Will blacks who backed Obama in '08 stay home in 2012?

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DETROIT – It was a scene we’re all accustomed to seeing. President Barack Obama speaking in front of a throng of ardent supporters, loudly cheering and chanting his name. His booming voice, energy, and trademark smile had the crowd hanging on every word.

“We’ve got roads and bridges across this country that need rebuilding,” he told an enthusiastic crowd of union members after the annual Labor Day parade in Detroit on Monday. “We’ve got more than 1 million unemployed construction workers ready to get dirty right now.”

It was in 2008, as Obama was on his way to winning the presidency, that he spoke at this same parade and put a stamp on his allegiance to labor unions. Union members, in turn, were some his biggest supporters key Midwest states such as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana in his successful run for the White House.

After this speech, which was highlighted by chants of “Jobs, jobs, jobs!” and “Four more years!”, the president was greeted by the same awe and reverence that he received in three years ago from multiple large crowds in Detroit and across Michigan. Three years later, that support appears to be wavering.

Detroit is the proverbial “Ground Zero” in terms of unemployment in this country. Michigan’s unemployment rate was at staggering 10.9 percent in July. For blacks, the number nationally jumps to 16 percent. This is a point that has not been lost on the residents of the city and its surrounding areas.

Detroit, the state’s largest city, has an unemployment rate that is nearly double the state average, and — according to Detroit Mayor Dave Bing — is thought to be as high as 50 percent when adding in the underemployed. Detroit’s population, estimated by last year’s U.S. Census to be 713,777, is 90 percent black.

“African-Americans are almost uniformly Democratic,” said David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political Economic Studies in Washington, D.C. “A lot of that is because the modern Republican Party has become the manifestation of Southern white conservatives. There’s no group that African-Americans have less in common with or are more suspicious of — or don’t like — than Southern conservative whites.”

It was with near-unanimous support of blacks three years ago that helped propel Obama to a historic election victory. In 2008, Obama won 96 percent of black voters, which made up 13 percent of the total electorate.

In Detroit, a heavily Democratic city notorious for low voter turnout, 53 percent of registered voters came out in 2008. It was the city’s largest voter turnout since 65 percent voted in the 1980 election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. With that groundswell of support, people were looking for nearly immediate “change” from Obama.

“One of the reasons I voted for President Obama wasn’t just about the historic nature of his presidency,” said Lawrence Ross, author of The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities. “I thought we had a pragmatic progressive, someone who understood that he had the political momentum to make substantive changes. That’s what happens when you say you want to be a transformational president.

“But my first inkling that perhaps President Obama wasn’t going to be as bold as his words: The Wall Street bailout. When an industry can cause a financial calamity through fraud and criminality — and yet no one goes to jail — that was a warning sign that power still resided with corporate interests.”

One of the biggest criticisms of the president has been his compromising with the Republicans in Congress. Obama is often criticized for giving in to GOP demands on everything from extending the Bush tax cuts, to the war in Afghanistan, to the debt-ceiling crisis, to the watering down of the health care reform bill — that Republicans derisively call “Obama-care.”

It has often seemed as if Obama has capitulated far too greatly to the GOP, even when Democrats held the majority in both houses and he was playing from a position of strength.

“He also began at the center, and moved right, instead of staking out a position that made the GOP move toward him,” Ross said. “That emboldened the GOP and they haven’t looked back ever since.”

Princeton professor Dr. Cornel West and television host Tavis Smiley are two of his loudest critics. They went on a 15-city tour known as the “Poverty Tour: A Call to Conscience”, where they openly criticized the president for not doing enough for the nation’s poor.

The tour was met by heavy backlash from Obama supporters and prominent members of the African-American community, including radio hosts Tom Joyner and Steve Harvey. Joyner issued a statement saying that Smiley — a former correspondent and frequent guest on the Tom Joyner Morning Show — and West were helping to stoke the climate that made it “acceptable” for Mark Halpern call the president a “d**k” on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Meanwhile, Harvey openly called West and Smiley “Uncle Toms”.
Rep. Maxine Waters, one of the most outspoken members of the Congressional Black Caucus, said during a Detroit CBC job fair at Wayne County Community College last month that she didn’t know why President Obama was not visiting black communities on his Midwestern bus tour.

“We’re supportive of the president, but we’re getting tired,” Waters added. “And so, what we want to do is, we want to give the president every opportunity to show what he can do and what he’s prepared to lead on.

“We want to give him every opportunity, but our people are hurting. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don’t know what the strategy is.”

It would outwardly appear that blacks have begun to lose faith in President Obama. But is this a case of perception not corresponding with reality?

“In terms of African-American support, 90-plus percent of African-Americans would still vote for him if the election were held today,” Bositis said. One of those supporters is Shanay Watson-Whittaker. A Bronx native now living in Detroit, Whittaker is a political activist and strident supporter of President Obama.

“I watched the speech on Monday, in fact, Ken (her husband) and I gave out over 150 tickets to it,” Whittaker said. “I respect and appreciate my president. I think he was handed a sh— sandwich and did what he could to make it taste like honey.”

Recently a Gallup poll showed that President Obama’s approval rating is at an all-time low of 39 percent. Political scientists consider the 40 percent level the “danger zone”. However, his low approval rating and disappointment among the general public has proven to not correlate to black voters.

“Disappointment, my a**,” Whittaker said. “The president has an approval rating of 81 percent with African-Americans. All you hear is that loud minority as if it is the so-called voice of black America. I’ll admit that he can do more but he has to deal with a very hostile congress that will do anything to stop him.”

Whittaker noted the numerous successes that the president has been apart of in his term, including the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, increased funding to HBCUs, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and health care reform.

“Despite the desperate and, at times, devious way President Obama has been maligned, I still believe him to be the victim of a political ‘dine ‘n’ dash’,” said retired Army Sgt. Patrice Myles, who served 11 years in the Army and is now living in Chesterfield, 40 miles north of Detroit. “Any logical-minded person can see how we are still experiencing the ripple effects of George W. Bush.”

“As for Tavis Smiley and the rest I honestly am reminded of the phrase ‘divide and conquer.’ We as a people are notorious for turning on each other in the hopes of promoting ourselves or in attempt to deal with and disguise our own failures. Regardless of what Mr. Smiley would like us to believe, his bitterness (over then-Senator Obama not attending a summit he hosted in 2008) is blatant and shameful.”

One advantage that the president may have is that there is no clear alternative to him. The Democrats will not run anyone in a primary challenge against him, and blacks — as well as other minorities and gays — are by and large, turned off by the GOP and the Tea Party.

Robert Putnam and David Campbell reported the results of their 3,000 person panel in the New York Times a few days ago study that the Tea Party aren’t some new group. They are the most partisan Republicans. They always have been,” Bositis said. “They’re the most conservative. They are the most religious, compared to other Republicans. And they don’t like blacks and immigrants.”

The threat of the Tea Party taking a stronghold in the federal government can be seen as the saving grace to the President in 2012. Of the current Republican frontrunners, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, Texas governor Rick Perry, and Minnesota House Rep. Michele Bachmann, only Romney does not outwardly align himself with the Tea Party.

The biggest problem the president is facing is not whether people will switch sides. It’s whether people will turnout for him again.

“I’d vote for him (again),” Ross said. “He was able to do something no other Democrat has been able to accomplish: National health care. Yes, it’s imperfect, but it’s going to do a lot of good.

“The problem is whether millions of others will be enthusiastic enough to go out to vote. When you compromise basic Democratic principles, Democratic voters begin to think you’re GOP-lite. No one wants to vote for GOP-lite.”