Anderson@Large

Dems’ Unfinished Business

The Democratic nomination battle may be over but the shouting. The rapid response to President Bush’s "false comfort of appeasement" shot suggests the shouting has just begun.

As Democrats pivot toward the general election, there is still the unfinished business of Michigan and Florida. A point that Bill Clinton recently made on the campaign trail:

All [Hillary] has ever asked for is that everybody vote, that we count the voters that show up, this is about the people not the mechanism. If you wanna punish them fine, but don't pretend they don't exist. And don't pretend it didn't happen. And don't pretend that she wasn't willing to let them vote again and help them raise the money to let them vote again.

It’s self-serving since Hillary desperately needs those votes and delegates. That said, it’s mindboggling that Democrats are having a hissy-fit over HBO’s dramatization of the 2000 Florida election debacle but are largely silent as voters in Michigan and Florida are disenfranchised and their voices silenced in this history-making primary season.

Democrats think Warren Christopher is unfairly portrayed as a wimp. Well, he was a wimp compared to James Baker who oversaw Team Bush’s scorched earth strategy.

For more than a year, I lived and breathed the Florida election drama as the writer and producer of the documentary, "Counting on Democracy." One of Baker's Miami-Dade County street fighters, Roger Stone, told me:

I went there immediately after the election. Until I got there, it wasn’t clear what our strategy would be or what the Democrats’ strategy would be. It became clearer that once they chose not to challenge and ask for a recount in every county, that their strategy was simple. And that was to take that vast number of spoiled ballots which were not clearly and legally executed for Al Gore and convert them to Gore votes by divine intuition.

The whole world knows how well that strategy worked out. To arrange a screening of "Counting on Democracy," send an email here.

Black Liberation Theology

For the third time in three months, Republicans lost a special congressional election in a safe GOP district. The Mississippi loss came 10 days after the GOP lost a traditional seat in Louisiana.

In Mississippi and Louisiana, Republicans used Barack Obama’s past ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. to try to scare up white votes. Instead, their strategy boosted black voter turnout. Now Congressional Republicans are scared the three straight losses foretell disaster in November.

While Wright didn’t work any magic for the GOP in Mississippi, 52 percent of voters in West Virginia said Obama shares the views of Wright. The question is open-ended so it is not clear to which views they are referring. Obama has, after all, denounced and repudiated Wright.

I am skeptical of organized religion so I try to steer clear of matters of faith. Earlier this week, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture held a forum on the origins and practice of Black Liberation Theology, "Understanding Black Theology: A 40-Year Retrospective."

The participants included Rev. Dr. James A. Forbes Jr., Senior Minister Emeritus of the Riverside Church, Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, Pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, and Dr. James H. Cone of the Union Theological Seminary.

I checked out the discussion to get some understanding of what makes Wright tick. Indeed, the moderator, Rev. Dr. M. William Howard Jr., acknowledged that "if it hadn’t been for Jeremiah Wright, we wouldn’t be here."

Black Liberation Theology was conceived in 1968 during a conference at Howard University. It was a response to the Stokely Carmichael's "black power." Dr. Cone’s groundbreaking book, "Black Theology and Black Power," provides the intellectual framework.

Dr. Cone said:

Black Liberation Theology asks what it means to love God with your mind. Theology is the critical side of faith. It is faith questioning itself, faith challenging itself. Theology reminds faith not to be too sure of itself. It reminds faith about the contradictions in life. And nothing challenges faith like suffering.

The civil rights movement was the embodiment of faith and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was its “great interpreter.” Still, some black clergy questioned Dr. King's philosophy of nonviolence. The Christian faith was also being challenged as a white man’s religion, most notably by Malcolm X.

Dr Cone added:

When I heard Malcolm and when I heard black power advocates, I asked myself how I can bring Martin and Malcolm together. Malcolm taught me how to be black and I was black before I was anything else. So I couldn’t give that up. I was determined not to give up my faith but I could not ignore the blackness of my existence.

To place Black Liberation Theology in context, one must understand the dialectical tension between Dr. King and Malcolm X. If there had been no Malcolm X and no consciousness movement, there would be no Black Liberation Theology.

Why West Virginia Matters

Hillary Clinton easily won West Virginia, beating Barack Obama 67 percent to 26 percent. Clinton’s trouncing of Obama did not change the game. Her pick-up of 20 delegates was offset by the 30 superdelegates who moved to Obama in the past week.

Still, West Virginia matters because it highlights Obama’s weakness with white working-class voters. CNN exit polls show that white folks ain’t feeling Obama. Indeed, 35 percent of Clinton voters said they would vote for John McCain if Obama is the nominee.

In her victory speech, Clinton reaffirmed she intends to stay the course:

I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign until everyone has had a chance to make their voices heard.

