn has removed the “do not resuscitate” sign from the Republican Party.

The Tea Party didn’t start out as a wing of the GOP, but in aligning itself and its interests with the Republican Party in the midterm elections, it has effectively become just that. And once in office, Tea Party members (to be distinguished from Republican candidates who were backed by the Tea Party) will have no choice but to toe the GOP line in Congress — or become powerless backbenchers.

And worse, the efforts the Tea Party has made to bring racial and ethnic diversity to its ranks will be severely compromised by the movement’s alignment with a Republican Party that is widely rejected by black and Hispanic voters.

This is worrisome because, as Jealous points out in the NAACP report, “ties between Tea Party factions and acknowledged racist groups endure.”

It’s possible the Tea Party made a smart move in joining up with the Republican Party. As the GOP’s political partner, it could be in the best position to inherit the lion’s share of its followers when the GOP finally implodes.

Or it could have made a big mistake in hitching a ride on a dying star.

Obama's presidency, not Congress, is GOP's top target in midterm election

2010-10-19T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As I watched Barack Obama walk alone across the south lawn of the White House to his waiting helicopter, I had something of a political awakening.

It was in that moment, following the president’s one-hour meeting with me and nine other black columnists, that I understood the campaign strategy Republicans have cleverly crafted and their Democratic counterparts are struggling to counter. For the GOP, the central issue of the midterm election is Obama.

It didn’t start out that way. Early on, the Republican strategy was to avoid any mention of the president as they probed the political landscape for vulnerable House and Senate Democrats whose defeat would put control of the Congress in Republican hands. Back then Obama’s job approval rating was high and most Americans thought the nation was headed in the right direction.

But after months of withering, right-wing attacks on the Obama-led efforts to bail the nation out of the economic mess that took root when Republicans controlled the White House and Congress, and a nagging concern about broken promises among elements of Obama’s political base, Republicans are using the president’s declining popularity to rally support for GOP congressional candidates.

They are buoyed in this effort by those on the rabid fringe of the right wing who chant: “I want my country back,” as if slaves have taken over the planation. And they are financed to a great degree by right-wing donors who pour money — much of it untraceable — into the GOP coffers.

“If the election is posed as a choice between Republican policies that got us into this mess and (my) policies that are getting us out of this mess, then I think we can do very well,” Obama said during his meeting with members of The Trotter Group, an organization of black columnists. “And, frankly, I would feel very confident about our position right now if it weren’t for the fact that these third-party independent groups, funded by corporate special interests and run by Republican operatives, without disclosing where that money is coming from, are outspending our candidates” by big margins.

Obama said the floodgates were opened for this massive infusion of money into political campaigns by what he called the Supreme Court’s “profoundly faulty” decision last year in the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling. Now money, gushing in from right-wing donors who want their country back, is fueling Republicans’ hope of winning control on Congress this year — and the White House in 2012.

To stop them, Democrats must energize their base. They’ve got to get young whites and Hispanics to the polls in numbers that are not usually seen in midterm elections by making them understand what’s at stake if Republicans win the Congress.

And they’ve got to make blacks understand that while Obama is not on the ballot next month, he is under attack.

“Our numbers and our ability to organize the grassroots have to counter those millions of dollars” Republicans are using “to try to take this election,” Obama told the black columnists.

A day earlier, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies said a large black turnout could put a big dent in the loses Democrats are expected to suffer in the midterm election.

But that won’t happen unless Democrats make it clear that what is at stake in this election, more than the Congress, is Barack Obama’s presidency.

Obama rises above the racial swamp

2010-10-15T18:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

WASHINGTON — As I sat with a small group of black columnists a few feet away from the Oval Office waiting to meet with President Barack Obama, I couldn’t help but think about William Monroe Trotter.

The publisher of The Guardian, a black Boston newspaper, Trotter was booted out of the White House in 1914 after challenging Woodrow Wilson’s decision to permit the segregation of federal offices in the nation’s capital.

Now, 96 years later, our organization of black columnists — called the Trotter Group — carried the memory of this fiery black journalist with us to our meeting with the nation’s first black president. Trotter would be proud, and no doubt appreciate the irony of this moment.

This nation’s racial divide was a wedge issue for Wilson, a transplanted Southern Democrat who did a stint as president of Princeton University and New Jersey governor before making a successful run for the White House in 1912. He wooed blacks like Trotter and W.E.B. DuBois away from the Republican Party with a commitment to support their demand for racial equality. Back then blacks were wedded to the GOP in much the same way we now support Democrats.

But once he got into the White House, Wilson pandered to the other side of that racial divide by instituting Jim Crow practices for federal workers.
Obama on the other hand tries mightily to rise above this nation’s racial swamp. It was a remarkable coalition of blacks, Hispanics, young whites and Asians — a mix of people who look much more like this nation’s demographic future than its past — that put him in the White House.

Ever conscious of this, Obama refuses to see race — or racism — where so many of us think it can be found.

When I asked during our one-hour meeting with him in the Roosevelt Room of the White House how he thinks the nation should observe the 150th anniversary of the Civil War next year, the president didn’t take the bait.

"I think it’s important for everybody to know that history," he deadpanned. "And if it’s presented in a smart and thoughtful and balanced way, I think it could be beneficial. And if it’s not presented in a smart and balanced way, it could end up being divisive."

Not satisfied with that answer, I tried to tie the old fight to one that rages now. "There are some who say when they hear people chant, ‘We want our country back, and they talk about states’ rights, that for them the Civil War is unsettled business," I told the president.

But instead of taking the path of a divider, as Wilson did with Trotter, Obama offered a bridge-building response.

"I think it’s important not to see race behind every disagreement with me. There’s a long tradition of federalism that predates the civil rights battles of the ’60s (and) of the Civil War. There’s a long tradition of suspicion of a powerful federal government that started with Thomas Jefferson and the founding of the country.

"And so, I think that my approach is always to take people at face value. If they say that they’re concerned about a government that’s grown too large and oppressive, then rather than suggest that they’ve got some illegitimate motives, I’ll take that at their word."

"I think that there’s a way of engaging people in their own terms about the things that they care about," he said. "I may not persuade them, but I continue to have faith that over time, if you make good policies and you try to explain to them as clearly as you can," the American people will understand.

I’m not sure he’s right about that. But I think there’s something to his determination not to give in to this nation’s racial demons the way Woodrow Wilson did.

And on this point, I’m sure William Monroe Trotter would agree.

Real life impact of social media bigger than movie

2010-10-05T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

If you want to learn something about the impact of social media, you might try discerning fact from fiction in "The Social Network," a new movie that purports to tell the story of how Facebook came into existence.

But if what you’re looking for is a quick primer on the real-life impact that social media have had on our society, you don’t have to spend two hours in a dark theater surrounded by people who may not be your (Facebook) friends. Just type the names Tyler Clementi and Anthony Graber into a search engine.

What happened to Clementi and Graber is a troubling commentary on an individual’s expectation of privacy in a world overrun by technology that all too often peers behind the curtains of our lives. But their stories also are proof of just how much social media have reinforced Marshall McLuhan’s prophesy that “the medium is the message.”

Sadly, Clementi committed suicide after his roommate and another student allegedly used a webcam to surreptitiously transmit a sexual encounter the 18-year-old Rutgers University freshman had in his dorm room with another male. The roommate, Dharun Ravi, then used his Twitter account to say he would broadcast another live sex act involving Clementi.

Apparently distraught by this humiliating invasion of his privacy, Clementi used his cellphone to make a final posting to his Facebook page: “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.” Moments later he plunged from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River.

As tragic as what happened to Clementi is, his story has become an international cause célèbre, in no small part because it played out in cyberspace. Clementi complained about the video streaming of his sex act on a Yahoo gay message board, New York’s Daily News reported. And less than two weeks after he used Facebook to bid this life adieu, a Facebook page created in his honor had over 106,000 supporters.

Graber, on the other hand, wasn’t victimized by a peeping tom; he was accused of invading another person’s privacy. The victim in his case, prosecutors in Harford County, Md., said, was the state trooper who arrested Graber earlier this year.

Graber was stopped while popping wheelies and riding at 80 mph in a 65-mph stretch of Interstate 95. The officer who pulled him over, wearing civilian clothes, jumped out of his unmarked car with his gun drawn. Only after ordering Graber to get off his bike did he identify himself as a law enforcement officer.

All of this was captured on the helmet camera Graber wore that day. He posted the video on YouTube a week later. Soon after that, the 25-year-old Maryland Air National Guardsman was arrested and charged with violating the state’s arcane wiretap law, which prohibits recording a private conversation without the consent of everyone involved.

It didn’t take long for Graber’s case to be propelled through cyberspace — or for the Maryland attorney general’s office to say cops who perform their official duties in public shouldn’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy. Eventually, the charges against Graber were dropped.

Just as technology has turned our vast world into a global village, social media networks have given us access to a virtual town square. Clementi and his tormentors jockeyed for space there. Grab-er used it to rally people to his defense.

And because of this rapidly expanding medium, life for the rest of us will never be the same.

