Sept. 5, 2012

30,000 Cheer First Lady on First Night of the Democratic Convention

By Hazel Trice Edney

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (TriceEdneyWire.com) - First Lady Michelle Obama wowed the crowd in Charlotte Tuesday night, Sept. 4, drawing tears and chants from an audience of 30,000 at the start of the Democratic National Convention.

"For Barack, success isn't about how much money you make. It's about the difference you make in people's lives," she said, obviously contrasting the President with Millionare Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential candidate who touts his business and financial success as among the reasons he'd be good for America. "I know from experience that if I truly want to leave a better world for my daughters -- and for all of our sons and daughters, if we want to give all of our children a foundation for their dreams and opportunities worthy of their promise, if we want to give them that sense of limitless possibility -- that belief that here in America, there is always something better out there if you’re willing to work for it then we must work like never before!"

The audience exploded with applause for the First Lady, who is hugely popular across the country. Speaking on opening night, she brought a major touch of glamour with substance to Charlotte's Time-Warner Arena where the audience had increasingly packed in up to the rafters in anticipation of her speech.

It was a crucial moment for the Obama campaign as Republicans who convened in Tampa last week had successfully stirred their base, decreasing the gaps in some polls in which the President has been clearly leading among voters. Though the level of excitement at the Democratic Convention is not the same as in Denver four years ago during the anticipation of the nation's first Black president, it was clear after Michelle Obama's speech that the momentum is peaking once again.

"You're not going to have that same energy four years later. You're just not. He's not the first Black President anymore, but people are fired up and ready to go," said the Rev. Earl Johnson, pastor of Martin Street Baptist Church in Raliegh, N.C. However, he predicts that the "clear contrast" between the Obamas and the Romneys will be the greatest inspiration for Democrats and some undecided voters.

"It was a major contrast between her and Ann Romney tonight. Of course that's the picture she wanted to paint - that her family and Ann Romney's family are strikingly different. The difference is that her husband is going to look out for the middle class, look out for the poor, look out for those that need a hand up and the other family is not," said Johnson. "I think the speeches all day long demostrated that Democrats, progressives and those who love this country are ready to give Obama four more years and to keep moving forward in the direction we're going now."

Among the stark difference here in Charlotte is also the diversity of the people attending the convention. People of all ages, races and walks of life were clearly represented as opposed to the vastly White attendance at the Republcan Convention in Tampa last week. Perhaps the best description of the mood in Charlotte was given by a 17-year-old volunteer for the Obama campaign.

"Four years ago, it was about the changing of the guards. Now it's about the guarding of the change," said Ron Busby Jr., a student at Georgetown Prep School in Washington, D.C. Busby was experiencing his first convention with his father, Ron Busby Sr., president of the U. S. Black Chamber of Commerce.

The major challenge for the Obama campaign will be to communicate such that his primary base, largely Black voters, will become excited again. Though the past four years have brought strides in the economy, health care and international successes, there has been a season of apathy due to a stubborn economy and consistently high unemployment rates among African-Americans.

"I think the energy is building," said Marvin Dickerson of the National Executive Committee of the 100 Black Men of America. "I think all the speakers tonight really began to tell the story of the first four years of President Barack Obama and it's starting to lay out his accomplishments. And I think that when the story has been clearly told, there will be no question that this has been a president that - despite all the barriers and odds that have been thrown his way, including the unfortunate hand that he was left by the previous administration - he has still methodically moved this country forward."

Telling the story on the first night was an all-star agenda of Democrats, including Massachusettes Gov. Deval Patrick; San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro; a keynote, and all of the Democratic women in Congress standing on stage together. Each speaker laid out President Obama's slate of successes, which included his saving of General Motors from bankruptsy; his increases in student aid like Pell grants; his support of a woman's right to choose an abortion; his success with the Affordable Care health care act, his first act of signing the Lilly Ledbetter Act for women to have equal pay for equal work; and his killing of Osama Bin Laden.

The anticipation continued to rise as former President Bill Clinton was to speak on Wednesday night, nominating President Obama, who was set to speak on Thursday.

