Black Political Zone

Amidst all the angst over this upcoming election and the African American candidates around the country, one wonders, where are the African American women in all this? Hopefully on the next election cycle we will see black women fully represented on ballots as well. One black female participant in the Civil Rights Movement, Ruby Bridges, was recently honored with having a school in California named after her. When she was 6 years old, she was the first black child to integrate the New Orleans schools.

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Florida Republican state representative, Ralph Arza, is being asked to step down by both Republicans and Democrats after he left an explicit voicemail with racial epithets on another legislator's answering machine. The Miami Herald reports:

The two calls from Azra began a political firestorm -- not the first for the Hialeah Republican -- that now consumes the leadership of Florida's GOP, and threatens to split the state House of Representatives along partisan lines.

Florida's Democrats, who hold only one-third of the seats in the state House, said in a tart resolution Wednesday they will refuse to sit in the same chamber as Arza, who has long been accused of acting like a foul-mouthed bully.

Read more and listen to the two voicemails here.

The ads the Republican National Committee has been running in Tennessee against African American U.S. Senate candidate, Harold Ford Jr., have attracted national attention for their racial overtones, particularly with regard to arousing fears among white male voters about interracial relationships. The mastermind behind the ad, Republican National Committee member, Terry Nelson, has been working for Wal-Mart in a get out the vote drive. The Houston Chronicle reports that Wal-Mart announced Friday that they have severed ties with Nelson. Read more.

Harold Ford Jr., an African American candidate for the U.S. Senate from Tennessee appeared on Hardball recently with students from the University of Tennessee. He discussed the race-baiting ads being run by the Republican National Committee and his strategy to deal with the War in Iraq. See the video above.

Chris Matthews recently spoke out against the racist ads being run by Republicans in key elections involving African American candidates. He speaks in particular about the ad against African American Tennessee Senatorial candidate Harold Ford, Jr. which involves a scantily clad white female winking and summoning him to call her.

The New York Times ran an article today about the Democratic party's last-minute efforts to get black voters to the poll. Democrats are having difficulty because of African Americans concerns that their votes will not be properly counted. They write:

Walking along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in the gritty and mostly black section of Brewers Hill on the North Side of Milwaukee, Ms. Affoul said that cynicism in her neighborhood was on the rise.

She traced her own skepticism to one afternoon two months before the last presidential election when she overheard several young black men saying they were not going to vote because they feared being arrested at the polling station for their unpaid parking tickets. The neighborhood had been flooded with fliers from the Milwaukee Black Voters League, a fictitious group, saying that even minor infractions like parking tickets disqualified people from voting.

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Just when you thought you that you had seen the worst that the Bush cabal has to offer us, Bob Schieffer reported recently on Face the Nation about a Washington Post article that reports that Bush recently signed a statement allowing him not to maintain certain criteria for FEMA directors. More specifically, he doesn't have to require them to have at least five years of experience in disaster management before taking the position. The Washington Post writes:

The standards for the FEMA director were inspired by criticism of former FEMA chief Michael D. Brown's performance after Hurricane Katrina last year. Brown, a lawyer and judge of Arabian horses, had no experience in disaster response before joining FEMA.

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While news shows such as Hardball with Chris Matthews (watch video above) have been discussing the possibility of Obama's run for the white house, Earl Ofari Hutchinson writes in his column this week about it as well in his piece entitled, "Obama Must Weigh the X Factor of Race." He writes:

Still, many white voters when publicly questioned whether they'd vote for a black candidate, swear that race makes no difference in their pick. But it's often a far different story when the voting curtain closes. And there no prying pollster eyes, and reporter microphones and note pads around. In a 2006 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, a Yale political economist found that white Republicans are 25 percentage points more likely to cross over and vote for a white Democratic senatorial candidate against a black Republican foe.

