Barack's back

    I find it curious that not all of black America’s civil rights organizations and its power elite are enthusiastically backing Barack Obama.
    My curiosity evolves not out of the traditional tried-and-true black and white purview or from simply peering through a rose-tinted lens but because I’m approaching it from an ethnic stance, not a racial one. If a pro-Israel Jewish-American candidate had a real shot at winning the Democratic party’s nomination for president, would leaders from the Anti-Defamation League or Jewish Defense League lay back in the cut until . . . ? If an Italian-American or a Polish-American ended up being the Democratic party’s front-running candidate, what would most Polish American or Italian-American politicians and community leaders do? So why are so many African-American leaders ambivalent, if not outright AWOL? And why are some of them backing the wife of our "first black president" while backstabbing the man who could be our first real African American Commander-In-Chief?
    Earlier this week, William Jelani Cobb, a history professor at the historically black Spelman College, had a widely-circulated Outlook piece tackling the issue. The headline read: Civil rights leaders aloof from Obama. Here’s how the piece began, click here to read it in its entirety.

   

    There was a time in the not-too-distant past when "black president" was synonymous with "president of black America." That was the office to which Jesse Jackson appointed himself in the 1970s — resigned to the fact that the actual presidency was out of reach. In 2003, Chris Rock wrote and directed "Head of State," a film about the first black man to win the presidency. (It was a comedy.) And in the ultimate concession, some African-Americans have attempted to bestow the title of black president upon Bill Clinton — a white man.
    In the wake of his strong showing in the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has already permanently changed the meaning of that term. It is no longer an oxymoron or a quixotic in-joke. And this, perhaps more than anything else, explains his tortured relationship with black civil rights leaders.
    The most amazing thing about the 2008 presidential race is not that a black man is a bona fide contender, but the lukewarm response he has received from the luminaries whose sacrifices made this run possible. With the notable exception of Joseph Lowery, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference veteran who gave a stirring invocation at Obama's Atlanta campaign rally in June and subsequently endorsed him, Obama has been running without much support from many of the most recognizable black figures in the political landscape.

    In Cobb’s commentary, he cited the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s criticism of Obama for not championing the “Jena Six” cause. Rev. Jackson took issue with Cobb’s wrist-slap, making a defensive rebuttal in his own commentary which ran under the headline: Barack Obama is Not a Threat.
    This is part of Jackson’s rebuttal, click here to read the rest: “I have supported Obama's campaign since early on. But civil rights leaders have always played a somewhat separate role from presidential candidates. Free from the constraints of sound bites and pollsters and the politics of compromise, we are able to speak truth to power and apply positive leverage to get inequality issues on the candidates' agendas.”
    Jackson should know better. Inequality issues were the driving force behind his two runs for the Democratic party’s nomination in 1980s and they automatically and instantaneously limited his potential to win. Rev. Al Sharpton, who ran for the Democratic party’s nomination on the inequality platform four years ago, did not fare as nearly as well as Jackson.
    The reason Obama is poised to be the first African American standard bearer in the Democrat’s bid for the presidency is because he’s not running on what have been stereotyped as black issues. His stage is larger than that. He is addressing and debating the same issues that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are addressing and debating. Should he win the party’s nomination and then go on to defeat the Republican presidential nominee, Obama will be free to push any inequality issues that need pressing.
    And should he fail to do the job the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton and the other black power brokers in the civil rights community believe he should be doing, I have no doubt that they’ll have his ear. Nor do I doubt that when they pull his coattail, he’ll be more understanding and more receptive to their inequality-issue pitch than any previous occupant in the White House–much more so than the last Clinton or, if it turns out that way, the other Clinton.