If there’s anything close to a political certainty in 2012, it’s that Barack Obama will get more than 90 percent of the African-American vote.
But that doesn’t mean every black Obama supporter will vote for him happily — nor does it guarantee that turnout will approach the stratospheric levels of 2008, even though Obama needs a huge showing from his base to offset the expected loss of swing voters in states like North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
With that in mind, prominent black leaders — fearing Obama is not only taking them for granted but avoiding them in public — have turned up the heat on the nation’s first African-American president, transforming all-in-the-family concerns into open criticism of the president at a time when they had hoped the completion of a monument to Martin Luther King Jr. near the National Mall would bring a moment of unity.
The leaders are tired, they say, of Obama dog-whistling his support for a broad black agenda rather than explicitly embracing the kind of war on racism, poverty and economic segregation embodied by King.
“You can spend a lot of time trying to win over white independents, but if you don’t pay attention to your base, African-Americans, if you have not locked up your base yet, you’ve got a serious problem,” said CNN contributor Roland Martin.
“African-Americans will vote for him again, 88, 92, 95 percent. The question is what’s the turnout? I’ll vote for you. But will I bring ten other people along, like I did in 2008? That’s the danger here for him. He doesn’t have the historical factor to lean on as much in 2012 as he did in 2008. … And the first step is that he has to be willing to speak to this audience, black people.”
In a striking turnabout for a president who has rewritten American racial history, Obama finds himself the target of criticism from the black cultural and political elite that has, for the most part, been leery of airing its disappointment.
The president is reportedly angry that African-American leaders aren’t crediting him for his hard-bought achievements that will especially help communities of color, including health care reform, aid to cities, student aid and protecting Medicaid.
“The whole thing is bull——. … We have met with [black leaders] more than any other group, and we are increasing our outreach,” said a person close to Obama.
But Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.), who represents several predominantly black Los Angeles-area neighborhoods, brings up an issue that African-American leaders repeatedly raise when talking about Obama: They say he’s worried about being too closely identified with the community that gave him inspiration and bedrock support.
“I understand that you’ve got to be president for all people, but this administration has gone just too far; they really don’t even say ‘African-American’ or talk about [our] specific issues,” Richardson told POLITICO.
“The president is smart enough to know he’s the first African-American, and I think he’s concerned — I would say afraid — that people are going to think he’s favoring African-Americans.”
Obama had been scheduled to speak at the dedication of the King memorial last Sunday — the 48th anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” oration — in what was likely to be his most explicit civil-rights speech in months. With the ceremony postponed because of Hurricane Irene, Obama embarked Monday on a mini-media offensive aimed at his core supporters, taping an appearance on a black radio station in Chicago that he frequented as a young Illinois state senator. He also called in to syndicated host Tom Joyner, who has defended the president from criticism leveled by other black media personalities, including Tavis Smiley.
When Joyner asked him about the King memorial, Obama immediately shifted the conversation to King’s crusade for economic equality, something of a departure from his recent focus on budget-cutting and deficit reduction.
“I think it’s always important to remember that when Dr. King gave the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, that was a march for jobs and justice, not just justice,” Obama told Joyner.
“And in the last part of his life, when he went down to Memphis, that was all about sanitation workers saying, ‘I am a man,’ and looking for economic justice and dealing with poverty. And so it’s not enough for us to just remember the sanitized versions of what Dr. King stood for; he made a real call for us to dig deep and be thinking about our fellow citizens and people around the world who are in desperate need and figuring out how we can help them.”
But in a series of town halls it held this month, the Congressional Black Caucus seemed to directly challenge Obama’s willingness to “dig deep” by more fully embracing a job-creation agenda.
On Aug. 16, as Obama discussed rural jobs before a nearly all-white audience in Peosta, Iowa, caucus members raised some pointed questions about where a president, who began political life as a Chicago community organizer, was spending his time.