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The LA Times is reporting on the growing disaffection among black and Latino religious leaders who were initially wooed by President Bush particularly regarding his Faith Based Initiative program. It seems that white evangelicals are also a bit dismayed as well (See the video above). The LA Times reports:

The Rev. Eugene Rivers, a Boston Pentecostal minister and one of about two dozen black clergy invited to a series of White House meetings with Bush, said Friday that black leaders had been wooed with assurances that their social service groups would receive money from the president's faith-based initiative. But, Rivers said, the bulk of the money had gone to white organizations, leaving black churches on the sidelines.

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The Chicago Defender reported today on Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate, Deval Patrick, and how he thinks about race in his campaign. They quote Patrick as saying:

"I know and knew before I started this that win or lose, I would have to look myself in the mirror," Patrick says in an interview with the NNPA News Service. "And so I wanted to be sure that I was doing this in a way that respected my own fundamental integrity. And that means all of the dimensions of who I am. I'm a Black man. I'm proud of that. I'm also a father and a husband of 20-plus years and have had times when we were trying to pay the rent and the heat in the same month just like a whole lot of other people."

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Complaints are arising about ads the Republican National Committee is running in Tennessee against African American Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. Ken Mehlman, head of the Republican National Committee, doesn't seem to see a problem with the ad. The Houston Chronicle reports:

A new Republican Party TV ad featuring a scantily clad white woman winking and inviting a black candidate to "call me" is drawing charges of race-baiting, with critics saying it contradicts a landmark GOP statement last year that the party was wrong in past decades to use racial appeals to win support from white voters.

Critics said the ad, which is funded by the Republican National Committee and has aired since Friday, plays on fears of interracial relationships to scare some white voters in rural Tennessee to oppose Democratic Rep. Harold Ford Jr. Ford is locked in a tight race to become the first black senator since Reconstruction to represent a state in the former Confederacy.

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Kerry Healey is perhaps the Republicans' example that the Willie Hortonish ad campaigning is not going to work anymore. After putting out several ads associating African American Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick with rapists, she has seen her polling numbers drop and her unfavorability soar. The Boston Globe quoted the Rev. Jeffrey Brown of Cambridge, MA on the ad:

"When I first saw it, the effect for me as a black male, it just killed me," Brown said yesterday. "It's the kind of race-baiting ad that plays to the worst fears of suburban America. It has crossed the line, as far as I'm concerned."

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Harold Ford, Jr. is an African American who has a good chance of winning a U.S. Senate seat from the state of Tennessee. While he's a Democrat, he opposes partial-birth abortion and same-sex marriage. Is this the combination of positions needed to pull over the swing vote (as comedian Chris Rock says, the swing vote is a code word for the white vote)? We shall see. Making the cover of Newsweek recently, the magazine quoted a recent speech Ford gave in Tennessee. He stated:

"The politics of destruction," he shouts, "the politics of those who define and malign people, that's all coming to an end." He asks the audience to "heal and make whole this great country of ours" with "a renewed sense of faith." Pointing to the sky, he tells them that "as long as your faith derives from up there, and not down there, we're going to be OK."

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The Associated Press reported today on Barack Obama's appearance on Meet the Press. They write:

Sen. Barack Obama acknowledged Sunday he was considering a run for president in 2008, backing off previous statements that he would not do so. The Illinois Democrat said he could no longer stand by the statements he made after his 2004 election and earlier this year that he would serve a full six-year term in Congress. He said he would not make a decision until after the Nov. 7 elections.

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The St. Louis Times recently reported about African American clergy in the city who are taking on the issue of embryonic stem cell research. Clergy find themselves introducing a topic to African American congregations that is new, yet also running in opposition to mainstream evangelical conservative groups. They write:

Catholic and conservative evangelical Christian church leaders have been outspoken for years in opposition to embryonic stem cell research, but the efforts of some of the state's African-American church leaders is evidence that Christians on both sides of the debate have been recruiting their armies for what some have called the Gettysburg of America's culture war.

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