She then raised the bar:

Neither of us has the total delegates it takes to win and both Senator Obama and I believe that the delegates from Florida and Michigan should be seated. I believe we should honor the votes cast by 2.3 million people in those states and seat all of their delegates. Under the rules of our party, when you include all 50 states, the number of delegates needed to win is 2,209 (emphasis added), and neither of us has reached that threshold yet. This win in West Virginia will help me move even closer.

Before the polls closed, the Obama campaign released a memo to “Interested Parties.” They dismissed his vulnerability with white voters as a “myth”:

FACT: Obama's is running as well or better than past Democratic Candidates among white voters.

Fact: In citing exit polls from general elections, the Obama camp is comparing apples with oranges.

My colleague, USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham wrote about Obama’s Achilles' heel:

But to beat John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, in November, Obama will have to make a better showing with white voters.

By raising this weakness in Obama's campaign, Clinton hopes to persuade undecided superdelegates to hand her the nomination. That's not likely to happen. The cost Democrats would pay for such a reversal would be nothing short of a political civil war. Obama's supporters believe he can do better with white voters in the general election. I suspect that will be a lot tougher than they think.

Fact: Democrats have won without a majority of the white vote. But they countered the racial gap with other demographic groups. In November, it will no longer be a black-white divide. The changing American electorate means the election will be determined by blacks, whites – and browns.

Obama says he will change the electoral map so West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania are not must-win states. The new battlegrounds will be in states like Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. To win these swing states, Obama will have to win over Latinos. But so far, Latino voters have not shown him much love.

West Virginia Votes

It’s another Tuesday and another primary. Unlike most of the other 48 contests, West Virginia is not a cliff-hanger. In fact, Barack Obama has conceded the state to Hillary Clinton who is expected to win in a landslide.

Still, Clinton said West Virginia is a must-win state for a Democrat in the general election. On the campaign trail, she noted that since 1916, no Democrat has made it to the White House without winning West Virginia:

If West Virginia had voted for our Democratic nominee in 2000 and 2004, we wouldn't have had to put up with George Bush for the last seven and a half years. I am going to work as hard as I can between now and the time the polls close tomorrow, because I want to earn your support.

Clinton’s point was underscored by David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center:

Barack Obama may have to write off West Virginia come November. In 2000, Al Gore won seventy-two percent of West Virginia Democratic Primary voters and lost the state’s general election to George Bush by six percent; in 2004, John Kerry won sixty-nine percent of West Virginia Democratic Primary voters and lost the state’s general election to George Bush by thirteen percent.  If Barack Obama can’t even garner thirty percent of West Virginia Democratic Primary voters, what does that say about the West Virginia general election?

Clinton’s persistence isn’t so quixotic. She hopes a blowout in West Virginia and Kentucky next week will help her overtake Obama in the popular vote. Campaign Chairman Terry McAuliffe told MSNBC:

We will move ahead in the popular vote. There are 1.1 million Democrats in West Virginia. There are 1.6 million in Kentucky, 2.4 million in Puerto Rico. We win by these huge margins, have good turnout there, we will pick up a significant amount of the popular vote.

Also, a new ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 64 percent of Democrats say Clinton should stay in the race.

So in the Mountain State, Clinton will “climb every mountain” till she finds her dream.

50 Shots Continue to Reverberate

Last week, thousands of New Yorkers engaged in acts of civil disobedience to protest the acquittals of three police officers in the killing of Sean Bell in a hail of 50 shots. They carried signs that read “We Are All Sean Bell: This Whole Damn System is Guilty.” Hundreds were arrested when they attempted to block traffic.

The pray-ins were spearheaded by the Rev. Al Sharpton. From Harlem to Lower Manhattan and across the East River in Brooklyn, the protesters prayed for a federal investigation of the shootings. Their prayers have been answered.

Later today, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers Jr. will convene a public forum on “law enforcement accountability and strategies for ensuring improved policing and greater public confidence in the fairness of the response to tragedies such as the Sean Bell case.” The invited witnesses include:

• Rev. Al Sharpton, President, National Action Network
• Raymond Kelly, New York City Police Commissioner
• Michael Hardy, Counsel for the Sean Bell Family
• Hazel Dukes, President, New York State Conference of NAACP chapters

At the National Action Network’s rally Sharpton said:

We will continue to do weekly civil disobedience because we can’t have police above the law. We will tell Conyers that whether your name is Guzman or Ziegler, we’ve got a problem in New York City and Philadelphia.

Sharpton added:

The signal is being sent that we have no rights that people are bound to respect.

That’s why people are going to jail. They know they are vulnerable. When you are pushed to the edge, when you are told by a system that you live under that you are not protected, that your rights are not protected, it will make you do extraordinary things because you’re in an extraordinary situation.

Someone must see the depth of fear in our community. We have to fear the criminals and some of the cops. We live in high crime areas and we have to wonder whether we should call the cops or not.

The community forum will convene at Noon in the Lower Level Auditorium of the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in New York City.