Will Obama's promise to talk to enemies work with Iran?

2010-09-28T06:00:00.004-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

It’s hard to imagine that when Barack Obama pledged during his presidential campaign to hold direct talks with America’s enemies he could have contemplated the back and forth he just had with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ok, the exchange between the American president and his Iranian counterpart fell short of a direct conversation. The two men talked at, not to, each other while in New York for the United Nations’ annual General Assembly. But their exchange of barbs came shortly before an expected high-level face-to-face encounter next month between Iranian and U.S. diplomats to discuss the contentious issue of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.

It also followed rumored, under the radar, contacts between officials of the two countries’ embassies in Afghanistan that hold out the possibility of cooperation in finding a political settlement to the long-running conflict in that country.

So, while he actually didn’t go mano-a-mano with Ahmadinejad, Obama appears to be making good on his promise, at least in the case of Iran, to talk to this nation’s adversaries – a commitment that probably has him wondering at times: “What was I thinking?”

That question must have flickered through Obama’s mind when Ahmandinejad suggested the U.S. government might have orchestrated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that took the lives of nearly 3,000 people in this country to save a faltering economy and justify a military presence in the Middle East.

Then, Ahmadinejad added injury to insult by claiming a majority of Americans share that view. Nevermind there is no known polling data to support that charge – or even found more than 15% of Americans who agree with it – the Iranian leader didn’t waiver in espousing this idea.

And neither did Obama in rejecting it. “It was offensive. It was hateful,” Obama said of Ahmadinejad’s speech in an interview with the BBC that was broadcasted into Iran.

Ahmadinejad called Obama’s response “amateurish,” as if the two men were involved in a global game of trash talking.

“The power in Iran is segmented. He’s trying to placate the more right wing elements in Iran” by using the U.S. government as a straw man, said James Steele, a political science professor at North Carolina A&T State University.

That’s a plausible explanation for Ahmandinejad’s charge. Another is that he is a mental case.

I’m not talking about the kind of insanity that would get him a one-way ticket to an asylum. But he may well suffer from the kind of mental disorder that is driven by the fanaticism of a religious zealot or fervor of an unyielding ideologue. In fact, Ahmandinejad might actually fit both bills.

Since taking office in 2005, he has used the annual General Assembly as a staging area for his increasingly vitriolic attacks on the United States. Until now, his most confounding attack came when he accused this country of “nuclear apartheid” for trying to deny Iran the nuclear weapons Ahmandinejad has repeatedly said it doesn’t want.

It is the unsettled question of the intent of Iran’s nuclear program that leaves Obama little choice but to keep talking to Iran – at least for now. If the talks next month, which will include Germany, Britain, France, Russia and China, produce meaningful results the exchange he had with Ahmandinejad will a diplomatic blip.

If, however, no progress is made toward proving that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons Obama must decide what to do when talk fails with a nation that has Ahmandinejad at its helm.

Withers a bit player in FBI campaign against King

2010-09-21T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Asked about the recent revelation that famed civil rights photographer Ernest Withers spied on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the FBI, Andrew Young downplayed the significance of this betrayal. “The movement was transparent and didn’t have anything to hide anyway,” the King disciple and former Atlanta mayor told The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal.

It might not have had anything to hide, but it had a lot to protect.

From December 1963 until his assassination on April 4, 1968, King was the target of a secret FBI surveillance that, ostensibly, sought to determine whether his efforts to gain fairness and equality for blacks was influenced by communists. But it quickly became what the FBI would later admit was an “unjustified and improper” attempt to discredit King, according to the 1976 report of a U.S. Senate committee that investigated these abuses.

That effort took the FBI far afield of its mission. In 1964, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover approved a plan by the bureau’s domestic intelligence division to replace King with “a new national Negro leader.” After approving it, Hoover said he was “glad to see that light has finally ” come to the unit, which was primarily responsible for uncovering spies and counterintelligence threats.

Withers, who had nearly unfettered access to King and his small circle of advisers, was just a bit player in the FBI campaign. This doesn’t make the treachery Withers is accused of any less despicable, but history would not be well served if his actions weren’t framed in a broader context.

While the FBI never found evidence that King was being influenced by communists — which is what likely moved Young to say the movement had nothing to hide — the FBI’s push to undermine King’s leadership left the movement he led with a lot to protect.

Tipped off about his whereabouts , the FBI bugged King’s telephones and hotel bedrooms for years and tried to use the overheard conversations to pit other civil rights leaders against him, break up his marriage and to get journalists to expose his personal failings. And when the worst of what it got amounted to little more than salacious pillow talk, the FBI continued to press its attack on King — even after his death.

In 1969, the bureau discussed using information about King’s “personal behavior” ” to keep Congress from creating a national holiday in his honor.
All of this might come as a surprise to many people in this country, half of whom were born after King’s untimely death 42 years ago. After being stalled in Congress for 15 years, the King holiday bill became law in 1983. Cities large and small have enshrined his name — if not a memory of the FBI’s vendetta against him — to street signs and schools.

Today, people on the ideological left and right lay claim to the tenets of the “I Had a Dream” address that King gave during the 1963 March on Washington. But two days after King riveted the world with those words, William Sullivan, who headed the FBI’s domestic intelligence unit, called it “a demagogic speech.”

To the extent that Withers provided Hoover and his G-Men with information that allowed them to track King’s movements and peer behind the curtains of his personal life, he must be condemned.

But it is the FBI — not the black photographer who died in 2007 — that deserves the lion’s share of our outrage for what was done to King at its behest.

A civil rights victory Republicans won't claim

2010-09-14T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

You can bet it won’t take 142 years for Republicans to run away from this civil rights victory.

The recent ruling by a California federal judge that the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” law is unconstitutional comes in a 6-year-old case brought by Log Cabin Republicans, a fringe group within the GOP that champions gay and lesbian rights. The policy, which allows gays and lesbians to serve in the military as long as they keep secret their sexual orientation, has been in place since 1993.

Shortly before this “don’t ask, don’t tell” decision was rendered, Republicans were consumed with talk of rolling back a civil rights victory they won in 1868 with ratification of the 14th amendment. Among other things, that constitutional amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” who are subject to this country’s jurisdiction.

For nearly a century and a half, Republicans took great pride in claiming this important addition to our nation’s founding document. But their rabid attempts to stem the flow of illegal aliens across our borders have pushed many leading Republicans to call for making the children of these people an exception to this amendment.

Now many of those very same Republicans might soon be doing battle with a wing of their party that has found little space for its members inside the GOP pup tent. But in celebrating his group’s legal victory, Log Cabin Executive Director R. Clarke Cooper directed his initial fire at Democrats, who overwhelmingly back congressional efforts to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The Senate’s Democratic leadership, he said in a partisan shot that seemed intended to forestall the inevitable GOP infighting, failed to schedule a vote on a repeal measure after the Senate Armed Services Committee passed it in May.

That was a weak attempt by Cooper to deflect attention away from the fact that 11 of 12 Republicans on the Armed Services Committee voted against the repeal measure and Arizona Sen. John McCain, its ranking GOP member, threatened a filibuster if it was brought up for a vote on the Senate floor. Cooper also failed to mention that when a similar bill was passed in the House, only five Republicans voted for it while 168 GOP lawmakers voted against it.

Ostensibly, Republicans say they oppose taking any action on “don’t ask, don’t tell” until the Pentagon completes a study on the impact of its repeal on the military. But that’s a smoke screen for their long-standing opposition to gays and lesbians serving in this nation’s armed services. If Republicans win control of either House of Congress in November, there’s little chance that a bill ending “don’t ask, don’t tell” will win final passage.

But even as the GOP lawmakers distance themselves from the federal court victory won by their Log Cabin colleagues, there’s a strong likelihood the question of whether gays and lesbians can openly serve in the military will be decided by the courts — not on Capitol Hill. Even so, a final adjudication of this matter could be years away.

In the meantime, Republicans will be forced to decide whether they want to wage a two-front campaign to deny birthright citizenship to children born in this country to illegal immigrants and fight a rear-guard battle to thwart the efforts of gays and lesbians to serve openly in this nation’s armed forces.

It’s times like these that the party of Abraham Lincoln seems to have lost its way.

Voters should send Tea Partiers to early political grave

2010-09-07T06:00:00.003-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

With Labor Day behind us, the nation’s voters now are expected to treat more seriously the election campaigns they thus far have given short shrift.

To say that up until now Americans have not paid much attention to the election process would be a reassuring explanation for the success of the Tea Party candidates who espouse views that threaten to turn this nation and its founding document upside down.

Tea Party-backed candidates who have won the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Kentucky, Alaska, Utah, Nevada and Colorado harbor views on a range of issues — like immigration, and the Second and Fourteenth Amendments — that ought to frighten thinking voters into the arms of their opponents.

Rand Paul, the Tea Party-backed GOP Senate candidate in Kentucky, blurted out during post-election interviews that he thinks Congress went too far in outlawing racial discrimination by owners of private property. He also said neighborhood associations and private business owners should be free to discriminate on the basis of race. He’s since backtracked on both of these positions with doubletalk that falls far short of what sounds like a true change of heart.

