Here, Professor Harris has given us a very thought-provoking summary of Black political actions and strategies since the Civil Rights era. Carefully highlighting its key events and then trying to properly situate Mr. Obama's "post-racial" and so called "race-neutral" political approach within that history. The author concludes that by publicly "distancing" himself from both his Chicago political mentors (mainly Jessie Jackson Senior and Harold Washington), and his main constituency, black inner city residents, Mr. Obama, throughout his first term, has as at times been aloof, callous, disinterested, ungrateful, gratuitously disrespectful and down right politically calculating, but has never been openly responsive to his most supportive constituency, black Americans. This has made our first black president a "hollow prize" for those who saw him as a black success and thus voted for him at the 95% level.
Given that blacks suffered more than most under the eight-year Bush debacle -- losing fully two-thirds of their total wealth, continuing racial disparities in income and education, owning a disproportionate number of under water mortgages, epidemic incarceration and unemployment rates, rampant HIV and the continuing breakdown in the black family, it is not unreasonable that those who supported Mr. Obama at the 95% level would expect at least a signal from him that he would put their issues high up on his presidential agenda?
Not so according to this author, in fact, curiously, Mr. Obama, in Professor Harris' view, has done just the opposite.
In this careful, nuanced, but uncompromising analysis, the author takes us on an excursion into why this might be so? Why has Mr. Obama, repeatedly "dissed" and gratuitously insulted his black audiences? Why has he openly rejected singling out the need to address the black agenda if by doing so, the US itself is sure to get better? And why has he done so under the demeaning mantra of "I am the President of all the people," when at the same time, he is busy going about the business of doling out rewards to Native Americans, Latinos, Unions, Wall Street crooks, the LGBT crowd, and white women? Never once has he said to those groups, I cannot single out your issues because "I am the president of all the people? In fact it seems that the only group conspicuously missing from Mr. Obama's list is the group that was most responsible for his election, black Americans!
Thus, here the author exposes Mr. Obama's unconscionable racial duplicity by raises disturbing questions about the true nature of our first black President's commitment to equality and more racial fairness. By failing to address the problems of race and the problems of those who suffer from it most, his most supportive constituency, black Americans, Mr. Obama reinforced Rev Wright's claim that he is just another cheap Chicago politician. Mr. Obama's defection from, and his ignoring of blacks, the very group that supported him at the 95% level, is such a curious and incongruous phenomenon for a professional politician, that the author uses this book to examine why this might be so?
The formula he uses to get to the bottom of this curious dilemma is what he labels "the price of the ticket." As always, in American politics, lurking in the background and subtext of this phrase is the 800-pound gorilla of racism. "The price of the ticket." is a metaphor resurrected from Jim Crow days, when blacks, due to rampant racial injustice, could expect little more than "political symbolism" from their political leaders. That blacks willingly settled for "political symbolism" instead of for the same "real political substance" given to the mainstream, was an embarrassingly true index of just how powerless they were during the Southern led era of America's racial dictatorship. Accepting this demeaning status of having to eat "symbol pie" in exchange for no "substantive supper" was said to be "the price of the ticket." The most blacks could expect is that with a "wink and a nod" before they voted, the politician in question would signal to his black constituency that (without doing so publicly), he would pass on to them whatever crumbs were left from the table after everyone else had been paid.
I believe that the author makes a convincing case that what we see again here today, under our first black president's administration, is a repeat of this cruel and demeaning race-based political strategy, one that was put to such good effect by Southern racist politicians during the era of Jim Crow. By being complicit in leaving blacks no honorable seat at the table -- despite their playing an indispensable role in his election victory -- means that Mr. Obama is guilty of devaluing the black vote when it is compared with the votes of others in other subgroups within the democratic family, subgroups that he willingly and openly makes promises to and publicly pays off his political debts.
Said somewhat differently, for all other groups, Mr. Obama has had no difficulty openly dispensing expected political largesse. Only blacks are left out in the cold when it comes to dispensing political rewards and payoffs in the aftermath of his election success. As was the case in the Jim Crow South, under Mr. Obama, blacks are again expected to continue to "eat "symbol pie." And to wait for the proverbial "wink and a nod."
Even whites (both those who voted for him and those who voted against him) expected Mr. Obama to turn his attention to the embarrassing problems in America's disgraceful inner cities. The fact that Mr. Obama did just the opposite, which is to say "distanced" himself from his black constituency, leaves the author only one way to characterize our first black president's behavior. And since he could not say it out loud, I will say it for him: This makes Mr. Obama a "soft Uncle Tom," masquerading as a progressive liberal democrat. He is indeed the president of all the people, except for those who voted fro him at the 95% level, black people.
What the author tells us here is that in every way possible, Mr. Obama, has given black America his "middle finger," and along with it, a single unmistakable message, one that in every respect is resonant with the same message once given to them a generation ago by racist white Southern politicians: "You and your degenerative behavior are the main causes of your own socio-economic predicament, and there is nothing I can do about it. Therefore, you've got nothing coming from me but whatever trickles down from policies that I implement to address main stream white American problems? [Wink, wink, nod, nod]
This is the end of the Obama message to blacks, and the end of the Obama administration's black program. Except that after that message, and the silence that usually follows it, blacks then hear in the distant background a new faint, but more urgent message: Oh, by the way, do not forget to get out the vote for me again in 2012, because remember, I can't win without you. And by the way, you really don't have any other option, now do you? You wouldn't cut off your nose and vote for Mitt just to spite me, now would you?
Given that Mr. Obama's reelection chances could well rest on a robust turn out of black voters, and given too that the black vote is now under siege by the full court press to suppress it unfolding within the Republican machinery, one wonders why it is that Mr. Obama continually runs the risk of gratuitously insulting his black constituency, further discouraging a strong black voter turn out? If this does not look like a formula for a self-inflicted political train wreck or political suicide, then I have completely lost all my political senses?
After stripping Mr. Obama naked, in the first half of the book, the author uses the rest of the book to cover his nakedness with the same patch of fig leaves of rationalizations we hear coming from Obama surrogates on MSNBC (the most prominent of whom has been Rev Al Sharpton, whom it it is well known that Mr. Obama despises). Rev Al's message is that " The President has been so busy dealing with the economic melt down, that he has not had time to address black concerns. Plus, the policies that he has put in place that help mainstream whites will also do wonders to help blacks." [Yea, right Rev. Al? Aren't you the one who has been trying to sell that bridge in Brooklyn?]
However, these weak Obama rationalizations belie the fact that the black socioeconomic situation is dire, if not catastrophic, near great depression levels, and they also only further beg the questions raise earlier that Mr. Obama does not find the need to use such rationalizations (or his mantra that he is the president of all the people) when he is called upon to address the problems of other minorities and special interests groups such as the unions, white women, the LGBT community, Latinos, and even Native Americans, none of whom voted for Mr. Obama above the 55% level. Plus, it makes more sense to turn Mr. Obama's trickle-down social thesis on its head: Helping the most severely injured in American society, ipso facto, helps the mainstream more, and not the other way around.
This is political analysis at its very best and anyone who wants to know why Mr. Obama is unlikely to get more than 75% of the black vote (and thus will lose the election to Mitt Romney) this time around, must read this book. A well deserved, five stars
