Why the Obama bus tour didn’t come to the hood (Pt. 4)
on August 30th, 2011 at 7:07 amThe great Roland Martin speaks:
“You can spend a lot of time trying to win over white independents, but if you don’t pay attention to your base, African Americans, if you have not locked up your base yet, you’ve got a serious problem,” said CNN contributor Roland Martin.
“African-Americans will vote for him again, 88, 92, 95 percent. The question is what’s the turnout? I’ll vote for you. But will I bring ten other people along, like I did in 2008? That’s the danger here for him. He doesn’t have the historical factor to lean on as much in 2012 as he did in 2008… And the first step, is that he has to be willing to speak to this audience, black people.”
First of all, that makes no sense. If Black folks are still going to turn out “88, 92, 95 percent” (and I happen to agree with that assessment), what difference is it going to make if you bring a friend with you to the voting booth? At that high percentage rate, Obama and the Democratic party already has the Black vote virtually sewed inside it’s back pocket.
The one thing that many of these commentators miss is the fact that while they (commentators, Congressional Black Caucus, etc.–not the actual people) want to hold town hall meetings and create forums to give Obama an earful of complaint (“Waaaaa! These po’ Black folks can’t find a job”), Obama is going where the money is. Obama, like all other politicians only use the Black vote to shake the real money tree: the White vote.
Sure, many Black voters took to the street to do FREE campaigning, purchased t-shirts, viciously defended him against all challengers (and still do) for Obama back in 08. But the operative word here is still FREE. Once Black folks began to tie their success or failures to the man and not his policy, there is no need for him to take his bus tour down to the hood. He has met with bankers, with Wall Street, corporate leaders. The last on that list was White voters. So he had a bus constructed (come on, now!) and drove to to their communities. Think about that.
I’m sure something like this has gone through the mind of Obama. If not, his actions sure say it:
“Nothing personal, y’all, but you guys are straight up broke. The party will hit you up when we need folks to sell t-shirts and bumper stickers. In the meantime, keep up the good work of calling all opponents “racists”.
