Anderson@Large

A Tale of Two Primaries

It’s primary day in Kentucky and Oregon. While the population of both states is 90 percent white, there will likely be a split decision.

Barack Obama is favored in Oregon, where 75,000 packed Portland’s Waterfront Park for a campaign rally. Hillary Clinton is expected to hit it out of the ballpark in Kentucky, home of the Louisville Slugger.

David Paleologos, director of the Political Research Center at Suffolk University, said:

With the nominating contest winding down, it’s unusual – to say the least – to have two states’ polls literally poles apart. And I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a disparity in a presidential candidate’s popularity from state to state.

So while the media pick over the presumed remains of Clinton’s campaign, she remains defiant:

I believe that with your help we will send a message to this country because right now more people have voted for me than have voted for my opponent. More people have voted for me than for anybody ever running for president before. So we have a very close contest for votes, for delegates, and this is nowhere near over. None of us is going to have the number of delegates we’re going to need to get to the nomination, although I understand my opponent and his supporters are going to claim that.

The fact is we have to include Michigan and Florida — we cannot claim that we have a nominee based on 48 states, particularly two states that are so important for us to win in the fall.

Meanwhile, Obama tells Republicans to “lay off my wife” and the National Women’s Political Caucus wants everyone to lay off Clinton:

In a campaign where the mere mentioning of facts about race is often attacked as being racist, where is the outrage at the pervasive sexism in this campaign?  Certainly not from Senator Obama, from his campaign nor from any major Democratic leaders - with the exception of Senator Barbara Milkulski who recently criticized the hostility of the media towards Senator Clinton. The Democratic Party leadership would not tolerate similar attacks if they had to do with race.

NWPC President Lulu Flores added:

We demand that the leaders of the Democratic Party - Howard Dean, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Senator Harry Reid  - censure Rep. Cohen and apologize on behalf of the party to Senator Clinton and to the women of America.

Are we there yet?

Are Black Women Not Women?

Hell hath no fury like women scorned. Hillary Clinton supporters are furious because they think she has been discounted and disrespected by the male-dominated media. In a full-page ad in USA Today, WomenCount, a newly organized political action committee, declared:

Not So Fast…
Hillary’s Voice is OUR Voice,
And She’s Speaking for All of Us

They were just getting started:

We cannot stand by as a cacophony of voices demand that she step aside to smooth the road for another.

Women risked all they held dear to make this country great. They put their lives on the line in all our quests for justice – from Abigail Adams to Sojourner Truth to Susan B. Anthony to Eleanor Roosevelt to Fannie Lou Hamer to Barbara Jordan to Dolores Huerta to Hillary herself.

We know that when women vote, Democrats win. Now it is the responsibility of our party to hear our voices and count all our votes.

We want Hillary to stay in this race until every vote is cast, every vote is counted, and we are convinced our voices are heard.

It’s ironic that WomenCount includes Sojourner Truth in the mix. In an address before the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, Sojourner asked "Ain’t I a Woman":

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

WomenCount reportedly was organized "to ensure that the 51 percent of American citizens who are women have their values and votes counted in the political process."

In this primary season,black women have voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama. Should their voices be heard? Should their votes be counted? Are they not women?

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 battleground 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.