James L. Taylor: The Assassination of Barack Obama

James Lance Taylor returns to our recurring online series, "Political Positions," to dissect how the tenor of the current political climate could lead to a scenario few dare talk about -- the assassination of Sen. Barack Obama.

"This animus we are witnessing may be owned by the Republicans, but it was bought and brought first by the Democrats during the primary campaign," he writes.

Taylor is associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and president-elect of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

James L. Taylor

"Kill him!" "Terrorist!" "Traitor!" "Sit down, boy!" "He is not one of us!" "He's an Arab," "Socialist," and "Bomb Obama!" are just a few of the audible rants of Americans, heard at McCain-Palin gatherings in recent weeks.

Wow, how we long for the good ol' days of feeling bombarded when William Horton (he was given the name "Willie" by Atwater, not his mother) was introduced to the Republicans by Al Gore in 1988 -- providing Lee Atwater and Bush 41 the race-baiting, fear-mongering fodder that resulted in the defeat of Dukakis after having the lead entering the final weeks of the 1988 campaign.

This is not to suggest the Obama campaign has been innocent of smear tactics, such as linking McCain to the anti-immigrant demagoguery of Rush Limbaugh on Spanish-speaking TV. But this did not amount to all-Mexican and all-Black crowds calling for McCain's Mississippi Irish blood.

The Right's rage against Obama has bordered on fanatical, and the dye may have been cast, regrettably, by Hillary Clinton's defeated campaign, which provided the blueprint that the McCain-Palin ticket is currently following. This tenor was stirred earlier this week by the Republicans' answer to Hillary Clinton -- Sarah Palin. McCain should take note; it did not work effectively for Sen. Clinton.

This animus we are witnessing may be owned by the Republicans, but it was brought and brought first by the Democrats during the primary campaign. Pundits called it the "kitchen sink" strategy. Indeed once Sen. Clinton's campaign was on the verge of defeat in late May -- just weeks before the 40th anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination -- she reminded an editorial board in South Dakota, "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992, until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know I just, I don't understand it," she said, dismissing the idea of abandoning the race at that time.

It was the fourth time which Clinton alluded to RFK's late June assassination as precedence for not suspending or ending her campaign (on March 6th she used the word "assassination" in a TIME magazine interview; on May 7th in Washington, D.C. and later in West Virginia she redacted the word, but mentioned the tragedy). After reasserting the word in late May amid much criticism, Sen. Clinton apologized.

In a January 8th interview with BET's Jeff Johnson (What's In It For Us? special), Barack Obama himself, conceded, that early reticence among older African Americans -- who witnessed the murders of JFK, MLK, and RFK -- centered on concern for his safety. It has been widely reported, but only whispered, that Barack Obama received Secret Service protection beginning in May 2007, earlier than any presidential candidate in recorded history of the Service; "I've got the best protection in the world," Obama said in a previous interview, "So stop worrying."

But Obama made the request for protection himself. On the eve of Obama's Democratic nomination acceptance speech on August 28, three "lone wolf" white supremacist meth addicts, Tharin R. Gartrell, 28; Shawn R. Adolf, 33; and Nathan D. Johnson, 32, were arrested for plotting to kill Obama. Initially, officials said there was no credible threat -- despite their possession of two rifles, one with a scope, in the car, along with walkie-talkies, a bulletproof vest and licenses in the names of other people -- but they now consider it a serious plot.

During this campaign, the world witnessed the tragic assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, who like Obama, was a left-of-center political leader and equally an historic figure as the first woman to be elected head of an Islamic state.

In 1963, Texas oil tycoon Haroldson Lafayette (H.L.) Hunt publicly stated that JFK should be shot since "there was no way to get those traitors out of government except by shooting them out." His son, Nelson Bunker Hunt and others, took out a full-page advertisement in the Dallas Morning News on November 22nd accusing JFK of being a Communist sympathizer and a traitor to the nation -- precisely the charges against Obama for his ties to Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.

JFK, like Obama, was a "first" in being a serious Irish Catholic candidate (Al E. Smith lost in 1920) and his faith, like Obama's racial mix, was a perennial issue in the 1960 campaign. The Hunts also ran a propaganda machine called the International Committee for the Defense of Christian Culture and like the venomous Fox News demagogues, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly, they used their radio programs Facts Forum and Life Line to spew hatred of the president before he was killed.

Martin Luther King, of course, lived with death threats every day of his public life until it was taken April 4, 1968. Like Malcolm X, it is depressingly true that in such an eerie atmosphere as the present, Barack Obama is safer abroad than he will be, should he win, in America, even as President of the United States.

