Does Obama Really Care About Black Voters?

Greg Palast is a New York Times bestselling author and fearless investigative journalist whose reports appear on BBC Television Newsnight and in The Guardian. Palast eats the rich and spits them out. Catch his reports and films at www.GregPalast.com, where you can also securely send him your documents marked, "confidential".

I’m blinking at the TV and thinking, “Wait, isn’t the President African-American?”

I know that the right-wing fruitcake parade thinks Barack Obama was born in Kenya, but now I’m beginning to wonder the opposite: is the cool out-of-Africa story for real?

This struck me when, in Obama’s State of the Union address, he announced the creation of “a non-partisan commission” to put an end to hours-long lines of black people attempting to cast ballots and other voting horrors. Most Americans were sick and upset about seeing this ugly throw-back to the days of segregation, the suppression of black voting by “Jim Crow” laws.

During election week, I went with the choir of the Freedom Faith Missionary Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio when they piled into the ministry’s van to vote, as a group, in the presidential election. They waited no less than four hours in a freezing parking lot behind a line of some 2,000 voters, almost all African-Americans.

Then I drove up the road to Toledo to a white suburban polling station to check out the line. But there was no line. They had so many voting machines available that no one had to wait even long enough to pour the coffee set out for the caucasians casting ballots.

Greg at the lineless white polling station.

Greg surveying the line at the black polling station.

Don’t believe me? Look at these photos, and catch the video short, “How do you steal a dream?” about the suit this week heard by the Supreme Court that would effectively end the US Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What most Americans didn’t see was the far larger group of African-Americans, Latinos and American Natives who couldn’t even get in the line to vote. About six million citizens had been “purged” from voter rolls, blocked from registering or lost their right to a ballot by techniques that would have made police chief Bull Connor blanch.

That election night – as the victory confetti fell decoratively on him – Obama thanked voters, including “those who waited in line a very long time”. Hey, thanks for noticing, Barack. Then Obama added an aside: “By the way, we have to fix that.”

Yes, we ought to. And it should be damn easy right now. After all, this week in Hollywood, Abraham Lincoln won an Academy Award for freeing the slaves. And the USA is preparing to celebrate the 50-year anniversary of Rev Martin Luther King’s revealing to Americans that he had a dream – “…and there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the negro is granted his citizenship rights”.

So Obama stunned me when, in the middle of the State of Union address, he broke into the strange non-partisan panel tango.

When a President really, really doesn’t want to do something, he calls for a non-partisan panel, appointing Republicans and Democrats who, together, take a couple of years to write a paper no one reads because we’ve all forgotten about whatever the hell it was the panel was created to agree on.

President Obama's State of Union address.

Obama then pointed out in the audience Desiline Victor, a 102-year-old lady from Florida who was forced to wait in line three hours to vote. Everyone applauded. Hooray, plucky old lady!

Obama announced that the non-partisan pooh-bahs would come up with a way, “to improve the voting experience”.

Like, huh? Voting isn’t getting a massage in a hot tub at some Buddhist retreat for confused yuppies. It’s about getting your damn ballot counted. Voting is not an experience, it’s a right.

And, Mr President, Desiline Victor didn’t have to wait in line because she’s really old, but because she’s black.

It’s not some technical problem about voting procedures, it’s about the systematic use of computer-aided bigotry employed by Republicans and some Democrats to steal elections.

Besides, we’ve done this “non-partisan panel” flamingo a dozen times before. Did you forget about George “Victory-in-Florida” Bush’s commission headed by Jimmy Carter and Jim Baker?

Bush created a new non-partisan Elections Assistance Commission. On this panel sat the very two white guys Obama appointed to the new commission: Ben Ginsberg, Mitt Romney’s lawyer, and Bob Bauer, Obama’s campaign lawyer. (That’s “non-partisan”? Whatever.)

Let me tell you about how the panel with your two pale-faces did it last time, Mr President. In 2006, they hired an expert, Dr Tova Wang, to find out what’s wrong with America’s elections. She concluded that Jim Crow still runs voting in much of America. Dr Wang titled her report, “Voting Fraud and Voter Intimidation,” detailing and quantifying widespread racist trickery.

The non-partisan panel, with your two current appointees, changed the title of Dr Wang’s report to the vague and pulp fictional, “Election Crimes”.

More importantly, the text and conclusions of Dr Wang’s report were completely reversed, downplaying voter suppression and giving big play to these so-called “crimes”.

Dr Tova Wang.

Dr Wang told me, “You’re more likely to be struck by lightning than vote illegally,” by, say, using a dead person’s identity to cast a ballot.

Dr Wang complained her words would be twisted to hinder, instead of help, voters of colour. She was told the federal government would sue her into bankruptcy if she revealed that her report, still carrying her name, had been turned on its head. (She went public anyway and was, indeed, nearly ruined.)

Why the “non-partisan” shuffle yet again, Mr Obama?

You’re asking Republicans to clear the booby-trapped voting obstacle course that keeps millions of Hispanics, blacks, students and other minorities from voting. You know, and Dr King’s ghost knows, that you’re asking the GOP to sign their party’s death warrant. And you know they won’t.

You didn’t ask Congress to set up a non-partisan committee to extend civil rights to gay citizens. You stated gay folk’s civil rights can no longer be denied. Period. And you flat-out refused Congress’ request for a non-partisan panel to look over your drone target list. You said it was your absolute right to pull the trigger.

So why the old “non-partisan panel” dodge for black folk’s rights? Are you afraid to remind voters that you yourself are, uh, black?

Or maybe it’s that class thing. Jim Crow games knock out many black votes – but only the votes of poor African-Americans. (Statistically, poor white citizens are more at risk of losing their vote than middle class black voters.)

The Missionary Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio is set in a neighbourhood of foreclosed homes of black, unemployed auto workers. Maybe the problem is, Mr Obama, their lives and the lines they stand in can’t be seen from your golf course on Martha’s Vineyard.

You know how the non-partisan panel dance will end: exactly the same as the last time these chuckle-heads did the same “investigation”. Black voters will be told to hunt for IDs they can’t get, brown Americans to prove they’re citizens and Natives to get back to selling us cheap cigarettes from the tax-free reservation store.

And your race, Mr Obama – the golf-cart Americans – will continue to rule as is their birthright, cosseted by a hardening system of economic apartheid.

When, on election night, you said, “By the way, we have to fix that,” it sounded oddly like you meant, “If only I were President, I could do something about it.”

Maybe that’s the problem. It’s not that you’re afraid to be black, you’re afraid to be President.

Follow Greg on Twitter: @Greg_Palast

Previously:

Too Fat to Vote

Murkier Than Oil

Hugo Chavez Told Me He Won't Sell Oil to the Kochs

Aaron Swartz Died for Piers Morgan's Sins