AMERICANS OF COLOR AND THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE: Black Agenda Report, MAPA, and Bill Cosby Weigh In

Martin Luther King Day offers an especially appropriate moment to look at which presidential candidate is favored by Americans of color.

Martin Luther King 1966

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.”

Martin Luther King 1962

Ford suggests, “since the corporate media is totally incapable of covering or even tolerating the raising of any issues of substance, and because both Obama and Clinton avoid real issues, real facts, and real history like the plague, we urge that thinking voters put the candidates to the Martin Luther King Test. What would Dr. King do, if he were alive?”

Ford says Obama and Hillary have already failed the test, “miserably”, and that “the only candidate who would pass the Martin Luther King Test is Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, whose platform for peace, truly universal health care, a living wage, and an end to corporate domination of American life harkens back to that "shining moment" in the Sixties that King mentioned, when there were "hopes" and "new beginnings."

Bill Cosby

When Bill Cosby was Larry King’s guest last October, Larry’s assumption that Bill would be supporting Obama met with a furled brow. “Do you ask white people that question?” Cosby bristled. “There’s a guy in Ohio that I happen to love … (he’s) running for president … Kucinich … I love what he says! … I love what he says, and—“ 

Larry King cut in with a break, and viewers never found out what was on the other side of Cosby’s “and.” But, clearly, Bill’s criteria are based on more than color.

Nativo Lopez

The Mexican American Political Association (MAPA)[2] also endorsed Dennis Kucinich, according to President Nativo V. Lopez.  The endorsement for the organization’s Democratic Party Primary Presidential Candidate was announced on Jan. 18.

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