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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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.