Martin Luther King Day offers an especially appropriate moment to look at which presidential candidate is favored by Americans of color.
The Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report (B.A.R.), Glen Ford,[1] doesn’t give Barack Obama a free ticket for the color of his skin, saying, “What would Dr. King say, today, about the two quarreling corporate candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? There can be no doubt but that he would judge them as he did his former presidential ally, Lyndon Johnson …”
Ford continues, citing that the Iraq War “is an attempt to prevent Iraqis from exercising control of their own land and resources, just as King believed the Americans were attempting to do in Vietnam. And the Iraq War, just like the Vietnam War, insures that the U.S. will never invest the necessary funds or energies to rebuild America's cities, restore the social safety net, or provide universal health care.”
“Dr. King said the ‘triple evils’ of his day were militarism, racism, and economic exploitation” and that he was ‘compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor.”
B.A.R. Managing Editor Bruce Dixon notes that Obama’s “first act as a U.S. Senator was to refuse to stand with the Congressional Black Caucus and California Senator Barbara Boxer in opposition to Ohio's nullification of hundreds of thousands of black votes.” Dixon also listed some of the other candidate’s early senatorial activities:
- Obama “declined to ask any difficult, pointed or revealing questions of Condoleezza Rice and two of the president's disastrous Supreme Court nominees.”
- He “actually voted for two out of three of these.”
- He voted “for a bill that made it nearly impossible for ordinary people to sue giant corporations who rob, defraud, maim or kill, and another vote to renew the hated Patriot Act.”
Dixon also points out that, “though Senator Obama now claims to oppose the war in Iraq, he remains an advocate of bombing Iran, to start yet another.”
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