Obama Bus Tour Not The Only One

As you probably already know, President Obama will soon be taking a bus tour to shake hands and kiss babies and pretend to be an actual live human being. Not to be outdone, certain celebrity poverty pimps, black academics, and Conbressional Black Caucus members are organizing their own bus tour. They're calling it the "Poverty Tour."

The two chief organizers are Princeton University professor Cornel West, and PBS host Tavis Smiley. You may remember that West famously exited Harvard when the university president told him he had to spend more time on academics and less time on recording hip-hop CDs. You may not know that Smiley ended up at PBS after double-crossing his former employer Black Entertainment Television (BET) by selling an exclusive interview with Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist Sara Jane Olson to ABC. West and Smiley also share a radio talk show entitled, appropriately, Smiley & West.

The tour is not intended to be a counter-tour to Obama's. After all, West and Smiley both fully supported Obama in the last presidential election, and are unlikely to do any different in the next one. But both have been critical of Obama for "not doing enough for poor black people." In fact, that is the impetus behind the Poverty Tour. So there will probably be some rough language about Obama during the tour.

Columnist Annette John-Hall at the Philadelphia Inquirer (who looks almost old enough to drink in a public establishment legally) believes that despite possible criticism of Obama, the Poverty Tour is a good thing because "the Civil Rights movement taught us to always present a united front--with unity, we could overcome." She failed to notice that a whole lot of those civil rights workers were white. But why let facts get in the way of a good racial rant? Still, she muses "some African-Americans are starting to wonder out loud if blind support for the president is going against their own interests." And thus, the Poverty Tour which will bring awareness to the President without abandoning him.

John-Hall believes the Poverty Tour is necessary to raise Obama's awareness of how racist America still is. "When members of Congress call the first black president of the United States a liar, send racist images of him in e-mails and depict his as a tar-baby, the most recent slur, our natural reaction is to try to support him through all the vitriol." Well, Obama is a liar (proven), and John-Hall cleverly runs the "liar" comment together with Congress critters to give the impression that a lot of white House and Senate members are sending racist e-mails and calling the President a tar-baby. I'd like to see the list.

Several thousand black media representatives met at the Philadelphia convention of the National Association of Black Journalists last week. In a session debate entitled "Black Out or Black In," writer Sophia Nelson, former RNC Chair Michael Steele, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed and the ubiquitous Professor Cornel West argued over whether Obama is paying enough attention to black issues, particularly black poverty. West offered that "[The president] is a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. When 40% of our children are going hungry, I'm going to get morally outraged at that. I'm an angry brother. Barack Obama is not angry. He's a different kind of brother." Well, at least he didn't call Obama "Uncle Tom."

Mayor Reed said that the president's race precluded him from implementing policies directed at African-Americans. I think that Eric Holder and the New Black Panthers might disagree. Given the margin of victory Obama achieved in 2008, it seems that the nation was more than ready to resolve its remaining racial issues once and for all.

Steele added that African-Americans are "always eating at the margins." In context, he was making a point about blacks needing to take individual responsibility for their own economic conditions, but John-Hall saw his words as an opportunity to indicate that Steele is "coming around" because of the treatment he received at the RNC. Black writers and activists believe that Steele was run out of the RNC chairmanship because of his color. They can't explain how he got elected in the first place, considering he was black at that time too, wasn't he? So they latch onto anything Steele might say as indicating that he is saying mea culpas for having joined the white oppressors in keeping black folks poor.

The Poverty Tour will visit soup kitchens, public housing projects, farms and low-income families. Mayor Reed was particularly concerned that what they learn on the tour should not harm Obama's chances for re-election. He is sure that the tour will find that Obama is simply not doing enough for poor blacks. So he performed a little rhetorical trick to deflect any negative impact their findings might have on Obama's next campaign. Says Reed: "What some of us haven't learned is that support and criticism don't have to be mutually exclusive. I hope we don't miss the point that we can do both."

In many respects, I agree with the organizers. Obama hasn't done enough for the black poor. Or the white poor, or the yellow poor, or the brown poor. He also hasn't done enough for the middle-class of any color. In fact, everything he has done has worsened the economy, and those already at the bottom levels are inevitably going to suffer more than others.

Even without taking strong public stands on black poverty being an issue of its own, Obama has continued the liberal mantra of oppression of blacks by the white power structure. He continues to treat blacks as victims of racism. In doing so, he makes black poverty worse and strengthens the racist argument that nothing blacks do for themselves can assist in relieving their own plight.