Some might remember comedian Eddy Murphy's 1980s Delirious stand-up routine where he joked about whites voting for Jesse Jackson -- after a night of drinking and pranks -- only to discover the next morning, that Jackson had been elected; during his fictitious inaugural address, Jackson ran back and forth from left to right of the stage as the imagined assassins, in southern drawl, looked through a rifle scope saying, "He won't stand still, he won't stand still."

That was funny; the tenor of this political moment is not.

Politics has always been a "blood sport," and campaigns often bring out the lowest common denominator in people; the "us" against "them" trope. But there is something of a spiritual sickness in a nation where our political process has been reduced to calls of "Kill him," and something only slightly less troubling about Hillary Clinton saying, "Let's wait and see what happens."

Add the ingredient of the worst global economy since the Great Depression or the crash of 1877, and it makes for a combustible atmosphere. And in the end, if this is the course that our politics take -- again, then what voice, prey tell, do you think many people might invoke? Does the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ring a bell?

-- James L. Taylor

Related: Palin Supporter Shouts: 'Sit Down, Boy!'

Geoffrey Bennett

11:48 AM ET | 10-14-2008 | permalink

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Mark Sawyer: 'At the RNC, Shock and Woe'

Mark Q. Sawyer takes a look back at Sen. John McCain's RNC acceptance speech and offers a scathing critique, in this piece titled Shock and Woe: McCain's Speech to the Convention.

Sawyer is director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics and the author of Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.

John McCain's speech to the Republican National Convention and to the American public was as Jeff Toobin noted on CNN, "the worst speech by a nominee that I've heard since Jimmy Carter in 1980. I thought it was disorganized, themeless ... I thought it was very, very boring until the end when he started talking about his personal story, which is, of course, remarkable and always important to hear. I personally cannot remember a single policy proposal that he made because they had nothing connecting them. I found it shockingly bad."

Toobin nailed it right on the head. McCain rambled and delivered his normal befuddled performance, where he seemed to wrestle with the TelePrompTer. However, those are just style points, let's turn to content.

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Geoffrey Bennett

11:46 AM ET | 09- 8-2008 | permalink

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James L. Taylor: UnAmerican Americans (Part Deux)

Here, James Lance Taylor revisits patriotism and "Americaness" in the presidential campaign. He says John McCain is picking up a strategy Hillary Clinton reportedly rejected to paint Barack Obama as something other than American. His follow-up essay is titled UnAmerican Americans (Part Deux).

Taylor is associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and president-elect of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

Some time ago, I posted an article for "Political Positions" titled, UnAmerican Americans: Or, Why Michelle Obama is "Fair Game," which sought to parse, rather discursively I must admit, the racial implications of the national media's, and opposition's depictions of the Obamas as somehow "incomplete" Americans.

This was written before the New Yorker magazine controversy The follow-up comments to my article were mixed at best. My favorite part was where it stated:

"The ideas that Michelle and Barack Obama are somehow unpatriotic, Muslim, anti-American racist Christians who -- as anti-Islamic, anti-Semites -- refuse to wear the lapel flag, to pledge allegiance to it with hand over heart, and are just recently "really proud" of their country, "terrorist fist" bumpers who secretly wear Afros, Islamic Somali traditional clothing, wrote angry undergraduate papers, might be assassinated between now and the Democratic National Convention like Bobby Kennedy in 1968, and can be a Harvard-educated married "baby mama," are all rooted in a history of "American alienation" that plays well in the strange world of American politics."

Very recent published reports confirm that both the ("suspended") Hillary Clinton and John McCain campaigns have variously considered strategically emphasizing to the electorate the "un-American" culture and values and "lack of American roots" of Barack and Michelle Obama in their efforts to defeat him.

Clinton adviser Mark Penn (left) and Sen. John McCain (right)

Getty Images

Given the diversity of his biography and the genuinely Chicago-influenced black politics of his wife, it is plausible that they harbor a left-of-center politics, which most Americans find unacceptable since the Civil Rights-Black Power movements. But polls show overwhelming disapproval of the thoroughly failed moral, military, social, economic, and political policies of right-of-center conservatism that have dominated American politics ever since.

Continue reading "James L. Taylor: UnAmerican Americans (Part Deux)" »

Geoffrey Bennett

1:02 PM ET | 08-13-2008 | permalink

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Mark Sawyer: Obama Has No 'Race Card' To Play

Earlier this week, presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Barack Obama was "playing the race card," when the Illinois senator warned an audience that his Republican rivals would try to scare Americans against voting for him.

Mark Q. Sawyer heard that charge and offers this piece, titled "Barack Obama Has No 'Race Card' to Play, But John McCain Sure Does."