And Paul has yet to retreat from his support of a call for Congress to find a way to undo the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship. In 1856, the know Nothing Party’s platform called for a waiting period of 21 years before an immigrant could become a citizen. Paul and other candidates, like Utah’s Tea Party-Republican Mike Lee, think children born in this country to illegal aliens shouldn’t automatically become American citizens.

Nevermind that the Constitution says “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens. They want to undo that constitutional provision. The Tea Party-GOP fusion candidates in Kentucky, Alaska, Utah, Colorado and Nevada back Arizona’s immigration law, which for them is an acceptable usurpation of the federal government’s authority.

And then there is Sharron Angle. In a throwback to the Wild West, the Nevada GOP Senate candidate has repeatedly talked about the possibility that people who dislike the actions of Congress might resort to a “Second Amendment (right to bear arms) remedy ” to assuage their discontent. It’s the kind of warped sense of entitlement that plunged this nation into a bloody civil war.

With the general election less than 60 days away voters ought to focus on reversing the meteoric rise of the Tea Partiers, who are the linear successors to the aptly named anti-immigration, Know Nothing Movement that flourished for a brief time during the 1850s. It elected eight governors, 43 members of the U.S. House and U.S. five senators during that time. But it ultimately collapsed from the weight of its own intolerance and blurred political vision.

The Tea Party Movement claims to be rooted in the traditional — but long compromised — Republican ideals of fiscal responsibility, small government and free markets. But its support of Arizona’s immigration law signals an intolerance of Hispanics that mirrors the Know Nothing Movement’s attempt to keep Catholics out of this country.

Left alone, there’s a good chance the Tea Party will sputter out of existence as quickly as the Know Nothing Movement did. But that may not be fast enough, given the stand Tea Party candidates are taking on issues.

Voters should speed up that process on Election Day.

Jackson, Sharpton, not Beck, have greatest impact with demonstration

2010-08-31T06:00:00.004-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

The important thing to remember about the recent anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech is not the debate over whether Glenn Beck hijacked the moment by holding a rally on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

While the conservative talk host’s appropriation of the scene of King’s most famous address offends the spirit of the civil rights leader’s lifelong challenge to those whose lips drip “with the words of interposition and nullification,” it was just a noisy subplot. The day’s more important event came in two other acts.

One, which occurred a short distance from Beck’s rally at Washington’s Dunbar High School, was led by the Rev. Al Sharpton. The other, in Detroit, was headed by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Both, like the 1963 march at which King gave his famous speech, were primarily demonstrations for jobs and the dignity that steady work gives a person.

Then, as now, blacks were hardest hit by joblessness. In 1963, the civil rights movement was largely outside of the nation’s political mainstream. It didn’t come in from the cold until after passage of the landmark civil rights bills of the 1960s. That’s when people like Andrew Young, Parren Mitchell, Richard Hatcher and Marion Barry traded their marching shoes for business suits.

In recent years, the civil rights movement has been more an appendage of the Democratic Party than an independent actor in the struggle for black enfranchisement. But the decision by Jackson, Sharpton and a supporting cast of civil rights groups, backed by organized labor, to “wave the bloody shirt” in their struggle for jobs for blacks, whose unemployment rate is double that of whites, signals a willingness to publicly pressure a Democratic-led White House and Congress.

“Many of us realize that without the real dramatic impact of some street demonstrations they (government leaders) don’t get it,” Sharpton said. “We’ve got to put some public pressure on them they’ll deal with our issues.”

Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally was a thinly disguised act of political chest-thumping by the “Tea Party” movement, which is a 21st century incarnation of the anti-immigration Know-Nothing Movement of the 1850s. Like its predecessor, the Tea Party will be short-lived.

More long lasting, I hope, will be the reawakening of this nation’s civil rights movement. The King anniversary demonstrations were a call for national action that organizers say will be followed up with other efforts between now and Election Day to rally blacks and their white supporters to the polls. That’ll do more to push this nation’s governing Democratic majority to attack the problem of black unemployment than quiet backroom negotiations.

“Congress — Washington must move from destruction and obstruction to the reconstruction of our economy,” Jackson said in his address at the Detroit rally. And Democrats in Congress have to do more to end the disproportionate impact of this nation’s ailing economy on its core constituency.

Coming as they do in an election year, the civil rights rallies have a greater potential to impact decision-making in Congress than Beck’s Lincoln Memorial appeal to the Tea Party movement. Sharpton and Jackson hope to use the momentum of their rallies to spur their supporters to the polls.

But if Democrats want this vote to hoist them into the winner’s circle — as it has done so often in the past — they must give blacks a compelling reason to do so.

Dr. Laura's n-word rant a window onto her twisted mind

2010-08-24T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

I’m going to talk about the flap over Laura Schlessinger’s use of the n-word without once calling her the r-word.

The nationally-syndicated radio talk show host said the n-word 11 times during a recent program in response to a black woman who called in to complain about the racially-tinged things some of her white husband’s friends say around her.

The caller was looking for relationship advice. What she got from Schlessinger was a cacophony of the word many blacks consider a hate-filled pejorative, especially when used by whites. Schlessinger rattled off the n-word easily in suggesting blacks are schizophrenic when it comes to its use.

“Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is nigger, nigger, nigger,” she said. “I don’t get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it’s a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it’s affectionate. It’s very confusing.”

But to an advice expert that shouldn’t be any more confusing than women who recoil when a man calls them the b-word; but laugh it off when a girlfriend does the same thing. Or, more confusing than the outrage gays show when a heterosexual calls them the f-word; but treats it as a term of endearment when it comes from another homosexual.

Anyone smarter than a nitwit understands that words can take on different a meaning, depending on who uses them. But Schlessinger’s failure to acknowledge what most first-year psychology majors understand isn’t what makes me think she’s got some bigotry coursing through her veins. It is what followed her n-word rant.

“If you’re that hypersensitive about color and don’t have a sense of humor, don’t marry out of your race,” Schlessinger said. That sounds to me like the good doctor is saying the caller should just grin and bear it when her white husband’s friends start talking like they’re at a Ku Klux Klan coffee klatch.

It is Schlessinger’s insinuation that blacks who spend time in the company of whites should expect to be exposed to the racial stereotyping the caller complained about that rubs me raw. And it is Schlessinger’s stereotyping of blacks that makes her vulnerable to a charge of racial prejudice.

Racism is a contorted value system that increasingly takes the form of something far less menacing, like advice from a radio talk show host. It can lurk just beneath the surface when someone says, as Schlessinger did: “a lot of blacks voted for Obama simply ‘cause he was half-black. Didn’t matter what he was gonna do in office, it was a black thing. You gotta know that. That’s not a surprise.”

It is to me.

In every presidential election since 1964, “a lot of blacks” – in fact, the overwhelming majority –voted for the Democratic Party’s candidate. And in 11 of those 12 contests that person was white. So to say blacks voted in great numbers for Obama simply because he is black is not only factually wrong, it’s a crass, racial stereotype.

Even crasser is Schlessinger’s attempt to make herself the victim of her n-word rant. She’ll give up her show in December so she will be free to say what’s on her mind and in her heart, Schlessinger told CNN’s Larry King.

I think that’s exactly what she did when she offered that black caller a piece of her twisted mind.

Obama press secretary attacks president's liberal base

2010-08-17T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

A day after Robert Gibbs opened a second front in the Obama administration’s political warring, Democratic Party Chairman Tim Kaine was triaging the wounds inflicted by the White House press secretary.

Asked how the Democratic National Committee can rally Democrats to the polls in November — after Gibbs blasted party liberals for griping about what the president hasn’t done and for not giving Obama enough credit for what he has accomplished — Kaine offered a surgical response.

“On balance, I liked more than I didn’t,” he said, trying to put a good spin on the front page story in The Hill, a Washington-based newspaper that covers the federal government. In the article, Gibbs called discontented liberals the “professional left” and said some of them “ought to be drug tested” for comparing Obama with George W. Bush.

Kaine, who runs the political arm of the Obama administration, faced a tough job before Gibbs’ rant. With polls divided over whether voters are leaning toward Republicans or Democrats in November’s midterm elections, the press secretary’s fragging of some members of his party’s left wing has made it worse. Self-described liberals voted overwhelmingly for Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

“The rallying of the troops (Democratic voters) is ultimately a function of the troops understanding what’s at stake,” Kaine said, deflecting attention away from his party’s infighting and focusing it instead on the war Democrats are waging with Republicans. “Our job is to explain to people” why the midterm elections are important. That message, he said, will make the choices “plain and stark” for voters.

An early supporter of Obama’s presidential bid, Kaine cut his teeth in the rough-and-tumble world of Virginia politics, where sniping among Democrats has been something of a blood sport in recent years. Somehow he was largely unscathed. He served two terms as mayor of Richmond, and a single term as lieutenant governor and governor before being tapped by Obama to take on the largely thankless job of national party chairman. His selection might prove fortuitous for Democrats, who desperately need a calming influence at their political helm this election season.

