The Democrats have a Catch 22 Black problem

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Guest Columnist

The Democratic presidential candidates have a Catch 22 problem. They have no chance of ousting Trump from the Oval Office without a massive turnout of Black voters, especially in the five states that will decide the White House. Yet, there is absolutely no sign, so far, that this turnout will ever happen. The problem is not with Trump. But with the top tier Democratic presidential candidates. Amy Klobuchar is the latest to fall victim to the problem. She has been roundly raked over the coals for the prosecution of a then Black teen, Myon Burrell, for murder. The teen is no longer a teen but a fast approaching middle aged man who’s been in prison since his teen years.

There is lots of inferential evidence that he was wrongly fingered and convicted, and lots of the usual biased racial overtones to the prosecution. Klobuchar virtually guaranteed that it would continue to dog her on the campaign trail when she did not walk back her role in the prosecution. Then there are the others. Joe Biden still routinely gets raked over the coals for his cheer lead of the Clinton Crime Bill. Pete Buttigieg gets picketed and hectored for not doing enough about the police murder of a Black man and the alleged neglect of poor Black neighborhoods in South Bend.

Michael Bloomberg, no matter how much good stuff he has to say about combatting Black poverty, police misconduct and his court of Black elected officials, he’ll continue to have his tout of stop and frisk and downplay of redlining tossed up in his face on the campaign trail. Both are sore spots for many Blacks, and rightly so. His wrenching apologies for both missteps mean little to the Black critics.

Then there’s the curious case of Bernie Sanders. Bernie has tried mightily to put forth big, sweeping initiatives to combat police abuse, mass incarceration, and special programs to deal with chronic Black poverty. But that gets buried in his stock bash of wealth inequality, blast of the big corporation and Wall Street, and Medicare for all. None of which carry any special Black imprint coming from Bernie. Finally, there’s Elizabeth Warren. She, like Bernie, has come late to the racial game. She’s missed few chances to brand just about anything that smacks of race in the negative as racist. She made her reputation like Bernie’s by hammering Wall Street and railing against wealth inequality. That’s a great populist stance, and it has made her the darling of progressives. But without an explicit policy edge to it for Blacks, it falls flat as a campaign issue that will excite any racial passions.

So, this brings it back to the worrisome concern about Black voter turnout. Remember, it is the number, not percentage of Black voters who turn out that will spell the difference for the 2020 nominee. The 2008 election decisively proved that the presidential reelection bid is a pure numbers game.

If Black voters had not turned the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries into a virtual holy crusade for Obama, and if Obama had not openly at times and subtly at others stoked the Black vote, he could easily have been just another failed Democratic presidential candidate. Through its voter education, awareness, and mobilization campaigns, the NAACP played a huge role in galvanizing and boosting the numbers of Black voters, nearly all votes for Obama. It was part race, part pride, and all sense of history in the making and being a part of Obama’s epic win.

The mass rush by Blacks to the polls was the single biggest reason that Obama carried the traditional must win states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, and broke the GOP presidential grip on North Carolina and Virginia. 2012 was no different. The enthusiasm level for Obama was as high as it was in 2008 among most Black voters. Polls showed that Blacks were the most optimistic that the country was heading in the right direction. That was due almost exclusively to their backing of Obama. That was the key factor in getting numbers of voters to show up at the polls on Election Day.

Obama kept the enthusiasm level high by holding a Black leadership conference and unveiled what was as close yet to a white paper the White House has issued on race. It ticked off a checklist of initiatives from health care, job stimulus and small business aid that have benefited Blacks. The position paper was an obvious counter to the shouts from some Black activists, and on occasion the Congressional Black Caucus, that he hasn’t said or done enough about the chronic high unemployment, failing public schools, high incarceration rates, and worries about home foreclosures, and poverty crisis facing black communities. It worked.

The top tier Democratic presidential candidates are not Obama. They are white male and females with racial baggage. Whether that baggage is enough derail the crusade of Black voters the eventual nominee will need to oust Trump remains to be seen. But it’s that uncertainty that remains the Catch 22 for Democrats.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is author of What’s Right and Wrong with the Electoral College (Middle Passage Press). He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on Radio One Network.

This article originally published in the February 24, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.