Sawyer is director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics and the author of Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.

What is "the race card" anyway? It appeared in the context of the O.J. Simpson trial when Robert Shapiro, O.J.'s lawyer, worried that by doing his job as O.J. Simpson's attorney had lost his whiteness card.

Shapiro said, "'Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.'" That phrase was echoed as a defense by McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis, in justifying the McCain's campaign likening Barack Obama -- a former state senator, editor of the Harvard Law Review, community organizer and sitting U.S. Senator -- to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. The two, of course, are most known for partying, sex tapes, eschewing underwear, and flights of fancy with drunk driving, drug use, jail and child neglect.

The New York Times has accurately pointed out the connection with the Simpson trial and the irony of McCain's use of it. Now we have pundits arguing whether the "race card" was played or not, without anyone have a clear idea of what a "race card" is -- if it exists at all. But I think I can help here.

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Geoffrey Bennett

6:07 PM ET | 08- 1-2008 | permalink

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James L. Taylor: Voting for Barack Obama

"Casting a vote for Obama is the cheapest way to fundamentally change the way Black Americans see America," says James Lance Taylor.

In this week's installment of Political Positions, Taylor offers an essay titled, Voting for Barack Obama: Is It the Polls or Poles?

Taylor is associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and president-elect of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

When W.E.B. Du Bois wrote Souls of Black Folk just over a century ago, he discussed frustration with how others seemed to look at him, and blacks in general, as if to ask, "How does it feel to be a problem?"

The success of the Obama campaign seems to be stirring a renewed sense of confidence among segments of the larger African-American population. I cannot say for sure how widespread it is, whether it is mere anecdote or just a superficial impression, but many Americans of African descent seem especially locked into the implications of an Obama candidacy for their social standing in America.

Barack Obama addresses a crowd at a January 2008 campaign rally in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Michal Czerwonka, AFP/Getty Images

Long ago, Alex de Tocqueville argued, that if democracy were ever to be real in America, it would be through the improved social and equality statuses of blacks in the country; their status, then understood in terms of the whole group, would be the best evidence of the democratic capacities of the American social and political system.

The newest CBS/New York Times poll suggests that African Americans are enthusiastic over the Obama candidacy and campaign, but still pessimistic about the broad state of race relations between the major groups, namely blacks and Caucasian Americans.

Ironically, whites are more optimistic about the state of race relations and levels of racial discrimination than blacks. But three of ten are far more skeptical about Barack Obama and his potential presidency.

By a full three percentage points (91 to 88 percent), white respondents said that they would vote for a black candidate more than did black respondents. When compared to white voters, by one percentage point (six to five percent) blacks said that they would not vote for a black candidate. But they overwhelmingly support Obama. What gives?

It should be remembered that black American men and women were initially more enthusiastic about the Bill and Hillary Clinton campaign than the Obama campaign. Black women, by more than 10 percentage points, supported Hillary Clinton over Obama, who nevertheless had the support of three out of four black women.

Once Obama passed the "electability" test in Iowa, African Americans -- across categories of gender, age, region, class, and ideology -- became more open to the possibility of what, in the 217 years of the Office of the American President, was believed impossible in the lifetimes of most living Americans.

But we stand less than four months away potentially from one of the most important moments in, not just American, but Western World history; for only in Cuba (Batista is alleged to have had African ancestry) and Mexico, have men of African descent governed a non-African, Caribbean, or Haitian country in the modern world.

Continue reading "James L. Taylor: Voting for Barack Obama" »

Geoffrey Bennett

5:32 PM ET | 07-17-2008 | permalink

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James L. Taylor: Why Michelle Obama is "Fair Game"

In an unscientific News & Views poll, 83 percent of respondents said Michelle Obama does not need an image makeover.

The premise for the poll question: Criticism and outright attacks on Michelle Obama for being, as her detractors say, unpatriotic, race-conscious, and abrasive.

In this week's installment of Political Positions, James Lance Taylor offers a historic perspective. His piece is titled The UnAmerican Americans: Or, Why Michelle Obama is "Fair Game."

Taylor is associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and president-elect of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

At the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of a concept widely discussed in contemporary intellectual and campus circles as "double consciousness," the sense of reconciling "two warring ideals" of being of African and American descent in a patriotically racist society that made these dichotomies the litmuses of who belongs to America and to whom America belongs.

This academic concept fits Barack Obama more than Michelle and traditional "African Americans" like her, whose ancestry is traceable to the slavery epoch, nine decades of enforced segregation, and the post-Civil Rights desperation of urban, rural, and suburban ghettos in Chicago and throughout the country.

