African Americans waiting to vote in long queues in Hyattsville, MD on November 6, 2012

We reside in a center right, seventy percent white nation, and President Obama is positioning his political strategies for a second term in the Oval Office around appeasing that segment of the electorate with his “center right” decisions and policies, both foreign and domestic. Now I fully understand the game this president is being compelled to play, but where does he draw the line given the lives that are being extinguished, turned upside down or damaged because of the racist policies that are embedded in the fabric of this nation? Did the president not throw Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law School professor who created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under the bus? And whatever happened to Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont who actually paved some of the roads for President Obama’s historic victory into the White House? Obama stiffed him!

But my biggest disappointments are Obama’s domestic policies relative to Black people. My wife and I attended his inauguration on the Mall in Washington, DC that bone chilling frigid January day in 2009 and remember the two and half million people, at least two million of them Black, many of them dreaming that Obama was being sworn in to become the most powerful man in the world – certainly in the country! The dream was that he was going to stop the racist madness they and their children and forefathers and fore mothers and other Black ancestors from as far back as five generations ago had been experiencing. What’s the Black unemployment rate in comparison to Whites across America? In NYC it’s 60%. Ditto Boston!! It’s 70% in rural communities like the Mississippi Delta. Have you read yet Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness? How about Shirley Sherrod the Black woman from the Department of Agriculture who was forced to resign from her position without a hearing or explanation by President Obama after a racist Tea Party blogger doctored a speech she had given to the NAACP about a White family she had rescued from being evicted?

I knew all this was coming after reading an article in The New Yorker magazine, November 17, 2008, entitled The Joshua Generation, Race and the campaign of Barack Obama by David Remnick. Here’s one particular piece from the article that stuck out when I read it:

"It was not by accident that (Jesse) Jackson, (Al) Sharpton, and other potential polarizing figures were seen so rarely on platforms with Obama during the campaign. The rule was: ‘no radioactive (B)lacks,’ Rose (a Chicago political strategist who is close to David Axelrod) said. ‘Harold Ford, fine. Jesse Jackson, Jr., fine. But Jesse, Sr., and Al Sharpton, better not.’ Rose noted that Obamas rarely referred directly to his race in his stump speeches, ‘When Barack came back from Europe and he was using that line about how he didn’t look like all the other Presidents on American currency, his numbers were down. He got whacked and the campaign noticed. You don’t raise it, that’s the axiom, and you let it work. The less said, the better’.”

Throughout both of the president’s autobiographies – Audacity of Hope and Dreams of My Father – as well as when he’s on the stump campaigning, he quotes Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. extensively. However, the “center right” policies and practices of President Obama’s administration have almost completely turned its back on the three major objects of Dr. King’s wrath, enemies against which he had devoted almost his entire life – e.g. racism, poverty, and war! Again, as I stated in the above, I understand the game President Obama is playing given whom he is trying to appease and the far right of center competition he’ll be facing come the 2012 elections. But Dr. King knew he’d be killed from the warnings he had been getting from the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, and yet he never let up or gave in to the White center, southern segregationists, or even the northern liberal bigots.

The entire world now knows there were no weapons of mass destruction, and as a result there should be no reason for the U.S. government to be engaged in a war on Iraqi soil. As a Black man, President Obama’s foreign policy blueprint should be a complete hands-off toward the entire Middle East – e.g. Afghanistan, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and so on. Is the president scared that he’ll be assassinated like Dr. King? Colin Powell got cold feet when he contemplated running for that job because his wife thought he’d be assassinated.

The non-violent strategies that were used to organize the national demonstrations that toppled the governments of the aforementioned middle-eastern countries were taken right out of the playbook of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership initiatives by today’s CIA. And when the Egyptian military recently raided the headquarters of the groups that had begun to re-gather to protest the failed policies and broken promises of democratic rule they were expecting the military regime in control of things to implement, how quickly, vociferously and forcefully did President Obama speak out on their behalf? Have we heard one peep from our president about the violence directed toward the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boston, Occupy Oakland, Occupy anything or demonstrators anywhere in this country? Why? Because the White men from Wall Street will be financing President Obama’s 2012 campaign if he remains glued to the center with his policies and carries the torch of being an “American” who’d have Bin Laden assassinated. That’s why!!!

Alicia Mullins casts her ballot with her two-year-old daughter Savannah as she participates in early voting on Nov. 2, 2012 in Silver Spring, Maryland. Photo: Alex Wong, Getty Images

Meanwhile the major thrust to candidate Obama’s entire ‘08 presidential campaign was the Black vote in southern states, which is where Black people are resettling in droves. Obama organized an army of mostly Black college volunteers that spread out across the south recruiting Black voters from street corners, housing developments, churches, Black college campuses, and even Black ex-convicts. The lynchpin to being elected in ‘08 was to increase Black southern voter turnout by 50%! (No other racial group in the country supported President Obama during the ’08 election as Black people did, with “98%” of their vote going to him.) But one of the main criticisms I’ve heard from the outset, six months into his term, was that the Obama administration is thin on Black appointees, and that way too many Blacks in his administration are situated in the “back of the bus,” appointed to second tier posts. (I’ve also heard that President Obama wants a second term so that the Blacks now in the “second tier” can be promoted to first tier positions.)

Kimberly Knight checks in to vote in Philadelpha where in almost half of the city's wards, President Obama won at least 95 percent of the vote.

Again, for the third time, I understand quite implicitly the three dimensional chess game President Obama is playing. If you’ll recall, back in 2009, the month after President Obama took the oath of office, US Attorney General Eric Holder caused a national frenzy when he stated during a Black History Month speech to his staff at the Department of Justice that “America is a nation of cowards” when discussing race. I’d have to include President Obama, as well as other Black elected officials like, say, Corey Booker, the Black Mayor of Newark, New Jersey in that mix; the controversy ended in a heart beat just like that, never to be heard about again in the category of 'cowards.' (Mayor Booker by the way, like Governor Duval Patrick, Mayor of Boston, are now already campaigning on behalf of President Obama’s Re-election Committee by opening up headquarters in Boston and Manchester, New Hampshire.)

Who is suffering unmercifully and disproportionately in the process as a result of President Obama closing this can of worms Holder opened? The power in this country was and still remains in the hands of Very Sick, Rich White men. The same Very Sick, Rich White men who were responsible for slavery, and for the unbreakable levels of poverty Black people have experienced for the past five centuries.

"Blacks are trapped because in the 2012 presidential election we either sit home and withhold our vote -as he tacks to the right ... or we hold our noses and pull the lever in the voting booth for him."

And finally, President Obama is fully cognizant that Blacks are trapped because in the 2012 presidential election we either sit home and withhold our vote – as he tacks to the right and trolls for Whites voters who are in the “center” to make up for the loss of the Black voters drowning in disappointment -- or we hold our noses and pull the lever in the voting booth for him, because what Black is ever going to even think of voting for extreme right of center candidates like Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum? Yes, we’re 'trapped,' but we ain’t that stupid!"