President Barack Obama versus Party of Whiteness

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Correspondent- | Last updated: Aug 23, 2012 - 11:15:30 AM

Despite other issues, the problem of the color line may be Obama’s biggest challenge

From the very moment Mr. Obama became president—when Chief Justice John Roberts made an error administering the Oath of Office—his identity has been paramount in the minds of everyone who looks at him, particularly to those who reject his and the Democratic Party’s policies.

WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - He is Barrack Hussein Obama, president of the United States of America. After nearly four years in office, the biggest obstacle he faces now in his bid for re-election may be overcoming perceptions related to his race, rather than any comparison with his opponent—former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney—or a fair evaluation of his performance while in office.

Mr. Obama is the son of an African father, an exchange student, and a White mother. He was reared by his White grandparents in race-neutral Hawaii, his birthplace.

Chief Justice John Roberts

The fact that he is Black has been used sometimes in a subtle manner, and sometimes quite openly to incite unprecedented levels of hostile, even occasionally violent opposition to his administration.

The Secret Service has investigated more death threats against this president than against any other president in history.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) spoke for many when he declared to The National Journal in 2010: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

When Mr. Obama took office conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh said his message for the new president was contained in four words: “I hope he fails.”

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Even Mr. Obama’s signature legislative achievement—the Affordable Care Act, the first national, comprehensive health care reform since Medicare was established in the 1960s, a law which was upheld by the Supreme Court—is ridiculed instead of applauded by his opponents as “Obamacare,” despite the fact that most people in this country favor the law’s various provisions over the way things were before the law was enacted.

Republican lawmakers are apparently content to see the entire country suffer than to see this particular president succeed. The GOP-controlled House of Representatives has voted 33 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, debates and votes Democrats insist are a waste of time on “a bill to nowhere.”

Meanwhile Republicans in Congress have done little or nothing for the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, or to create jobs for the millions made jobless by The Great Recession of 2009 that was brought on by the ruinous fiscal policies of Mr. Obama’s predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush.

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney

In many ways, this commander in chief is seen instead as the “stepchild” in the ancient African proverb: “If he washes, he’s wasting water. If he does not wash, he’s dirty.”

Case in point: Gov. Romney chose as his vice presidential running mate, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan who’s known as a so-called “deficit hawk,” and who as chair of the House Budget Committee, authored a budget plan which would eviscerate trillions of dollars in government spending over the next 10 years, beginning with massive cuts in Medicare, Social Security, and practically every domestic spending priority that does not benefit the super rich. Gov. Romney even went so far as to propose the elimination of funds for PBS-TV, the Public Broadcast System. Gov. Romney and Rep. Ryan want voters to accept that they and other Republicans are angry over “reckless” government spending over the last three years by the incumbent president.

“America is on the cusp of having a government-run economy,” Mr. Romney complained in a speech this June in Missouri, according to published reports.

But at the same time, the GOP candidates are castigating the president for not spending enough on programs they favor. Mr. Romney is demanding that Congress reverse defense budget cuts that were agreed to in last year’s debt-ceiling agreement.

Another self-contradictory charge has been leveled by Mr. Romney—who wrote in a 2008 op-ed article about the pending auto industry bailout by the federal government: “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” In recent months Mr. Romney has attacked the Obama administration for not doing enough to support auto dealerships that were shuttered as part of the auto-industry restructuring.

“In 2009, under the Obama administration’s bailout of General Motors, Ohio dealerships were forced to close,” the Romney campaign and the Republican National Committee complained in a recently released, Ohio-specific, television commercial.

One conservative commentator even penned an op-ed article for The National Review Online, titled: “Obama Bureaucrats are Fueling Wildfires,” blaming Colorado’s devastating wildfires on the president because the government did not “adequately” fund the maintenance of the aging U.S. aerial fire-fighting fleet.

Meanwhile, political observers and public opinion polls cautiously favor Mr. Obama, despite the public disarray in the Republican ranks. For example, one commentator warned the party to avoid “the perils of Palin,” the decision by Arizona Sen. John McCain to select former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Carrie Medina, of Portland, Ore., argues with an Obama supporter during a protest in Oakland, Calif., in response to the visit of President Barack Obama to downtown Oakland, July 23. A major portion of Oakland’s year-old police radio system failed during President Obama’s visit to the city, in what one lieutenant described as a “train wreck.” Many of the 100 Oakland offi cers assigned to handle presidential security were unable to communicate with the police department dispatch center for a time during the presidential fundraiser at the Fox Theater. Photo: AP Wide World Photos/The Contra Costa Times, Dan Honda

Another unnamed Romney adviser claims Gov. Palin “poisoned the well” for women in the GOP, this according to The American Thinker.com. And a New Hampshire Republican Party chairman believes that Gov. Palin, and not the election of President Obama was the “error of 2008.”

Ironically, even though Gov. Romney’s campaign received a ratings and a financial boost when Rep. Ryan was named Mr. Romney’s vice-presidential pick, he did not get as big a boost in popularity as Sen. McCain got when he announced that Gov. Palin would be his running mate.