Michelle and Barack Obama embrace during an election day speech at the end of the 2008 Democratic Party primaries.

Emmanuel Dunand, AFP/Getty Images

Harold Cruse would later suggest that Du Bois's idea was autobiographical and did not apply to desperately poor, peasant, and working-class African Americans in the post-bellum South, whose daily experience prevented them from having the convenience of "double consciousness." They knew who they were and what they had been in American society. For middle-class and affluent African Americans -- as the Obama's now are -- this idea yielded a sense of "twoness" concerning being in America but not of America.

Years later, Cornel West took the double consciousness construct and clarified that its major shortcoming was the failure to realize that the earliest Europeans who came to America were as alien to the land as were the Africans. Early American whites were "incomplete" Europeans and as much "bastards" of the American continent as the first Negroes.

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Geoffrey Bennett

4:51 PM ET | 06-25-2008 | permalink

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James L. Taylor: Before Hillary Clinton Became White

Taylor is associate professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and president-elect of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists.

Despite John Edwards's endorsement of Barack Obama, the very recent transformation of Hillary Clinton in becoming the voice of dispossessed white working class and populist elements in the United States is not at all a political conversion.

That is, if the Clintons' electoral successes, respectively in Arkansas (1978, 1982), nationally (1992, 1996), and in New York (2002, 2006) are any measure. As the most powerful Democratic Party machine since the New Deal, having inspired the party's ideological shift from traditional liberalism to "centrism" in the 1990s, the Clintons' very skillful balance of the party's disparate ethnic, regional, religious, ideological, racial, and gender constituencies saved the national Democrats from the humiliation of occupying the White House for less than five of the past forty years.

Pardon the numbers, but between 1980 and 2005 their native Arkansas alternated with Mississippi, New Mexico, West Virginia, (and occasionally South Carolina, Alabama, Utah, Indiana, and Montana), as perennial states with the four or five lowest per capita personal incomes.

Its average poverty rate between 2002 and 2004 was 17.6 percent and second in the country only to Mississippi's 17.7 percent. The overall state unemployment rate in 2006 was 7.0 percent. Recent unemployment rates among its various populations respectively were 5.6 percent for whites, 7.5 percent for Latinos, and 14.8 percent among its African American residents. Residents with high school education or less constitute 16.2 percent of its unemployed. In 21 of its 26 Rural Swing counties, more of its 2.8 million residents lived in mobile homes in 1990 than in the rest of the state.

It shares ethnic and religious demographics with Appalachia, which includes southwestern New York, western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, West Virginia, western Maryland, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, South Carolina, and northern Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi; by one, Obama has won a majority of these states, even where he has not won the counties or regions.

Arkansas is in many ways a microcosm of the Democrats' "racial dilemma" since 1948; it was the Republicans' dilemma from the Civil War until the early New Deal. Political Scientist Diane Blair's seminal study, Arkansas Politics and Government (with Jay Barth), notes how former Governor Homer Adkins pronounced in 1944 after the Smith v. Allwright case eliminated the all "white primary" that "if I cannot be nominated by the white voters of Arkansas, I do not want the office."

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Geoffrey Bennett

7:47 PM ET | 05-30-2008 | permalink

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Mark Sawyer: 'Ugly Betty' Just Plain Ugly

America Ferrera stars in ABCs' Ugly Betty.

Courtesy ABC

Does TV's Ugly Betty play in ugly stereotypes? Mark Q. Sawyer thinks so.

He's back with this submission titled, "Ugly Betty Just Plain Ugly: Latino Assimilation at Black Expense."

Sawyer is director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics and the author of Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba.

I really tried to love the show Ugly Betty. I even like America Ferrera. The idea of a less than anorexic real woman with curves representing a Latina on television is wonderful. I have also been a longtime fan of Vanessa Williams so, why does Ugly Betty offend me?

In my opinion, the show is pseudo-feminism where the bottom line message is that Latinos can assimilate and achieve success by protecting white male privilege. The central message is that if Latinas take care of white men, and don't challenge their undeserved privilege and in fact defend it, they too can be upwardly mobile.

The show not only offends me as an African American but also should offend hordes of Latino men, who are either absent in popular films or television or there is a suggestion that they are so sexist and backwards the only way for a Latina to achieve liberation is through white men. Let me explain.

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Geoffrey Bennett

4:42 PM ET | 05-27-2008 | permalink

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Ron Walters: An Open Letter to Barack Obama

This week's "Political Positions" submission comes from Dr. Ron Walters. In it, Walters offers advice to Barack Obama as he figures out the numbers game, which is vital to winning the White House.

Barack Obama addresses people during a town hall meeting in Boca Raton, Florida.

