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Barack Obama, America's CEO
“On Obama” is a weekly column about Barack Obama and American politics. On the morning of Nov. 5, 2008, the day after Barack Obama’s election, I sat in the office of my Chicago apartment, filled, like most Americans, with a peculiar sense of hope. It seemed that in electing the country’s first black chief executive,…
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The Reason Obama's Faith Is Questioned
Obama’s America is a weekly column about Barack Obama, politics and culture. In many ways, the last few days in political coverage have been like watching a reality show, and religious zealotry is the emerging theme. First there was Rick Santorum, a Catholic former U.S. senator, who interrupted a discussion on energy with a conservative…
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Back to the Future, Starring Rick Santorum
In Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox’s character, Marty McFly, takes a sleek DeLorean to spin back three decades to 1955. Now we’re watching a new version of the movie, and one of the stars is Rick Santorum. Instead of regressing just 30 years, the former Pennsylvania senator — whose austere ideas on government…
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Andrew Breitbart: A Muckraker to the End
Conservative blogger and entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, who died shortly after midnight Thursday in Los Angeles at the age of 43, was insightful, combative and absolutely puckish. He was raised in an affluent Los Angeles family, the son of a restaurateur and banker, and attended Tulane University in New Orleans. In a 2011 interview with WNYC,…
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Out-of-Touch Romney: Move Back to Detroit
Picture it: Mitt Romney’s Boston campaign headquarters, in a post-Super Tuesday strategy session. Everyone’s high on Tuesday’s six-state sweep. They’re sitting around a conference table, trading ideas on how to add a dash of pepper-jack ranch dressing to a campaign that’s as blandly risk averse as an iceberg wedge salad. Primary goals: Knock off Rick…
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Remember, the South Has Black Voters, Too
In the Gulf Coast town of Lafayette, La., Tuesday night, Rick Santorum boasted of winning the Mississippi and Alabama presidential primaries and flatly dismissed doubts that his improbable bid could match Mitt Romney’s well-financed machine. “This is a grassroots campaign,” Santorum told supporters, adding, “Who would have ever thought, in the age of media we…
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Trayvon Martin: Time for a Gun-Policy Debate
The tragic case of Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old boy fatally shot in a suburban Orlando, Fla., neighborhood last month, has rightly galvanized certain quarters of the country. It has become a symbolic commentary on race, class and justice. But it should also offer a window into a larger, universal question: Where is the meaningful gun-policy…
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On Blacks, Guns and History
One of the earliest scenes of the Autobiography of Malcolm X takes us to the Lansing, Mich., of 1929. Malcolm’s father, Earl Little, a Baptist minister derided as “uppity” for aspiring to own a store and live outside the city’s traditional black neighborhoods, shot a pistol one night at a pair of white men who’d…
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Don't Believe the Economy Hype
In a Rose Garden ceremony at the White House last Thursday, President Obama signed a bipartisan measure intended to help expand entrepreneurs’ access to money — and, ultimately, create jobs. The affair drew plenty of favorable headlines for the JOBS Act (the noncreative acronym for Jumpstart Our Business Startups), and in some ways provided a…
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Smiley and West: Still Fighting for the Poor
If there’s any doubt that the economic crisis persists, consider the takeaways from recent headlines: The official unemployment rate remains 8.2 percent. One in six Americans — nearly 52 million people — receives food stamps, even as Republican legislators in Washington and state capitals push austere cuts to social programs. In a Gallup survey released…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
