GOING FOR THE COMFORT ZONE I look at the vote totals for Washington D.C. — a nearly all-black city in which approximately 125 000 residents cast their ballots for Barack Obama and about 17 000 for his opponent — and scratch my head. Surely they’re aware of his resolute opposition to their city’s voucher program which has given thousands of poor black kids with a waiting list of thousands more a chance to escape the sinkhole that is the DC public school system and work toward a successful future. It is championed by Republicans in Congress and is fought tooth-and-nail by Democrats like Messrs. Obama and Biden whose children and grandchildren respectively attend the tony Friends School located far far away from the grimy warehouses of public education in that town. Friends indeed.
But the DC electorate is merely a reflection of the stratospheric percentage of votes the president received in blackAmericaas a whole. Why? Can they be unaware of what his time in office has meant for black — and especially black youth — unemployment?
I know a lot about this man Barack Obama. But for all that I know of his history his influences his record if I had to choose one item from out of his past to make my case about him it would have to be the speech he gave on June 5 2007 at Hampton University which like so much else about him has only now come to light. In the video of the talk Senator Obama is seen speaking to a predominantly black audience in the faux-ghetto accent that he puts on exclusively before black crowds.
This is post-Katrina and he’s speaking about the Stafford Act which requires local governments in communities receiving federal disaster relief to contribute ten percent as much as the federal government does. Obama points out that this requirement was waived for disasters inNew YorkandFloridabecause the people there were considered to be “part of the American family.” But he continued the people in predominantly blackNew Orleans“they don’t care about as much.”
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