Joe Raedle, Getty Images

I write this "open letter" to Barack Obama, because I am concerned about one recently written by Harold Ford Jr., urging Obama to try harder to connect with white blue-collar voters by engaging them in states like Kentucky and Indiana in the fall elections. And while I would not argue that he should ignore these states, I worry that the agenda he would use to attract conservative voters could weaken the force of change.

To begin with, worry about the blue collar vote is based on the perception of their strength as a part of the Democratic base. But this year will probably not reflect the 1980s, when they went over to the Republican party en masse, or in 1992 when they were a large part of the Ross Perot vote.

This year, blue collar whites are hurting more than any other time in recent memory and more than any other part of the political demographic with: significant job losses, high prices for everything from milk to gas, the loss of their homes and disaffection with the war policies of the Bush administration.

They have been let down by Republicans on both domestic and foreign policy and although about 20 percent in recent polls have said they would vote McCain if Obama were the choice in the fall, the issue is what would happen to the rest.

I think this year the blue collar constituency is likely to split. One group could go with McCain; another group may buy in to Obama's promise of change to an agenda that favors lower income citizens; and still another group, frustrated by the choices, is likely to stay home. This means that while the split in their votes may be a threat to the Democratic base it could be neutralized by the dynamism created by the Obama campaign.

There is the distinct possibility that a great deal of the loss of blue collar whites could be made up by the new coalition that Obama promises to bring into the fall election. Estimates by the Associated Press are that the new voters Democrats have attracted in the primaries thus far amount to 3.5 to 4 million.

If this proportion holds up in the fall elections, one would have to triple the number of new voters to about 10 to 12 million. This substantial number of change voters should be the focus of the campaign rather than lavishing resources on voters in the conservative heartland of the nation that will most likely not vote for Barack Obama in any case.

The other path to increasing the change constituency is to focus on enhancing the turnout of those groups that have shown they are more likely to vote for a Democratic ticket -- blacks and Hispanics. To be sure, some of the increase in new primary election voters is reflected in the increase in blacks and Hispanics, but more could be done in the general election to increase these numbers, especially among the youth who are trending away from the Republican party by astounding numbers.

In 2004, 35 percent of blacks and 66 percent of Hispanics were not registered, and 44 percent of blacks and 72 percent of Hispanics that were eligible did not vote. The addition of new voters to the Democratic base should put into perspective. Much of the speculation about Hillary Clinton's strength in so-called swing states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania came from considering the new states such voters might deliver.

Finally, some of Obama's perceived weaknesses are based on head-to-head polls during the primary season, but the tradition is that these numbers do not necessarily hold up in the fall. For example, in 1998 Michael Dukakis was ahead of George H. W. Bush but Bush won; in 1992, Bill Clinton trailed him in the primary elections but Clinton won; and in 2000, Al Gore was ahead of George Bush but Bush was given the election.

Therefore, the moderate wing of the Democratic party and the punditry that seems obsessed with blue collar voters should not dictate to the Obama campaign a strategy that both feeds into Obama's weakness among blue collar whites, and challenges the strength of a change oriented campaign and administration if he wins the presidency.

Such a strategy is disrespectful of Blacks by suggesting that they would stand still while Obama pursues conservative interests to their detriment, in effect, exchanging the progressive substance of change for race.

I think this is a dangerous course the Obama campaign should avoid.

-- Dr. Ron Walters

Geoffrey Bennett

12:10 PM ET | 05-27-2008 | permalink

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Mark Sawyer: McCain's Crooked Talk on Cuba

Today, we're starting a new series, featuring online commentaries written by our political contributors. "Political Positions" brings you opinionated reactions to the week's news, so be sure to read and respond.

This first piece comes from Mark Q. Sawyer, director of the UCLA Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Politics and the author of Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba. Here, he writes about what he considers John McCain's politically expedient stances on U.S. relations with Cuba.

Mark Q. Sawyer

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain attacked Sen. Barack Obama -- his potential opponent -- on Cuba policy and argued we must stay the course with our current lack of engagement with the island. Why is it that McCain supported normalizing relations with Vietnam, a regime that tortured him and cost 58,217 American lives, but won't talk with Cuba?

McCain, who once sensibly suggested that some reforms in Cuba could open the door to constructive engagement, is now hardening his position simply to garner votes among older Cuban American voters in South Florida. He is attempting to draw a distinction between himself and Barack Obama by characterizing Obama as "naive on foreign policy." It may be good politics, but is it sound policy?

Continue reading "Mark Sawyer: McCain's Crooked Talk on Cuba" »

Geoffrey Bennett

12:38 PM ET | 05-22-2008 | permalink

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