Michelle Obama Admits What Hubby Won’t---A Loss in Iowa Will Sink Him

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama couldn’t sprint fast enough to publicly correct his wife when she candidly said that “Iowa will make the difference. If Barack doesn’t win Iowa, then it's just a dream.” An Obama campaign spokesperson said that Iowa’s only one state and a win or loss there won’t derail his self-proclaimed American Dream campaign. He’s dead wrong, and Michelle’s right. But Obama acts like he doesn’t know she got it right. He’s spent a lot of money in the state, and has more field offices there than Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. But he has skipped several key Democratic forums and events in Iowa.

Obama has spent some time chit chatting with farmers and local townspeople at coffee shops and diners in Iowa's back country towns. He’s talked about affordable health care, farm support programs, and the war in stump speeches in the state. However, his no-shows on the big ticket events have raised red flags about his prospects in Iowa and tells why Michelle has the jitters about them.

Iowa is crucial to Obama. It has little to do with it being the first state out the presidential primary box and that a win there gives a candidate’s campaign a rocket launch upward. Iowa is a bell weather of how effective a candidate is in connecting with mid-America voters. It’s a state small and folksy enough where voters can look a candidate in the eye and tell if they’re honest and sincere and can speak plainly on the issues. A candidate that flunks that litmus test is dead in the water. A candidate that passes it will front stroke ahead of the pack.

Democratic Presidential contender Howard Dean found that out in 2004. He had tons of money, lots of media hype, and supposedly represented the Democrat’s populist hope. He bumbled and stumbled with the regular folk in Iowa. This marked him as a high brow, arrogant loser. By contrast, Dean’s rival, John Kerry came into Iowa floundering in the polls. But he convinced the folk that he was a regular guy and could talk their talk on the issues. The rest of course with Kerry is history.
The ability to connect with a dairy farmer, a waitress, or a tractor driver helped Kerry and the inability to do that hurt Dean. That won’t be enough for Obama. He’s got an added obstacle that Dean and Kerry didn’t have. He’s the first black presidential candidate running in one of the whitest, most rural, and conservative centrist states in the nation. He’s got to do more than speak the language of mid-America. He’s got to convince the voters that he’s not a black presidential candidate, but a color neutral presidential candidate. The slightest hint that Obama will tilt toward minorities on the big ticket issues will thicken the clouds of suspicion about him.

He’ll also have to overcome polling day conversion. That’s the penchant of more than a few white voters to fib to pollsters and interviewers in a tight race involving a black and white candidate and say they will vote for the candidate solely on their competency and qualifications, not color. Then on Election Day turn right around in the privacy of the voting booth and vote on color. The conversion phenomena did in Harvey Gantt and Harold Ford in senate races in North Carolina and Tennessee, and Tom Bradley in the race for governor in California, and almost did in Doug Wilder in the governor’s race in Virginia. In pre-election polls, they had comfortable leads over their white opponents and were projected to win their races handily.

Obama has a companion problem with polling day conversion. Nearly all white voters say that they have no problem voting for an African-American for president. In the next breath they say that qualifications rank at or near the top of the list in determining their candidate choice. Obama has consistently ranked well beneath Hillary and Edwards on the qualification scale. That’s not exactly racial code speak for saying that Obama as a black candidate doesn’t have the right stuff. Yet it does raise another huge red flag that he’s got a long way to go to overcome voter suspicion about his qualifications. A suspicion that Hillary’s husband, Bill, fueled when he said that he was more experienced than Obama at a comparable stage of the presidential contest game.

A second place finish will not totally dash Obama’s dream but it will do little to dispel the doubts of the mass of heartland American voters that he’s still a political question mark. It will cast deep doubt on whether he can pull one or two Southern or Western states out of the GOP orbit. He’ll need substantial white male centrist voters to do that. That feat is mandatory this time around for a Democrat to cinch the White House. There is almost no chance Obama can pull that off.
Michelle didn’t need a crystal ball to predict that Iowa is the political and psychological break point state for Obama. She got it right. The question is is her hubby listening?

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.

Juvenile Court is No Bargain for Mychal Bell(s)
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

A beaming Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III effusively praised Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco for arm twisting La Salle Parish Prosecutor Reed Walters not to challenge an appellate court’s decision overturning the adult court conviction of Jena 6 centerpiece defendant Mychal Bell. But there is really no need for Walters to waste time and money waging a long drawn out time consuming legal war to toss the appellate court ruling on Bell.