"I was so impressed with all the speeches," said Ron Busby Sr., president of the U. S. Black Chamber of Commerce. "It was an inclusive host of speakers from all nationalities to all races, to all genders, sexualities and preferences from across the country that spoke to everyone across America about all issues that we share in common about a future that looks like us as opposed to a previous past that looks like them. This is our opportunity to continue the movement that we have built on for the last five to six years and we are just so excited about being here in this movement of changing the guard verses guarding the change."

Having watched her husband handle the presidency, Michelle Obama says she loves him more now than ever.

"He has seen first-hand that being president doesn't change who you are. It reveals who you are," she said. "So in the end, for Barack, these issues aren’t political -- they’re personal. Because Barack knows what it means when a family struggles. He knows what it means to want something more for your kids and grandkids. Barack knows the American Dream because he’s lived it."

Moments after First Lady Michelle walked off the stage and the lights lowered for the closing remarks and prayer, chants errupted from the crowd waving Obama 2012 placards: "Fired up! Ready to go! Fired up! Ready to go!"

Concluded Shirley Newsome of Chicago, "It was what we expected. It was what we needed."

Sept. 2, 2012

By Barbara Reynolds

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - From a Black camera woman being pelted with nuts at the GOP convention to private remarks from House Speaker John Boehner of aspirations that Blacks and Latinos won’t vote to Mitt Romney’s jokes about President Obama’s birth certificate, the Republicans have a talent for assaulting people of color and opening up wounds from a bitter past.

Recent actions off stage and on the big stage of Tampa demonstrate why The Wall Street Journal’s latest poll shows African-Americans giving Zero percent of their vote to the Republicans in the November election.

For me, this latest hurt feeling ignited with Romney’s recent statement in his hometown of Detroit about “no one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate.’’ This was a sop to the idiotic birther movement.  Despite President Obama’s repeated display of his birth certificate, no proof is good enough for the Right Wing.  These kinds of demands on Blacks to prove that water is wet resonate deep in our DNA. We can get the same degrees as Whites, pass the same tests and die in the same wars, but so often our credentials  are often devalued or discredited in the effort to paint Blacks as “the other, the lesser, the outsider.’’  When this happened to President Obama, I felt like it was happening to me.

The hateful incident of Patricia Carroll, a Black camerawoman who works for CNN, only intensified the pain many Blacks have felt as they were undermined or thrown out of their own workplaces. Two Whites in the GOP convention threw peanuts at her saying ‘this is what we feed animals.’’

The culprits were reportedly evicted from the convention area by security officials, but for some mysterious reason their identities were not revealed. While this was apparently an isolated incident, to me it was reminiscent of how in 2010 right wing Tea Party protesters hurled the N-word at Rep. John Lewis (D. Ga.) a hero of the civil rights movement and it shows how hard it is to rise above racial hatred  in America.

As some were reeling from the nut-throwing action, the current Romney TV ads just keeps the temperature rising. The false ads accuse president Obama of gutting the welfare work requirements to “shore up his base,” just another divisive way to paint Obama as the “welfare president” who caters to lazy Blacks living off the dole.  Data, however, show that the overwhelming populations of welfare recipients are non-whites. Only about 5 million are recipients of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families in 2011, which would be a small base if true.

But what do Romney facts have to do with truth? As Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster reminded: the “campaign is not going to be dictated to by fact checkers.”

The crowning blow, however were the words of House Speaker John Boehner who reportedly told a luncheon hosted by the Christian Science Monitor that his party's strategy for winning the presidential race does not rely on winning over more Black and Latino voters, but hoping they won't vote at all. He was reported as saying: “This election is about economics… These (Latinos and Black) groups have been hit the hardest. They may not show up and vote for our candidate but I’d suggest to you they won’t show up and vote for the president either.”

Political strategist Faye Morrison says Boehner’s words go far beyond mere aspirations but underscore a national Republican strategy to suppress the Black vote.  As national attention focused on the GOP convention, efforts in 33 states continued to block hard-won voting rights. Morrison pointed out that that Thursday a federal court ruled that a Texas voter identification law violated the Voting Rights Act but the  pattern continues to emerge as GOP lawmakers enact illegal voter suppression legislation. Those restraints include: tight voter ID  laws, provisional voting restrictions, limits on voter registration drives, and reduced availability for early voting. Studies have proved those kinds of strict rules diminish minority voting.