“The nub of what he was trying to express is, we Democrats tend to be impatient people.  There isn’t a single constituency within the Democratic Party who says everything has been done” on the issues important to them, Kaine said. “I think Gibbs just expressed that natural frustration that while we’re impatient, let’s at least acknowledge the progress that’s been made.”

That’s the kind of soothing — though hardly exculpatory — explanation of Gibbs’ harsh words that gives Democrats reason to believe they can keep their coalition together long enough to fend off GOP efforts to win back control of both houses of Congress in November.

Kaine said the DNC will spend about $50 million to get out the party’s message that the nation was in a ditch when Obama took office and that the president’s policies are slowly lifting it out. Kaine points to the passage of the health care bill and financial reform legislation — talking points straight out of his party’s election campaign playbook — as proof of that movement.

That might be a good message in a one-front political war. But to make sure that message is heard, Kaine will have to drown out the sounds of the second front Gibbs opened less than three months before voters go to the polls.

Black movie star's daughter hopes porn film will make her famous

2010-08-10T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

While most aspiring actresses try mightily to avoid the casting couch, Montana Fishburne is jumping onto it, proving once again that fame is a drug far too many people seek at any price.

In this case, the 19-year-old daughter of Oscar-nominated actor Laurence Fishburne hopes to become a Hollywood A-lister by launching her film career among the industry's bottom feeders. Her decision to "star" in a pornographic movie being released this month will test whether the path she's taking could be the new low standard for celebrity stature.

Until now, that "honor" belonged to those whose home video of sex with a lover became available for public viewing, often just in time to hype a reality show or rejuvenate a flagging career. "I've watched how successful Kim Kardashian became, and I think a lot of it was due to the release of her sex tape. I'm hoping the same magic will work for me," Fishburne told TMZ.com.

Kardashian catapulted to fame after the 2007 release of a sex tape she made with rapper Ray J, a onetime boyfriend. Though she tried to block the tape's release, Kardashian quickly benefited from the widespread distribution of the salacious video. She has appeared in Harper's Bazaar and on the cover of Playboy.She now has an online shoe company, her own perfume line and the top talent website.

But there's a big difference between the sex tape Kardashian made and Fishburne's purposeful venture into the underworld of porn.

Kardashian made a private sex tape with her boyfriend. Fishburne made a pornographic movie, with a male actor, that is specifically intended for mass distribution. Kardashian stumbled into the murky realm of sex tapes; Fishburne jumped headlong into adult moviemaking. Kardashian is a victim who turned her exploitation to her advantage. Fishburne is a troubled young woman who hopes people will see her as something more than a professional sex peddler.

"I'm impatient about getting well-known and have more opportunities, and this seemed like a great way to get started on it," Fishburne said.

Today, it seems - from YouTube to Twitter to the many faces of reality TV - too many young people will sacrifice their dignity and more for a fleeting shot at fame. This young woman is taking that well-worn path.

Understandably, Fishburne's father is devastated. Though he hasn't spoken publicly about her descent into the adult movie industry, he has apparently signaled his displeasure. "My dad is very upset" and "very hurt," she told TMZ.com.

I understand Laurence Fishburne's pain. His daughter's movie puts her in league with porn stars Linda Lovelace and Jenna Jameson, not A-list actresses such as Angela Bassett, Glenn Close and Sandra Bullock. Montana Fishburne almost certainly will be best remembered for her public acts of debauchery, not the Hollywood career she hopes will follow.

Though the sex tape boosted the celebrity status of Kardashian, she didn't let it define her. But while Fishburne longs for that same celebrity magic, she is taking an even lower road.

"I am not in porn to get into acting," she told People magazine. "I am in porn because I wanted to be in porn."

Fishburne might, for a time, become the darling of the adult film industry. But precious few women who enter that swamp emerge from it unscathed. Sadly, I suspect, Montana Fishburne will be no exception.

Obama goes on The View, bypasses "serious journalism"

2010-08-03T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

The simmering debate over whether Barack Obama did the right thing by going on “The View” centers on whether his foray into the murky ground of daytime television besmirches the dignity of the presidency.

But this concern is a shallow one that turns our attention away from an issue that is deeper and far more troubling.

Nearly 7 million people watched Obama wedge himself onto a couch between Barbara Walters, the show’s creator, and the program’s four co-hosts. The five women, an irascible, eclectic mix of estrogen, didn’t make him squirm during an hour of questioning on the popular program, which resembles more of a coffee klatch than a news show.

Of course, that’s why Obama decided to go on “The View.” With his approval rating sagging badly and his Democratic party hoping to stave off a drubbing in the mid-term congressional elections, the president needs to rally female voters, a critical part of his political base. And “The View” is a good place to go hunting for their support. Women are nearly 80% of the show’s audience.

Obama won 56% of the female vote in the 2008 presidential election. But recent polls show his approval rating among women has dropped below 50%. So as a matter of political strategy, it makes sense for the president to try to reverse this slide on “The View,” rather than on a TV news show.

I know coming from me such an acknowledgement sounds like treasonous talk to those who think presidents should regularly subject themselves to the questions – and judgment – of serious journalists. Even Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a former Democratic Party chairman, objected to the president going on the show.

“I think the president should be accessible, should answer questions that aren’t pre-screened, but I think there should be a little dignity to the presidency,” he said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Rendell compared “The View” to “The Jerry Springer Show,” and then added: “I think the president of the United States has to go on serious shows.”

But it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find truly serious journalists to populate television news shows. The lines between “serious” journalism and news-entertainment has been blurring for years.In 1994, while promoting his latest book, then-CBS news anchor Dan Rather went on the ”Late Show with David Letterman” and exhibited his tobacco spitting skills.

Before being picked to anchor the “CBS Evening News” in 2006, Katie Couric was a guest host of the ‘Tonight Show with Jay Leno.” After taking the job she went on Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central faux news show and joked about giving a free colonoscopy to viewers of her CBS show to beef up its audience.

In 2007, NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams hosted “Saturday Night Live,” the network’s long-running comedy show. And earlier this year, Christiane Amanpour played a TV journalist in the movie “Iron Man 2.” This month she takes over as host of “This Week,” ABC’s real-life Sunday morning news show.

Given this cross-dressing, it’s not surprising that Stewart, the comedian, was ranked right alongside “serious” network anchors in 2008 when Americans were asked which journalist they admire the most.

You can expect the confusion over who’s a real journalist – and what’s a serious news program – to grow as more and more news organizations try to do journalism on the cheap. Using untrained people to provide video to broadcast news outlets and newspapers’ reliance on “citizen journalists” to help fill the void created by the downsizing of their news staffs blurs the line even more.

The short-term financial gain news organizations get from this watering down of the practice of journalism will, in the long run, make it harder for Americans to distinguish the difference between programs like “The View” and a network newscast.

And it will make it increasingly easy for savvy politicians like Obama to avoid answering tough questions from this nation’s dwindling number of truly serious journalists.

Race issue is kyptonite to Obama White House

2010-07-27T02:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

This never would have happened on Louis Martin's watch.

The political "prestige and the stature of the president of the United States among blacks" was his business, Martin told a senator who in the early 1960s resisted his attempt to get John F. Kennedy to appoint a black to the federal bench.

Helping presidents navigate racially sensitive issues was what the one-time black newspaperman did for Democratic Oval Office occupants from Kennedy to Jimmy Carter. He was their "go-to" guy. Martin had deep roots and was well-connected to civil rights activists as well as black politicians.

It was Martin's job to keep the presidents he served from stumbling into a race-baiting ambush like the one Andrew Breitbart sprung on the Obama administration and the NAACP. The right-wing blogger set off racial shockwaves when he released a 2-minute, 38-second video clip from a nearly hour-long speech that Shirley Sherrod, a regional USDA official, gave to a Georgia NAACP branch back in March.

This craftily selected excerpt, which Breitbart says he got from an unnamed source, left the impression Sherrod bragged about withholding assistance from a white family facing foreclosure on their farm. That was enough to cause the Obama administration to demand Sherrod's resignation - without giving her a chance to defend herself. The full version of the speech showed Sherrod actually went out of her way to help save the white family's property.

But this revelation came too late to save Obama - who apologized to Sherrod days later during a 7-minute telephone conversation - from an embarrassing racial episode that left his administration scrambling to explain why it had been so quick to throw her under the bus. The most likely reason is that when it comes to issues of race, the Obama administration is a basket case.

Its racial paranoia, though not without provocation, is exacerbated by the absence of someone in the president's circle of advisers who has the job - and connections - to protect Obama's flank on matters of race. This is a troubling omission that leaves the president vulnerable to the racial portion of the guerrilla warfare right-wingers are waging against him. Many black politicians and civil rights activists whose concerns get short shrift are frustrated by a White House that handles racial matters like they're political kryptonite.

Obama can't expect his civil rights allies to buffer him from such attacks. The NAACP blamed Fox News for snookering it into calling Sherrod's words in the truncated version of the speech "shameful." That knee-jerk response came before the civil rights group bothered to view the entire video of Sherrod's address to one of its own chapters.