“Mr. Romney had to satisfy the rabid, right-wing, Tea Party base, by adding Ryan to the ticket,” Dr. Gerald Horne, professor of history and African American studies at the University of Houston told The Final Call. “But the problem is a character like Ryan doesn’t sell so well outside of Dixie, outside of the South.

“It’s difficult to see how his ideas will fly in Colorado, or Nevada, or in other important swing states and battleground states. So, in some ways, Mr. Romney shot himself in the foot by adding Paul Ryan to the ticket,” Dr. Horne continued.

“As everybody knows, demography is not working to the advantage of the GOP which has styled itself as the ‘Party of Whiteness,’ that is to say: it is well known that Black Americans will vote against the GOP nine-to-one; that Latinos, particularly in light of Mr. Obama’s latest moves on immigration, will vote against the GOP seven-to-three; that Asian Americans will vote against the GOP six-to-four; that Native Americans will vote against the GOP seven-to-three; and so basically Republicans are reduced to a White base, which for the last half century in bad times mostly, and sometimes good times, have voted 57 -to- 43 for the GOP.

“The problem is that the White proportion of the electorate is shrinking. It will be shrinking even more by 2016, particularly in light of this spectacularly skyrocketing Latino population, and ditto for the Asian American population.

“So, I really see a long-term crisis for the Republican Party, and if they lose this election, I see the knives coming out. I see a lot of bloodletting, and I see a circular firing squad being formed, which quite frankly is great news for social progress,” he continued.

And yet, with public opinion polls consistently giving Mr. Obama a small national popularity edge over Mr. Romney, and an edge in enough battleground Electoral College states to give Mr. Obama from 275 to 291, to as many as 300 votes there (270 votes are needed to elect a president) and yet an Obama victory is not yet certain.

“I think (President Obama’s) favored,” Dr. David Bositis, senior research fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies told The Final Call. “There are some things about Romney: one, personality-wise and how he comes across. He’s ultra-secretive. He’s really suspiciously secretive.

“He bought and then destroyed all of the computer memories of his staff and his when he was governor. He has buried all these records, including for the 2002 Olympics. He just has this mania for secrecy, and as far as I’m concerned, anybody who has that level of mania for secrecy has something to hide.

“I think that there are shady things in his background,” Dr. Bositis continued. “I think that his tax things have things that really are shady and would raise a great deal of opprobrium,” if the public knew them.

Perhaps GOP insiders have a sense of doom about this presidential campaign that outsiders do not dare to proclaim. As a result perhaps, the Romney campaign is a “bunch of whiners,” according to Dr. Bositis.

Dr. Horne points instead to a Wall Street Journal editorial which attacks “what they call, quote, ‘the Bed-Wetters Caucus,’ unquote. Who is this you ask? Well these are the Republicans who have been giving interviews raising searching questions about the viability, as a candidate, of Paul Ryan.”

For his part, there has been “no shortage of criticism of Obama in the Black community,” said Dr. Horne. “It’s unfortunate, sadly, in the United States of America in 2012, that there is a widespread perception that Mr. Obama is unable to do as much for the Black community—or to put it another way—to do as much for the most loyal Democratic voters than some of his predecessors, because of (the) perception that since he’s Black, he’ll be engaged in special pleading of a sort, if he satisfied those who vote for him. That seems to me to be a very perverted kind of politics, because politics is all about satisfying your base. That’s why Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan.

“Somehow there’s a double standard that’s not necessarily applicable to the most loyal voters for the Democratic Party,” said Dr. Horne.

“The fact of the matter is that Obama’s agenda has very much been a Black agenda,” Dr. Bositis said. “The healthcare reform? That was a civil rights bill. I mean, 36 percent of African Americans don’t have health insurance, and African Americans have way more health problems than White people do—hypertension, obesity, diabetes.

“And the stimulus saved a ton of jobs, including a million in government—state and local government—which, as soon as the stimulus was over, a lot of African Americans lost their jobs,” Dr. Bositis explained.

And yet the dueling perceptions of President Obama remain in the minds of many, including top GOP strategists. As this campaign season nears the homestretch, beginning after Labor Day, Republicans themselves are not in agreement about how to attempt to define the president. Some see him as either a power-hungry politician who will say just about anything to maintain his grip on the levers of power, while others contend he’s simply a well-meaning politician who just got in over his head.

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As kindly predisposed as Black voters may be to him, Black critics may also be blinded by the president’s race. Black critics of Mr. Obama may be mistakenly judging him as if his job description more closely resembles that of the Prophet Moses, the deliverer of the oppressed than it does that of a ruling Pharaoh. Mr. Obama now sits in the same seat that was occupied by presidents who themselves were slave owners.

President Barack Obama is likely the first president of the United States who has read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He is a Black man in America, and he likely has what Dr. W.E.B. DuBois described 109 years ago as “double-consciousness.”

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Dr. DuBois wrote in the opening chapter of his book The Souls of Black Folks, “of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

“One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost.

“He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn’t bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

In this case, the “doors of opportunity” just happen to lead to the White House Oval Office and the possible re-election of the first Black President in American history.

The Final Call