“How dare Boehner push apathy as a strategy," Morrison, fumed as she packed her bags to attend the Democratic Convention in Charlotte as a delegate. “This election is about the price paid by Dr. Martin Luther King, NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Fannie Lou Hamer and the hundreds of other Whites and Blacks who died for our right to vote.  Voting is a way to make them – as well as ourselves -- matter. Apathy will only continue our suffering.”

In the highly charged patriotic setting of the GOP convention, nothing of course was said about the voter campaigns underway to suppress the African-American vote - just another reason Blacks aren’t warm and fuzzy about the Republican Party.

By Hazel Trice Edney

President Barack Obama gives an account of his last four years with hopes that voters will give him four more. PHOTO: Khalid Naji-Allah/Trice Edney News Wire

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (TriceEdneyWire.com) – Now that President Barack Obama and other Democratic National Convention speakers have made their cases for why they insist Americans must move “Forward” in its re-election of him as president, the challenge of activists across the nation will be to take the momentum to the polls Nov. 6.

Optimism among Democrats continues to permeate the nation after an exuberant convention, packed to the rafters with more than 30,000 people and millions more watching by television and the Internet. From chants of “Four more years!” to “Fired up, ready to go!” which is reminiscent of the NAACP war cry, delegates left Charlotte donning Obama T-shirts and carrying placards under their arms. Back to the communities they go with high hopes of recreating the same sense of activism and responsibility.

“When all is said and done -- when you pick up that ballot to vote -- you will face the clearest choice of any time in a generation. Over the next few years, big decisions will be made in Washington on jobs, the economy, taxes and deficits, energy, education, war and peace -- decisions that will have a huge impact on our lives and on our children’s lives for decades to come,” President Obama said in a speech that was less soaring and much more grounded that the one given on Mile High Mountain in Denver four years ago. “And on every issue, the choice you face won’t just be between two candidates or two parties. It will be a choice between two different paths for America, a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.”

The Obama speech was the crescendo of a week of anticipation for what he and other key speakers would say about his first presidential term that brought as many successes as it did unfinished business. On the one hand, speakers boasted that “General Motors is alive and Osama Bin Laden is dead.” They also illuminated the fact that Pell educational grants have doubled and that America now has a national health care plan. But, on the key issue of what some have called “jobs, jobs, jobs” even the President himself admitted he had oversold his ability to turn the economy completely around in just four years.

“Now, I won’t pretend the path I’m offering is quick or easy. I never have. You didn’t elect me to tell you what you wanted to hear. You elected me to tell you the truth,” the President said to applause. “And the truth is it will take more than a few years for us to solve challenges that have built up over decades. It will require common effort and shared responsibility, and the kind of bold, persistent experimentation that Franklin Roosevelt pursued during the only crisis worse than this one,” he said of what is known as the “Great Depression” of the 1930s. “But know this, America -- our problems can be solved. Our challenges can be met. The path we offer may be harder, but it leads to a better place. And I’m asking you to choose that future.”

It was no doubt that by the end of the President’s speech - coupled with the words of keynoters First Lady Michelle Obama on Tuesday and President Bill Clinton on Wednesday – the electorate had grown to a new level of enthusiasm by the end of the convention. Spontaneous outbursts of “Fired up! Ready to go!” could be heard even as people departed the arena and headed back to their hotels to pack.

"The most important question is, what kind of country do you want to live in? If you want a ‘you're-on-your-own, winner-take-all society,’ you should support the Republican ticket. If you want a country of shared prosperity and shared responsibility -- a we're-all-in-this-together society -- you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden," said former President Bill Clinton in a stirring address in which he clearly compared the leadership style of President Obama to that of his opponent Mitt Romney.

Clinton continued, “In Tampa, the Republican argument against the President's re-election was pretty simple: We left him a total mess, he hasn't finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in…I like the argument for President Obama's re-election a lot better. He inherited a deeply damaged economy, put a floor under the crash, began the long hard road to recovery, and laid the foundation for a more modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses, and lots of new wealth for the innovators.”

