What exactly do some black members of Congress think they are doing by picking a public fight with President Barack Obama right now?
It’s a year and two months from what will be the political fight of Obama’s life, with the campaign already underway (whether we like it or not), and his most reliable natural constituent base, African Americans, are being confused by the grandstanding of black politicians who run in the safest districts in the country, and therefore have little to lose – or gain.
This upstart chorus of public criticism of Obama from some black elected officials inside his own party will make wonderful talking points for Republicans in the upcoming election. And if the officials making these critical statements don’t think they are being archived for future selective editing, then they have never seen the work of Andrew Breitbart.
GOP candidates would love nothing more than to create distrust and disappointment about the president in the African-American community. This president already faces huge challenges to be reelected in 2012, and we need to understand the implications of this strident public criticism of the president.
It’s either wrongheaded or disingenuous to claim that this president has not been responsible for legislation that disproportionately impacts African Americans positively – health reform, education reform, support for disadvantaged businesses and unprecedented levels of funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Obama’s record speaks for itself. And his black colleagues in Congress know – or should know – that he can’t speak too much about it himself, or he risks alienating the majority of voters. Moreover, he has made himself and his office available for them to express their concerns. The public officials who should be speaking up for him are instead slinging rocks from the safety of their Voting Rights Act-protected districts.
Mind you, this president has never failed to identify as an African American with deep cultural and emotional ties to the black community and its past and continuing struggles. He is one of us.
It’s not as if these rock slingers – some of whom have demonstrated less than stellar behavior in their personal conduct – don’t understand the difficulty of the president being reelected in the current economic and political environment. The very last thing that we need to do is to enable his Republican opponent – whoever slouches toward Tampa for the GOP nomination – to win the White House in 2012. The worst possible alternative would be to enable the election of a Mitt Romney or (it’s almost unthinkable to say it) Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann to the nation’s highest office.
In 2012, there can be no Ralph Nadaresque chess-playing in pushing to the right so as to free up a third party of the left that is more genuinely populist than the admittedly flawed and compromised Democratic Party. The issues that face this nation are too immediate. The federal government almost went into default this summer over the antics of a few doctrinaire new-breed Republicans. We can’t afford four years of a Republican president to grow a third party – the nation as we know it very possibly would not survive it.
Remember, too, that Republicans are odds-on favorites to take the Senate in 2012 and hold onto the House, which would leave the president as the only defense against the enactment of an agenda that is anathema to the well being of African Americans at all levels.
Black Democrats in the House – minorities in a minority party – feel powerless. We get it. Their constituents have been hurting a long time and are hurting even more now. They feel the need to talk tough (which, as the record shows, is what they do best), because their deliverable initiatives in the Congress are so limited by their party’s minority status and as an African-American Caucus. But if they continue to talk tough at the expense of Barack Obama, they are dooming the best interests of their people and, ultimately, themselves.