If Walters chooses to retry Bell in juvenile court, and given his dogged and hardball pursuit of Bell, there is a good likelihood that he will retry; he still holds a full deck of legal cards. Juvenile courts are and have never been any bargain for a Mychal Bell, and the countless other Mychal Bells nationally that face major felony cases. It’s a broken, flawed, repressive system that emphasizes punishment, and not rehabilitation for teens. Louisiana’s juvenile justice system that Bell will be dumped back into is a textbook example of the towering failures of the system.

Three years before the Sharpton-Blanco meeting on Bell, Blanco sternly vowed to do everything in her power to overhaul Louisiana’s badly broken juvenile justice system. It was long past time for that call. Juvenile courts and facilities in the state are grossly under-funded and understaffed; the teens are warehoused in crowded, cramped, and aging facilities. They have few opportunities to obtain job and skills training, mentoring and counseling and family support programs that could help them stay out of legal harm’s way.

Numerous reports on the workings of the juvenile justice system in other states have also found that the system is often a dumping ground for youth that the society has thrown in the towel on. They are children with mental health problems, minor school-related misconduct and other adolescent problems.

Then there are the courts. The youthful offenders in many cases have shoddy or non-existent legal representation, few appeal rights, and there is no bail. Juvenile offenders are considered child wards of the court, and the judge has the discretion to release them to their parents or keep them locked down indefinitely. Louisiana is hardly an aberration to this sorry pattern.

An American Bar Association study in 2003 found that when Ohio children were arrested or cited on a charge, the offenders waived their right to counsel without an explanation of what rights they were giving up and how waiving those rights could harm them in the future. In some courts, the defense attorneys did not play a significant enough role, the study found. Vigorous representation for children also varied county to county, but investigators found meaningful representation lacking at the arrest or detention hearing stage, little pretrial or trial advocacy, and limited or nonexistent appeals in many jurisdictions.

Studies also have found that many U.S. children age 15 and younger are unable to understand criminal proceedings, hindering their ability to be competent defendants. Bell’s troubles started at about that age. He was remanded to juvenile courts for the four offenses he was charged with before his conviction for beating white teen Justin Barker.

Bell backers railed that his trial in adult court was a farce. His public defender never requested a change of venue, never challenged the all-white jury selection, presented no evidence, and didn't call a single defense witness. But if he had been tried in juvenile court, the likelihood is the outcome would have been exactly the same, or worse. He could have been detained without bail if he was considered a threat to the community. Walters and Judge J.P. Mauffray have repeatedly called Bell a threat. That was a prime reason Mauffray revoked his bail.

The judge has the sole power to make that decision. In La Salle Parish Mauffray wears the dual hat of both a juvenile court as well as a district judge. Bell would have been assigned a public defender, tried by an adult judge (possibly even Mauffray), and if convicted by the adult judge on the serious felony charge of aggravated battery with his prior juvenile offenses could have been ordered held until he’s age 21, in a prison-like juvenile facility. Or he could be shipped off to an adult prison to serve his sentence. Nationally, black and Latino youth make up the majority of those youthful offenders that are convicted in juvenile courts and ordered to serve their sentences in adult prisons.

The towering flaws and abuses that wrack the juvenile court and justice system in Louisiana are no different than those that plague the system in other states. It’s a system that desperately screams for reform. Louisiana governor Blanco knew that reform is desperately needed even as she met with Sharpton on Bell. But those screams have mostly fallen on the tone deaf ears of a public and state legislators determined to be as tough on youthful offenders as adults. Bell and the nation will discover that harsh truth if he’s dumped back in a juvenile court docket.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.

In Defense of O’Reilly
Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Spin Zone Bill haters are having another field day with Bill O’Reilly after his latest shoot from the lip seeming insult of blacks. At first glance O’Reilly’s quip on his radio show that he marveled that black diners at Harlem’s famed Sylvia’s restaurant were “respectful,” didn’t utter m’f s when they ordered, and acted, well, like white folks, in a suburban Italian restaurant, looked and sounded dumb and racist. O’Reilly haters trotted out a string of other O’Reilly borderline race tinged cracks and gaffes over the past years as proof that O’Reilly is at best racially insensitive and at worst an unreconstructed bigot.