“Our people are hurting,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, (D-Calif.), a former CBC chairwoman who hasn’t been shy about calling out Obama. “Unemployment is unconscionable,” she added. “We don’t know what the strategy is. We don’t know why this trip that he is on in the United States now, that he’s not in any black communities.”
A few days later, a riled-up Waters was even more direct, daring a top Obama aide to use the word “black” at an event in Miami. (The staffer did.)
“We want him to know that from this day forward … we’ve had it,” Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) said of Obama at the same event. “We want him to come out on our side and advocate, not to watch and wait.”
Richardson wants to see Obama do a black, urban bus tour: “There are three [black] congressional seats in L.A., and I don’t think he’s visited any of them as president, not Watts, not Compton, not Long Beach, not Carson.”
Some of this criticism reflects long-standing grievances between Obama and the black establishment, and none of his critics are considering backing anybody else in 2012.
Smiley, the radio host who toured the country this summer to publicize a near-16 percent national black unemployment rate, has made no secret he’s less than thrilled Obama has refused to sit down for more interviews. Both Waters and Richardson initially backed Hillary Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary. Conyers is such a consistent Obama critic, the president reportedly asked him to stop “demeaning” him in 2009.
Some Obama defenders say that what they regard as his reluctance to tout his work on behalf of blacks reflects an essential, if unfortunate, reality of America’s not-so-very post-racial politics.
“If the president were to start speaking directly to African-Americans about what he’s doing for them, what he has done for them as the first African-American president, that during a general election campaign … could have very adverse [effects],” Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed told MSNBC on Monday.
“I believe that black people understand that. I think they understand it well. … And I’d also like to talk to my friends in my own community who are raising these issues to make the point that if you weaken President Obama in the black community, you seriously hamper his chances of being reelected. A small depression among the African-American electorate could be devastating to this president. And I’d also like folks on the other side of the conversation to tell me who the alternative is that’s going to do such a better job for black people. Will it be Michele Bachmann? I mean, will it be Mitt Romney? Rick Perry?”
Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy, who studies race and politics, thinks Obama’s black support “has frayed a little bit around the edges, but I think only a little bit” and said Obama’s tricky racial balancing act saddles him with “burdens that other politicians don’t bear.”
Obama’s staff, including campaign manager Jim Messina and White House senior adviser David Plouffe, have privately predicted black turnout in 2012 will be comparable, or in some places even exceed, the rates in 2008.
But they are also clearly concerned about drift. Hoping to head off the dispute before it becomes a larger 2012 headache, Obama and his team are ramping up outreach efforts. On Monday, Democratic National Committee Executive Director Patrick Gaspard and Obama 2012 official Michael Blake convened a meeting and conference that included Roland Martin, veteran operative Donna Brazile, BET’s Debra Lee, National Urban League President Marc Morial and Ben Jealous of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
And the president will address the mid-September Congressional Black Caucus Foundation conference, a person familiar with the situation told POLITICO.
Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political scientist, said Obama simply isn’t paying enough attention to his African-American base — and that dog whistles beat total silence.
“In the last couple of months, I haven’t heard those dog whistles, but you certainly heard them in 2008,” she said. “You heard that he was signaling to African-Americans.”
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black political analyst, author and radio host, said that Obama needs to “reassert what King represented on civil rights but also on jobs and poverty.”
“There is a deep sense of frustration in the community, discontent on the part of some and an increasing sense of betrayal,” Hutchinson said. “But Obama also was the victim of overinflated expectations, and even though it’s not politically correct to say this, there was a perception that a black president has a special duty to do more for African-Americans.”
Still, even though African-American voters are increasingly displeased with Obama’s handling of the economy, they are sensitive to the possibility of aiding his Republican opponents.
“If I am out there calling the president names, I may win applause, but I am not going to win any bills that help people,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, an Obama supporter. “We are raising a monument to King, we ought to be instructive on how Dr. King was in how we deal with President Obama.”
But Sharpton said Obama might be doing better if he was less willing to show Republicans the other cheek.
“I am a Christian preacher, and he is more forgiving than I am,” Sharpton added, laughing.
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