Mrs. Obama, who introduced the President as “the love of my life” on Thursday had also wowed the crowd on Tuesday. Telling the crowd “We must work like never before!” she established a sense of urgency and euphoria in a tone that communicated love for her husband and belief in the change that is still possible under his leadership.

Four years ago, the President spoke highly of hope and change for an America that was mired in economic woes. Though Republicans spent their weeklong convention in Tampa making light of these themes, that hope remained very much alive at the Democratic Convention.

“Hope on!” Shouted an excited Emanuel Cleaver, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, speaking to a rowdy crowd on Wednesday evening. “We are driven by hope,” said Cleaver, who is also a preacher.

He continued, “President Barack Obama has been lampooned for speaking of hope; hope for a better America. I want to encourage him and all of us to continue to hope for an America that remembers, recognizes, and fervently protects its greatness…Yes, President Obama! Continue to have hope. Continue to speak of hope to the American people, because it is impossible for hope to overdraw its account in God's bank. The tough days our nation faced may have caused us great pain, but they must not and will not cause us to lose our hope.

“Hope fills the holes of my frustration in my heart. Hope inspires me to believe that any day now, we will catch up to the ideals put forth by our nation's founding fathers. Hope is the motivation that empowers the unemployed, enabling them to get out of bed every single morning with unbounded enthusiasm as they look for work. It is our hope and faith that move us to action. It is our hope and faith that reminds us to pray and also affirms that we must move our feet. It is our hope that tells us our latter days will be greater than the former. It is our hope that instructs us to march on!”

(TriceEdneyWire.com) - The Republican convention in Tampa, Fla., touched on a date that has marked the depths and the heights of the African-American experience in this country. On Aug. 28, 1955, Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old African-American visiting his relatives, was brutally murdered in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman. His funeral — with an open casket that displayed the barbarity of the attack on him — attracted tens of thousands in Chicago and helped spark the growth of the civil rights movement.

On Aug. 28, 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead the March on Washington, where he captivated a nation with the moral plea for the “dream.” That peaceful and dignified gathering helped to enlist millions across the country on the side of civil rights. Two years later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. This not only protected African Americans, but provided for multilingual voting and protected the right of students to vote on campus.

As they gathered, Republicans should have decided whether their meeting would mark a new low or a redeeming moment for their party and the country. Across the United States, Republican state and local officials have been moving systematically to restrict the right to vote by limiting early voting; requiring official ID; limiting hours of voting and voting booths — laws that have a disproportionate effect on the poor, on African-Americans and other minorities, on the young and the very old.

Republicans claim this is about fighting fraud but offer no evidence of the problem. One expert noted that you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than discovering polling-booth voter fraud.

In Pennsylvania, Mike Turzai, the GOP House majority leader, exposed the purpose of the new ID requirement: “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”

In Ohio, Doug Preisse, a Republican county chairman, hailed the decision to abolish weekend voting because “we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban — read African American — voter turnout machine.”

Instead of increasing the vote, Republicans seem intent on constricting it. Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner argues this is on purpose: “Jim Crow has been resurrected. This is by design. It’s not by accident.”

Mitt Romney should condemn these efforts to suppress the vote and call for their repeal. Earlier, Romney attacked an Obama lawsuit to protect early voting in Ohio.

The campaign statement claimed, in what the New York Times editorialist called “an extraordinary lie” that Obama wanted to suppress veterans’ voting. Romney must decide which side he is on: with the historic tide that has extended the right to vote or with those who want to roll back the clock to an old era of voter suppression.

This is not an abstract question. Tom Edsall, an astute columnist in the New York Times, has suggested that the Romney campaign is using two dishonest ads — on welfare and on Medicare — to turn the election into a “resource competition pitting middle class white voters against the minority poor.”

And it is notable that, as the convention opens, there seems to be no room for African Americans such as Michael Steele, the former head of the party, or Colin Powell, a universally acclaimed leader.

This is likely to be a close election. Romney cannot want a victory built on voter suppression tricks. In a time of Gilded Age inequality, as representative of a party that seems intent on writing off the votes of America’s growing minorities, Romney should stand with King and the dream, not with the nightmare of a revived politics of division.