Spin Bill is a jello soft target for dumping the racist tag on. But aside from his usual acerbic take-no-prisoners, let fly with the cracks style, the talk show host didn’t say anything that was earth shatteringly offensive. And he certainly didn’t say anything that many whites, non-blacks and a fair number of blacks don’t routinely whisper behind closed doors. That is that blacks supposedly act crude and uncouth in public. There’s no mystery why so many would think and say that. The nightly newscast’s steady diet of crime, drugs, violence, poverty, and dereliction news about life in inner cities reinforces the belief that black neighborhoods are cesspools of neglect, decay, and ill-mannered, bad behaving folk.

Then there’s the other stubborn fact of American life, and that’s that segregation is still alive and well in parts of America. That makes it even tougher to exorcise the warped racial perceptions. The Sunday church hour is still as the old saying goes one of the most segregated hours in America. In school cafeterias, office lunchrooms, and at countless social events, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and whites more often than not huddle tightly together in their separate racial enclaves. There is no prohibition against them mixing and mingling, but it's simply chalked up to personal and social preference.

Most big city schools are more segregated than a decade ago, and they are also poorer and miserably failing. Residential segregation is still the norm in most of these cities, and even when blacks and Latinos integrate neighborhoods, they often don't stay that way very long, white flight insures that they are soon re-segregated.
That's only the big-ticket stuff of segregation. There are the less visible and less easily provable, annoying race distinctions. The cabs that whiz by black passengers, the police officer that routinely stops and frisks young blacks solely because they are young, black, and the galling indignity of being followed by security guards and ignored by clerks and sales personnel in department stores. They are thorn in the side reminders that race in far too many cases still matters. And an even more offensive reminder that the ancient stereotypes of blacks as crime prone and deviant are still very much alive.

The academy award wining film Crash poked fun at the racial stereotypes and off color attitudes of blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians toward each other. One scene that painfully resonated with many blacks was the fearful murmuring of a white middle-class couple that clutched their belongings as they passed two young blacks on the street. The couple couldn’t be blamed for their paranoid fears. They lived in a cloistered world, scared of, and angry with minorities and in perpetual turmoil. Their world was driven by myths, distortions, and half-truths on race.

Even Barack Obama is not totally immune from the occasional veiled racial dig. Talk show guru Rush Limbaugh’s stirred a brief dust up with his insulting tag of Obama as the “magic Negro,” meaning he’s a black that’s bland and palatable to whites. Though Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden profusely apologized for his ill-framed quip that Obama had the intelligence, there was the dangling suspicion that Obama was being singled out as smart as contrast to dumb blacks.

While polls show that whites by big margins say that they’d vote for a black presidential candidate, in the next breath by overwhelming margins they also express big doubts about whether Obama possesses the right stuff to be president. This is a legitimate concern given his relative newness and inexperience with national political issues. But it’s also code talk on the part of some to question his intelligence.

The racist gaffes, cracks, slips of the tongue from politicians and celebrities about blacks that seem to crop up like clockwork every few months is a bell weather that at least with some racial attitudes are frozen deep in time, and stereotypes are still more the norm than the exception.

It’s easy and fun to razz O’Reilly as a loudmouthed racist, turn the tables and give him a dose of his own medicine. But dumping on O’Reilly for giving his honest personal reaction to the scene at Sylvia’s is disingenuous and self-serving. It simply puts O’Reilly on the hook while letting far too many others off of it.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.

Send This Message to Jena 6 Judge J.P. Mauffray
JUDGE J.P. MAUFFRAY
1050 COURTHOUSE STREET
P.O. BOX 1316
JENA, LA 71342
(318)992-2002- phone
(318)992-8701-fax
www.lpgov.org/directory/parish.cfm?id=30

In the past Judge J.P. Mauffray you have shown both compassion and a willingness to work with young people that have gotten into legal trouble and have come before you in juvenile court. And that includes Mychal Bell. You recognized in those that you have helped that rehabilitation is not a dirty word and that with the right mix of counseling and mentoring, troubled youth can easily become productive adults. You have given some of these youth a second chance. And again, that includes Bell.

Revoking Bell’s bail sends the wrong message about fairness and rehabilitation. Bell’s parents, his attorneys, and prominent Jena ministers have publicly vowed to mentor and counsel him to make sure he and Jena put the contentious past behind.
Judge you can be part of that healing process by releasing Bell. This time Judge he won’t fail. There are too many eyes in Jena and the nation watching him to make sure that he doesn’t.