For years Martin helped Democratic presidents avoid such missteps. But in an administration that believes simply repeating that Obama "is not the president of black America" keeps him from hitting the racial tripwire, there is no one in the West Wing with Martin's portfolio.

That's too bad - and might be politically fatal.

In the multi-front war Obama's political enemies are forcing this nation's first black president to fight, he has left his most vulnerable flank lightly guarded. From the moment he emerged from the pack to become a viable candidate his party's presidential nomination, the race issue has been his Achilles' heel.

And if Obama doesn't get someone on his staff soon who knows how to protect it, it'll be his undoing.

NAACP should pressure Obama to help jobless blacks

2010-07-20T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

GREENSBORO, N.C. — A day after the NAACP passed a resolution calling on the "Tea Party" movement to condemn unnamed racists in its ranks, I stood inside this city's old F.W. Woolworth, the scene of a truly important civil rights battle.

The lunch counter inside the old department store — now the focal point of Greensboro's International Civil Rights Center and Museum — was the scene of a sit-in demonstration 50 years ago that sparked the greatest chapter of this nation's civil rights movement. The protest led to passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The effort to end the store's refusal to serve blacks at its lunch counter was launched by four black college students.

They didn't issue a formal statement condemning the act of bigotry enraging them. They didn't try to fight their battle in the press, though their cause was certainly aided by the news coverage it got. Instead, they did something of substance: They walked up to that segregated lunch counter, sat down and requested service. Within days hundreds of people, black and white, joined their effort — a campaign that pushed Congress to outlaw discrimination in public accommodations.

Of course, if there are racists in the Tea Party movement, the NAACP should track them down and call them out by name — not inference. Ferreting out the racists among us is still important work. But the most important civil rights work the NAACP needs to do is in the economic arena.

Two years ago while campaigning for the presidency, Barack Obama told the NAACP's convention that the federal government has a responsibility to provide employment opportunities for struggling families.He reminded his audience that Martin Luther King Jr. once said the inseparable twin of racial justice is economic justice.

Back then, black unemployment was 9.9%. Today it's a whopping 15.4%. Joblessness among black teenagers in July 2008 was 27%. Now, 39.9% of black youth can't find work. For most of the past decade, black unemployment has been double that of whites.

But 10 months into his presidency, Obama told USA TODAY and the Detroit Free Press he wouldn't do anything special to address the unemployment problems of blacks. "I will tell you that I think the most important thing I can do for the African-American community is the same thing I can do for the American community, period, and that is to get the economy going again and get people hiring again," Obama said.

When black unemployment rose while the Reagan administration gave federal aid to troubled American businesses, the NAACP said the Republican president's economic policies were a "virus" that would set back blacks for generations.

So far, the NAACP hasn't challenged Obama's refusal to make a targeted effort to close this nation's black-white jobless gap while he has used federal funds to rescue failing corporations. Instead, the civil rights group announced that it will march on Washington in October to pressure Congress — not the president — to create jobs.

Joblessness is certainly a greater threat to blacks than the bigots who show up at Tea Party movement events. But the NAACP is apparently unwilling to push Obama, whom blacks played a big role in electing, to do what they asked of Reagan — so the organization will pressure Congress instead.

That makes no sense to me. The four students who challenged Woolworth's whites-only lunch counter focused their efforts on the root of their problem — and the NAACP should do the same.

It's time for Michael Steele to return to his roots

2010-07-13T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

It’s time for a change, Michael Steele — time for you to find a new political home.

Born into a family of Maryland Democrats, you became a Republican when the most revered members of the state’s GOP were Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin and Charles “Mac” Mathias.

McKeldin was the moderate Republican who gave the nominating speech for Dwight Eisenhower at the party’s 1952 convention, and who later broke with the GOP to back Democrat Lyndon Johnson over Republican Barry Gold-water in the 1964 presidential campaign. A two-term governor, McKeldin was twice elected mayor of Baltimore. And unlike many other Republicans — then and now — he won widespread support from black voters.

Mathias, a liberal Republican who helped draft the 1964 Civil Rights Act, served in the Senate for 18 years before retiring in 1987. For his willingness to put principle above party, he was called the “conscience of the Senate” by Democratic leader Mike Mansfield.

Your political roots are in the GOP of McKeldin and Mathias, not the Republican Party that is now commanded by right-wingers such as Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell and Ohio Rep. John Boehner.

There is no room for you in today’s GOP. For all the talk of a “big tent,” the Republican Party is a neoconservative pup tent where those with differing views are forced to kowtow to these ultra-right-wingers. Their political absolutism chased Florida Gov. Charlie Crist from the GOP and has reduced Maine Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to backbenchers. And more than once, it has forced you to retract something you said — when it seemed you spoke from the heart, not the party’s playbook.

It’s time to “man up,” Michael Steele, time to put your principles ahead of your job as GOP chairman, time to move into another political space — one that will let you be you. It’s time for you to become a Democrat.

As it is now, you’re widely thought to be a gaffe-prone embarrassment to the GOP. You called Rush Limbaugh an incendiary “entertainer,” then you apologized after he turned his media-megaphone against you. You told GQ that abortion is “an individual choice,” and then backpedaled when the anti-abortionists squealed in protest. And as quickly as you said at a Connecticut GOP fundraiser that the Afghanistan war is a conflict of President Obama’s choosing and is unwinnable, you retreated when GOP hawks demanded your resignation.

While many of your views would not prevail in the Democratic Party, you wouldn’t have to eat your words. You could become a member of the party’s conservative “Blue Dog” faction and influence the Obama administration’s policies and congressional legislation.

Sure, the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress is decidedly liberal. But the party has space within its ranks for moderates such as California Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, and conservatives such as Nebraska Sen. Ben Nelson and North Carolina Rep. Heath Shuler. They aren’t forced to genuflect to an ideological litmus test. In the GOP, you’re treated like a malfunctioning dupe of the party’s claim of diversity. In the Democratic Party, you’d be yet another example of the inclusiveness it admittedly struggles with but hasn’t abandoned.

Breaking away from the Republican Party would be a tough move, but clinging to the belief that you can remain in the GOP and be your own man, ultimately, will cause you greater trauma.

What should worry us all about Seattle cop punching incident

2010-06-22T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

In a video flashed around the world, Seattle policeman Ian Walsh is seen punching Angel Rosenthal in the face after she pushed him while trying to keep a friend from being arrested. Five days later, the 17-year-old girl was charged with third-degree assault in the incident. Her friend, Marilyn Ellen Levias, had been stopped for jaywalking.

Walsh took Levias into custody when she refused to identify herself and tried to walk away to avoid getting a ticket. The clash between the white officer and the black women produced rare alignment between the inhabitants of distant ideological universes — and could offer an equally unique opportunity to solve a deeply rooted problem. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a liberal civil rights activist,said the blow Walsh struck was not justified, and conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly agreed that it wasn’t a measured response to Rosenthal’s provocation.

This agreement should be used to bolster the efforts to take on the behavior of bad cops and the warped thinking of those young blacks who flout authority.

For far too many blacks, police are perceived as an army of occupation, not a force that protects and serves their community. This perception and the inexcusable behavior of Rosenthal and Levias — as well as the viral video — turned a jaywalking incident into a worldwide news story.

In using what was clearly excessive force to ward off Rosenthal’s interference, Walsh showed a lack of training — or a lack of desire — to handle the situation better. Even so, he had good reason to believe he’d suffer no great penalty for what he did.

In the past, such misjudgments by cops have resulted in deaths — extrajudicial capital punishments — and sparked major race riots. Among them: the 1979 killing of Arthur McDuffie, a black insurance salesman who was beaten to death by five Miami cops after he was chased down for running a red light; the 1999 killing of Amadou Diallo, an African immigrant, by four New York cops who said they mistook him for a rape suspect; and the 2008 shooting of Robert Tolan in Bellaire, Texas, by a white cop who said he believed Tolan, the son of former pro baseball player Bobby Tolan, had just gotten out of a stolen car.

In all these cases, the officers were ultimately acquitted. This imbalance in the scales of justice, I suspect, causes some cops to think they can mistreat blacks and get away with it.

Something has to be done about this.

And something has to be said about the bad attitude and misbehavior of people like Rosenthal and Levias, who think they can contemptuously challenge authority, even when they have committed a crime. This was not their first run-in with the law. In November, Rosenthal was charged with second-degree robbery when she allegedly punched a 15-year-old boy in the face. Two years ago, she was charged with stealing a minivan. In 2009, Levias was charged with third-degree assault for allegedly pushing a sheriff’s deputy.

The tendency of cops to mistreat blacks and the alarming way some young blacks respond to authority is what should alarm us about the Seattle incident. It's this pattern of behavior that must be addressed so brush fires like this don’t again spark deadly race riots.

Racism in Cuba: Debated by blacks here, attacked by blacks in U.S.

2010-06-15T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham
HAVANA — Nancy Morejon says she doesn’t want to get into a war of words with Cornel West. While all-out combat might be avoidable, a bruising skirmish has already occurred.

In many ways, Morejon and West are kindred souls. One of Cuba’s best known contemporary writers, she champions the rights of women and blacks in this island nation. He’s a Princeton University professor and an irascible public intellectual whom President Obama once called “an oracle.” The two are at the center of a festering debate over racism in Cuba, a country that thought it long ago escaped the swamp of racial bigotry and discrimination.

“I don’t want to look arrogant, especially with Cornel West. But I believe he sat on the side of something he doesn’t actually know,” Morejon said of the open letter West and 59 other African Americans sent to Cuban President Raul Castro late last year. In it, they accused his government of mistreating civil rights activists and a “callous disregard” for its black population.

But underlying the American letter and the Cuban response is the more subtle question of the role racism and racial prejudice play in Cuba, a nation whose social mores once mirrored those of America’s Jim Crow era. Surprisingly, even as Cuban intellectuals dismiss the attempt of their African-American counterparts to stand up for them, they talk openly about Cuba’s racial problems — and the solutions that are needed.

Despite the Castro regime’s public pronouncements against racial discrimination, the signs of racial disadvantage, if not outright racial prejudice, are easy to find. The best jobs in Cuba’s growing tourism industry are overwhelmingly held by whites. Hotel doormen, chambermaids, tour guides, translators or restaurant waiters can earn more tips in a day than a doctor or government bureaucrat is paid in a month.

“Yes, there is racism in Cuba,” Tomas Fernandez Robaina, a prolific writer about the social condition of black Cubans, told me. The country “engaged in romanticism” when Castro ordered an end to racial discrimination nearly a half-century ago, Fernandez said. “Now we understand it will take more than goodwill to get rid of it, something Americans should know better than Cubans.”

That’s an amazing level of frankness in a country that its critics say has little tolerance for painful introspection. Out of this openness has come talk of a solution that sounds surprisingly like the affirmative action programs that continue to divide Americans. Cuba cannot simply give blacks new track shoes and expect them to compete with the nation’s most gifted runners, said Heriberto Feraudy Espino, president of the National Committee on Racial Discrimination and Racism. They will need some special help to catch up.

Cuba’s struggle for racial equality dates back more than a century. It is rooted in the changes wrought by the U.S. occupation of Cuba (1898-1902) and the brutal annihilation in 1912 of the leaders of a black movement for racial justice. It predates the Castro regime but has survived its condemnation.

Morejon said West should have spoken to some of Cuba’s leading blacks before signing a letter that mischaracterizes their struggle. “I believe that this dialogue that we haven’t had is necessary,” she said yearningly.

And I think it’s not too late for that conversation to take place.

In sports, as in business and politics, leadership counts

2010-06-08T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Shortly after Baltimore Orioles’ manager Dave Trembley was fired in the wake of the second worst start in the franchise’s 56-year history, the team suffered a humiliating loss. The Boston Red Sox beat the Orioles 11-0. For the onetime pride of Baltimore, losing is the only thing this baseball team now does well.

Over the past 12 seasons, the Orioles have finished last, or next to last, in its division 11 times. In 1997, the year before this nose dive began, the Orioles won 98 games and lost just 64 — the best record in baseball’s American League.

The fall has been swift and steep.

The one constant throughout this run to futility: Owner Peter Angelos, who clumsily drove off the last manager who had a winning touch. The lesson in watching this debacle from the bleachers: Leadership matters. And how.

We’ve had far too many examples of failed leadership in the past few years, and the wreckage has been strewn wide and far in endeavors more consequential than men running around a baseball diamond. President George W. Bush in Iraq. The titans of Wall Street and the economic collapse. Most recently, BP CEO Tony Hayward and the unthinkable Gulf Coast catastrophe.

But leadership doesn’t just sink ships. It also saves them.

Apple’s Steve Jobs on Monday unveiled his latest marvel: the next generation of iPhone. Ask any Apple shareholder who endured Jobs’ absence from the tech giant whether leadership matters. (For that matter, ask a BP investor.)

And make no mistake, cheering a team on for decades is an emotional and financial investment. Any fan of any sport in any town in America knows this. The return on investment can be high or, as with my Orioles, non-existent. But a worthy franchise can lift a town at its moment of despair, as the New Orleans Saints did for that stricken city. The investment ultimately paid off.

I take no delight in reciting this sorry record of my hometown team. I remember the Orioles’ glorious past; their improbable 1966 World Series win over the Los Angeles Dodgers; their victory over Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine” in baseball’s Fall Classic four years later; and their World Series appearances from 1969 to 1971. From 1969 to 1983, the Orioles were arguably the best team in professional baseball. During that 14-year stretch, the team finished 1st in its division seven times and 2nd six times.

Ironically, in 1997 — the team’s last winning season — the Orioles spent every day of that campaign in first place. Davey Johnson, the team’s manager, was the American League Manager of the Year. But the same day he received that honor, Johnson, who didn’t get along with Angelos, quit. Since that day, the Orioles have had six managers, including Juan Samuel, who was named interim manager to replace Trembley.

That revolving door, and the team’s poor play afield, have turned this once mighty team into a professional sports embarrassment. Even a die-hard fan like me finally had to give up the season tickets I’ve had for 18 years. This investor has cashed out his shares.

I held on to those seats for so long because I didn’t want to be a “fair weather” fan. But the storm clouds have hung over Orioles Park at Camden Yards for so long that it takes the recklessness of a hurricane hunter to cling to the belief that better days are just around the corner.

Of course anyone fortunate enough to own a Major League Baseball franchise has a right to run it any way he sees fit — just not into the ground. That’s what Angelos has done.

It’s too bad Baltimore’s deserving fans can’t fire the owner.

Memorial Day's reminder: democracy must be protected by all Americans

2010-06-01T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

How dare she? In the middle of a presidential news conference that was supposed to be about the government’s response to the BP oil spill, Helen Thomas had gall to go off script.

When President Obama called on her, the 89-year-old White House correspondent asked him about the blood of American troops that flows in Afghanistan, not the oil gushing out of a ruptured well in the Gulf of Mexico — the largest oil spill in American history.

Though the U.S. death toll in Afghanistan crept above the 1,000 mark just a few days earlier, Thomas was the only journalist to ask about that human carnage during Obama’s first full-blown meeting with the White House press corps in nearly a year.

“Mr. President, when are you going to get out of Afghanistan? Why are we continuing to kill and die there?” Thomas pressed Obama. His answer, which sounded like a regurgitation of George W. Bush’s defense of the war he launched, was not nearly as important as the fact that no other reporter in the room showed even mild interest in the topic.

Coming as this did just a few days before Memorial Day — a national holiday that honors those who died in this nation’s wars — Thomas’ lone inquiry is a chilling reminder of how war has become an abstraction for too many Americans. In this age of around-the-clock television and Internet news, the fighting in Afghanistan — or for that matter, the winding down of the Iraq war — gets little coverage.

Capitol Hill isn’t overrun with anti-war protesters, and the outcome of November’s congressional elections won’t hinge on where candidates stand on the wars. And far too few of the current crop of politicians — and journalists — really understand the sacrifices our men and women in uniform make.

I do. Like a lot of members of my generation, I saw military service as a duty of citizenship, not a burden to be borne by someone else. As the war in Vietnam was heating up, I volunteered for a four-year stint in the Air Force and ended up serving a year in that war zone.

A lot of the guys who lived alongside me in Cherry Hill — a public housing complex on the southern edge of Baltimore — ended up in the military. Some volunteered; many were drafted. To the best of my knowledge, all of them served. When we came home on leave, we walked the neighborhood streets in uniform and were greeted warmly by just about everyone.

Back then, Americans seemed much more interested in war than they are today. Of course, some of this has to do with scale: Vietnam was a far bigger conflict that took a much larger human toll. And the randomness of the draft made every able-bodied young man a potential member of the armed forces. Eventually, of course, support for the Vietnam War waned and opposition to that awful conflict swelled.

Frankly, I prefer the anti-war protests of the ’60s to the indifference of today.

Democracy is like a muscle; if you don’t make good use of it, it’ll atrophy. If people genuflect to the notion that war is inevitable, or believe it is the province of a small group of men and women in Washington, then the shared sacrifice made by members of my generation — and the tenacity of Helen Thomas — will have been wasted.

Texas school board action could expose truth about slavery

2010-05-25T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

It’s late August 2011 and the new school year has just begun in Austin. Answering a nationwide search for anyone willing to teach history in the city’s public schools, I’ve taken my place at the head of a history class.

I landed the job after a lot of the school’s history teachers quit in protest of the curriculum changes the State Board of Education ordered in May 2010. These changes made a lot of liberals — and people across the political spectrum from President Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan to George W. Bush’s first Education secretary, Rod Paige — cry foul.

But where they saw catastrophe, I see opportunity.

Among other things, the Texas board wants students to be taught about the inaugural addresses that both U.S. President Abraham Lincoln and Confederate President Jefferson Davis gave on the eve of the Civil War. Its motive was to give credence to the South’s case for seceding from the union. I think the board’s change opens up another possibility. It unwittingly gives teachers an opening to prove that the Civil War’s root cause was slavery.

So, motivated by a desire to end the long-running attempt by those who want to cleanse the South of the awful stain of slavery and the bloody war Southerners fought to preserve it, I launch into this discussion of Davis’ and Lincoln’s inaugural addresses on the first day of class.

Davis gave his speech two weeks before Lincoln took office, I tell my students, and those remarks leave little doubt what cause created the Confederacy. It was, Davis said, “actuated solely by the desire to preserve our own rights, and promote our own welfare.”

What rights was he talking about, a student asks?

I pull out a copy of the Confederate constitution, which differed only slightly from that of the United States, and pointed to two provisions.

One, I tell my students, makes unconstitutional the enactment of any law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” The other says “negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress” in any new states or territories that might be acquired by the Confederacy.

Slavery, I tell my students, was the primary reason 11 Southern states tried to leave the Union. The states’ rights argument was about the right of these states to maintain that peculiar institution. The term “sectional conflict” that some suggest as another reason for the war is a veiled way of describing Southern discontent with the North over whether slavery would be permitted in new states.

Lincoln acknowledged as much in his inaugural address. “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended,” he said, “while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended.”

Despite Lincoln’s promise not to “directly or indirectly” interfere with slavery, the rebellious states plunged the nation into a Civil War that took 610,000 lives and inflicted nearly one million casualties, I tell my students.

Of course, it’s not likely that I’ll really ever get a chance to teach that history lesson to Texas schoolchildren. Not as long as the revisionists who now dominate the state’s 15-member education board are in power. The history they want taught is based not in fact, but in ideology.

It is the product of political zealotry, not an honest reading of an inaugural address that reveals Lincoln as a reluctant patriot — and Davis as a rebel.

Kagan's pick boxes in black leaders

2010-05-18T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

President Obama’s choice of Elena Kagan to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has boxed in a lot of black leaders who weren’t consulted in advance on her selection, but now are expected to fend off a left-wing attack on her nomination.

Even so, some of that support came quickly. Just five days after Kagan’s selection, the NAACP announced its endorsement of her after completing what the civil rights organization called “a careful and thorough review” of the 50-year-old nominee’s record.

Back in 1991, the NAACP took 45 days to produce a 77-page report, with an epilogue from John Hope Franklin, to make its case for opposing Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court nomination. In Kagan’s case, it used just a one-page press release to explain its decision. The press release touted Kagan’s efforts to diversify the student body of the Harvard Law School during her nearly 6-year-stint as dean.

Nonetheless, NAACP President Ben Jealous told me his group’s examination of Kagan was exhaustive, despite the White House’s late attempt to build support among civil rights organizations for the high court nominee whose diversity record has come under attack.

Kagan’s defenders say this is a bad rap. They argue the small number of minorities hired (2 black and an Asian out of 43 permanent, full-time faculty members) brought onto the law school faculty while she was dean shouldn’t be blamed on her. The decision wasn’t hers alone. It required a vote of the faculty, they said.

But that explanation is muddled by the credit Obama gave Kagan in his nomination statement. “At times when many believed that the Harvard faculty had gotten a little one-sided in its viewpoint,” the president said, “she sought to recruit prominent conservative scholars” the Cambridge, Mass., law school.

And as if these conflicting claims weren't bad enough, one day before Obama nominated Kagan, a group of 28 prominent black women sent a letter to the president expressing concern about her rumored selection.

It IS into this political swamp that leaders of black civil rights groups now find themselves. There's a sense among some that they're expected to support plays being run by the White House, even though they weren’t in the huddle when they were called.

"There was an unusual level of discipline," Jealous said diplomatically of the White House's failure to give his group advance notice of Kagan's selection. That was valuable time the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group could have used to do its own vetting of Kagan and strengthen its ability to defend her selection.

National Urban League President Marc Morial, whose support the White House also has courted, hasn’t been as quick to jump on the Kagan bandwagon. “We have started this process late,” he said of his group’s examination of Kagan’s record, “because prior to the nomination there was not an opportunity for consultation in advance.”

Morial said the Urban League is waiting for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund – which was once headed by Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice and a civil rights icon – to finish its review of Kagan before it takes a position on her.

In the meantime, the White House should do a review of its own. Not of Kagan, but instead of its handling of her nomination, and the shabby treatment it gave black civil rights groups that now may be key to saving Kagan from a growing fury on political left.

President Obama's commencement speech at Hampton University - May 9, 2010

2010-05-09T20:49:00.000-04:00

Arizona's immigration law an act of insurrection

2010-05-04T06:00:00.002-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Though it has been settled law since the Civil War ended that a state cannot secede from the union, Arizona is acting as though it believes it can.

Given this existential loophole, Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill that unilaterally gives her state the power to enforce federal immigration law and mandates that people who cross its borders carry an identity card acceptable to Arizona.

The law defines this as an Arizona driver's license, identity card, tribal identification, or any federal, state or local government ID issued after a person proved he's a legal resident of the U.S. Anyone caught in the Grand Canyon State without one of these IDs will be subject to up to six months in jail and a $2,500 fine. It takes effect 90 days after the Legislature adjourns.

Arizona's law ostensibly targets “alien(s)” who are “unlawfully present in the United States.” But there's little doubt it will be used disproportionately against Hispanics, who are 30 percent of the state's population. “We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels,” Brewer said at the bill-signing ceremony.

“We cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence compromise our quality of life. We cannot delay while the destruction happening south of our international border creeps its way north,” she said in an apparent reference to the drug war raging in Mexico.

But the law doesn't target drug dealers so much as it stigmatizes Arizona's large Mexican population. “The way it's tailored is very clear. You're looking for brown-skinned individuals. … It's people coming across the border illegally and they're talking mostly about Mexicans,” Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada told Tucson TV station KGUN9.

Keeping people from illegally entering this country isn't a bad idea. But Arizona's law is an “ends justify the means” attempt that enjoys widespread support among its voters. According to a Rasmussen poll, while 53 percent of the state's likely voters think enforcement of the law will potentially violate the civil rights of some U.S. citizens, 70 percent support it anyway. The law is backed by 84 percent of Republicans, 51 percent of Democrats and 69 percent of unaffiliated voters.

There are, fortunately, some pockets of resistance. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon, a Democrat, has threatened to file suit against the new law. Interim Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, a Republican, tried to talk Brewer into vetoing the immigration bill. More than 1,000 Phoenix high school students, who used Twitter and Facebook to organize, walked out of class and marched to the state Capitol to protest the measure a day before Brewer signed it Friday.

But it will be left to the federal government to counter Arizona's immigration witch hunt.

The Obama administration can do this by refusing to take custody of any nonviolent illegal immigrants whom local police charge with “misdemeanor trespassing” — the immigration offense the new law creates. Faced with a $3 billion budget deficit, Brewer is pushing a controversial 1-cent sales tax increase that will be on the state's ballot on May 18.

If illegal immigrants are left in the state's custody, Arizona will have to bear the financial cost of its decision to usurp the federal government's authority to legislate immigration laws.

While such a stance isn't likely to produce a surrender like the one at Appomattox Court House that ended the Civil War, it could force Arizona's governor and lawmakers to end their legislative insurrection.

During their 2010 annual meeting at the University of Louisville Trotter Group members visit the Muhammad Ali Museum

2010-04-25T19:25:00.004-04:00

Is Kelley's book on Oprah more fiction than fact?

2010-04-20T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

The last time there was such a seismic clash between a media giant and a roguish storyteller, the world was at war and television was commercial-free.

Back then, the antagonists were William Randolph Hearst, the ruler of a massive media empire, and Orson Welles, a young filmmaker whose first movie, Citizen Kane, was a not-so-veiled trashing of Hearst. The film premiered on May 1, 1941, but it had a short run. The media mogul used his considerable clout to keep Citizen Kane — which has been called the best movie ever made — out of most theaters.

The current conflict is centered on a book about Oprah Winfrey, the reigning queen of daytime television, by bestselling author Kitty Kelley. There’s no indication Oprah is trying to silence Kelley, but after reading this book, I wouldn’t blame her if she did.

Oprah: A Biography is, even for the gossip journalism genre, a bad read that has catapulted the muckraking author back into the spotlight. That’s due more to the prurient interests of those who buy this book than to Kelley’s “reportorial sights,” which are touted on the book’s jacket.

My critique of Kelley’s work is not done at arm’s length. Oprah and I were once close friends, but drifted apart after she in recent years. We first met in 1976 when as a young reporter I covered the Caucus of Black Democrats in Charlotte, N.C. Oprah, then a student at Tennessee State University and a reporter at WTVF-TV in Nashville, had a thirst for hard news and finagled her way into the event.

Later that year, when Oprah moved to my hometown of Baltimore to co-anchor that city’s top-rated newscast, our platonic friendship blossomed. We spent much time together and often talked about the things that brought joy and pain into our lives. I was backstage in Morgan State University’s Murphy Auditorium with Oprah before her “one-woman” show that Kelley mentions in the book. I also headed the local journalism group Kelley says Oprah joined.

That’s why I know the two chapters Kelley devotes to Oprah’s time in Baltimore are more the product of exaggeration, insinuation and error than a search for truth.

For example, Kelley trlls a story about Oprah devouring a huge platter of salmon, which her unnamed source described as “an amazing display of gluttony.” Kelley says this happened at the home of Pat Wheeler, whom she described as the community affairs director of the station where Oprah worked. When I called Wheeler to mention this incident, her reaction was predictable.

“You’re making this up, aren’t you?” she yelled into phone. Wheeler actually had worked for a competing station where she produced a public affairs show I hosted. “That never happened. Why didn’t she ask me about this?”

Why indeed.

Why did Kelley quote Al Sanders, one of Oprah’s newsroom rivals who died in 1995, as if she had spoken to him herself? (In the foreword, Kelley said she had worked on the book just four years.)

She also wrote that there were “only two black women on television in Baltimore” when Oprah arrived in 1976. At the time, I headed the city’s black journalists group. Those women, she said, were Sue Simmons and Maria Broom. She overlooked at least two others, Jaki Hall and Edith House.

So why should we trust anything else Kelley writes in a book she wants us to believe is the product of her drive to “penetrate the manufactured” image of Oprah Winfrey?

Afghan president is playing with fire

2010-04-13T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

Just when it looked as if Hamid Karzai was behaving like South Vietnam’s Ngo Dinh Diem and daring Barack Obama to respond like John F. Kennedy did in the early 1960s, the Afghan president blinked — twice.

The first batting of his eyes came after President Obama made a surprise visit March 28 to the war-torn country and reportedly pressed Karzai to crack down on corruption, which is widely thought to have been employed to steal last year’s presidential election. Four days later, Karzai accused “foreigners” of spoiling that election and said the U.S.-led coalition that has kept him and his government alive was on the verge of being seen as invaders because of its meddling in his country’s affairs.

The following day, Karzai emerged from his rabbit hole long enough to try to put a good spin on that speech, which the White House called “troubling.” In a telephone call to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he “reaffirmed his commitment to the partnership” between Afghanistan and the United States.

But less than 24 hours later, Karzai was at it again. During a meeting with Afghan legislators, he said he might be forced to join the Tali-ban if parliament didn’t vote to give him total control over the country’s election commission, several legislators said. Three of the five election commission members were appointed by the United Nations until Karzai unilaterally declared in February that he’d fill all of those positions. When the White House responded by saying a visit by Karzai to the U.S. might be canceled, Karzai blinked again by having his spokesman deny that he had made such a threat.

Karzai’s actions are eerily reminiscent to that of Diem, the South Vietnamese president the U.S. supported with troops and taxpayers’ dollars until he was toppled by a coup and assassinated by his own generals in 1963. Like Karzai, Diem was a nepotistic leader who is believed to have rigged an election that put him in the presidency. Diem won that 1955 contest with, he shamelessly claimed, the backing of 98% of voters. Last year, Karzai’s victory margin was far more modest but no less tainted.

Despite massive American aid, Diem objected to U.S. calls for him to end corruption in his government, just as Karzai views the Obama administration’s push for him to clean up his government as foreign interference — rather than a sensible strategy for winning widespread support among the Afghan people.

Eventually, President Kennedy decided that Diem was not a good ally in the fight to block a communist takeover of South Vietnam and let Diem’s opponents know the U.S. would not stand in the way of a coup.

For now, the Obama administration wants to heal its rift with Karzai. The president called him a “critical partner” in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Tali-ban, during a recent appearance on ABC’s Good Morning America. That’s understandable. A stable government in Kabul — one that can win strong backing from the Afghan people — will help bring an early end to the fighting there.

But if Karzai thinks he can continue to vacillate between being a loyal ally and contemptuous patron while the cost America pays to keep the Taliban from overrunning his government grows, he is badly mistaken. If he thinks the U.S. will back him at any cost, he is not a good student of history.

While he might be a critical partner, Hamid Karzai is not irreplaceable, as Ngo Dinh Diem discovered much too late.

Will Obama do something about rising black unemployment?

2010-04-06T06:00:00.001-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

On the day the Labor Department reported that March saw the biggest jump in monthly job creation in three years, President Obama toured a Charlotte business that is getting $49 million in federal aid to help grow its workforce.

“We are beginning to turn the corner,” Obama said of the good news he had gone there to tout. “This month, more Americans woke up, got dressed and headed to work at an office or factory or storefront. More folks are feeling the sense of pride and satisfaction that comes with a hard-earned and well-deserved paycheck at the end of a long week of work.”

But instead of going to Charlotte to proclaim this jobs growth, the president should have gone to Harlem to explain why black workers are being left behind.
While the unemployment rate for white men dropped for the fifth straight month in March to 8.9 percent, it hit 19 percent for black men. That’s a sizeable 1.2 percentage point jump in a single month. During this same time, unemployment for black women also grew from 12.1 percent to 12.4 percent, even as the jobless rate for white women held fast at 7.3 percent.

None of this seemed to register with Christina Romer, the president’s economic guru who echoed Obama’s upbeat analysis. The addition of 162,000 jobs in March showed “continued signs of gradual labor market healing,” she said, without acknowledging the racial schism in the turnaround. Instead, she offered this explanation for the conundrum of more people getting jobs while the unemployment rate stayed the same: “This stability reflects roughly proportional rises in the labor force and employment.”

That’s doublespeak. Left unsaid is this hard truth: The unemployment rate for blacks and whites is moving in different directions. The rate for blacks is trending up, while for whites it is trending down.

This harsh reality won’t change as long as the Obama administration thinks its “rising tide lifts all boats” approach to economic recovery is all that’s needed to solve the workplace problems of blacks, whose overall unemployment rate is significantly higher than that of whites, Hispanics or Asian Americans.

“The most important thing I can do for the African-American community is the same thing I can do for the American community, period, and that is get the economy going again and get people hiring again,” Obama told USA TODAY in a Dec. 3 interview. But now, four months later, it seems certain the president has to do more than that to close the yawning gap between blacks and whites.

If the White House continues with its laissez faire approach to black joblessness, the ripple effects will be devastating — and predictable. In the foreword to the National Urban League’s 2007 State of Black America report, then-Sen. Barack Obama bemoaned the condition of black men, including the high level of unemployment that afflicted them. “These hard facts also remind us that politics is not a game. The decisions we make and the challenges we ignore have real consequences,” he wrote.

Last month, Marc Morial, president of the Urban League, called for a targeted federal effort to reduce unemployment among blacks. “The government has bailed out Wall Street. It’s time to act swiftly and do something for Main Street, which includes a strong, focused jobs plan. There can be no true economic recovery in this country without addressing the dire jobs situation in urban America,” he said.

He’s right, and it’s time Barack Obama and his economic advisers admit it.

Israel should be a better friend

2010-03-30T06:00:00.000-04:00

By DeWayne Wickham

The unspoken message that the Obama administration appeared to send Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week is this: Stop behaving like an ungrateful friend.

Ever since Netanyahu's government blindsided Vice President Biden during his recent visit to the Jewish state with an announcement that it will build 1,600 new housing units in east Jerusalem, the Obama administration has been smarting.

And for good reason.

Of all the hurdles to an enduring peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, the fate of Jerusalem - which both claim as their capital - is the most daunting. Every time Israel breaks ground on more housing there, the peace lamps flicker.

Reeling from Israel's announcement, the Obama administration urged Netanyahu to rescind the decision. In a phone call, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the prime minister that the new construction was "a deeply negative signal" about Israel's relationship with the United States. The Israeli government "needed to demonstrate not just through words but through specific actions" its commitment to that relationship and the peace process, Clinton said, according to State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley.

But in a speech last week in Washington to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Netanyahu thumbed his nose at these concerns. "Jerusalem is not a settlement; it's our capital," he proclaimed.

The United States is Israel's oldest and closest friend. And since its creation in 1948, Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of American foreign aid. In addition to now receiving nearly $3 billion annually in grants from this country, Israel has gotten billions of dollars worth of loan guarantees since 1972 to help build housing and shore up its economy.

While Israel is forbidden from using any of this money to construct housing in its occupied territory, the largesse frees Israel to use other parts of its budget to fund such projects. Not to mention that without U.S. military assistance, Israel would struggle to fend off its enemies.

Our support of Israel is costly in non-monetary ways, too.

"The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests" in that part of the world, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month. "Arab anger over the Palestinian question" hurts this country's relationship with other governments in the region and "weakens the legitimacy" of moderate Arab leaders, he said.

And while unemployment in Israel dropped to 7.4 percent in the last quarter of 2009, joblessness during that period in the United States hovered around 10 peercent.
The investment of treasure, and as Petraeus hinted, perhaps U.S. blood, on behalf of Israel should evoke deep gratitude. Instead, Netanyahu's government takes a go-it-alone approach when it serves Israel's interest - the rest of the world be damned.

The United States is right to champion Israel's right to exist, of course, and to provide an umbrella of protection to help ensure the Jewish state's survival.

But the Netanyahu government strains this longstanding friendship when it pursues a course of action that unnecessarily inflames passions in the Arab world and weakens the ability of moderate Arab leaders to talk peace.