A Plea to Jena 6 Defendant Judge J.P.Mauffray
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
La Salle Parish District Judge J.P. Mauffray Jr. watchers are adamant that the judge is not a bigot, a back country bumpkin, or a judge that’s in the hip pocket of La Salle District Attorney Reed Walters. Mauffray has even been criticized by some conservatives as being too fair-minded; meaning that he’s willing to tilt ever so slightly toward working to help some of the troubled teens that parade before him in his juvenile court stay out of jail.

Mauffray seemed anything but the fair-minded, erudite jurist when he revoked the $90,000 bond of centerpiece Jena 6 defendant Mychal Bell. This brought howls of rage from Bell’s family, attorneys, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and the thousands that flocked to Jena to demand his freedom. But Mauffray as a key juvenile judge in La Salle Parish, in fact virtually the only judge in the parish that hears juvenile cases, is certainly well familiar with Bell.

He has been involved with Bell to one degree or another when he was charged with four prior offenses. In the past two years, he was hauled into the juvenile court that Mauffray helps oversee on battery and property damage charges. The juvenile court and Mauffray did not toss the book at Bell after he committed those offenses. He was placed on probation in April 2006 until his 18th birthday. With the prior offenses that Bell had, he could have easily been held in juvenile jail for the two year period. That has been the fate of legions of other black teens in legions of juvenile courts throughout the country. Many of these youth that languish in juvenile or even adult jails with fewer prior offenses than Bell.

But Mauffray and the juvenile court gave Bell the benefit of the doubt and another chance.
This seemed in keeping with Mauffray’s bent, and the source of some of the criticism, that he is willing to work with troubled youth. Bell is his greatest challenge yet, though. And the notoriety of the case makes it even more of a challenge, and a prime reason for his hard ball on Bell’s bail. He ticked off these three reasons for revoking bail: the seriousness of the offense (beating white student Justin Barker), the weight of the evidence, and of course, his previous record.

Yet Mauffray also heard Bell’s father, and several prominent local African-American ministers publicly vow to monitor, counsel, and tightly supervise Bell. He heard them promise to get him into another high school in another town or parish in an aggressive effort to put Bell in a new environment that will help him straighten out his life. Mauffray obviously wasn’t moved enough to release him, but he did offer a glimmer of hope when he conceded that those who would cocoon Bell had “excellent intentions.” That showed that the judge at least recognized that many people are now committed to helping Bell put the past behind him, finish high school and go on to college, maybe even on a football scholarship.

Mauffray can make this possible if he translates his glimmer of recognition that help has been offered into action and releasing Bell. The nine months that Bell spent in jail before even being convicted of the aggravated battery charge is not just harsh punishment, but also a harsh and sobering experience and lesson for Bell. A long jail sentence is the best and the worst kind of wake-up call that the system is pitiless and no-nonsense when it comes to meting out punishment to black teens accused of serious crimes. Bell is no different than countless other black teens that have gotten into trouble with the law, and could turn their lives around if given a second, and yes, if necessary even a third chance.

The sledgehammer treatment of black teens in juvenile courts nationally is tormenting proof that that chance is more often than not given to them. The teens become yet another tragic statistic and a monument to the towering failure of the juvenile criminal justice system to fulfill what was once its mandate, namely to rehabilitate youth, and not simply toss away the cell key on them.

In the past, Judge Mauffray has shown both compassion and a willingness to work with young people. He has recognized in those that he has helped that rehabilitation is not a dirty word and that with the right mix of counseling and mentoring, troubled youth can easily become productive adults. He has given these youth a second chance. And he has given Bell a second chance. He should give it to him again. This time Judge he won’t fail, there are too many eyes in Jena and the nation watching him to make sure that he doesn’t.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.

A Cautionary Tale in Mychal Bell’s Jail Plight

Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Huey Crockett has a much different view of Jena 6 defendant Mychal Bell than the thousands of protestors that stormed Jena to demand his freedom. Months before Bell became a cause celebre, Crockett said he called the police to report that Bell and some other youths were vandalizing cars in his mostly black neighborhood outside Jena. Crockett bitterly charged that police moved with glacial speed to come out and investigate. Crockett chalked police lethargy and indifference to it being just another case of blacks committing criminal acts against other blacks. If Bell and his pals had been vandalizing cars in white neighborhoods the police would have been all over it, said Crockett.

The double standard that outraged Crockett in the glaring difference in how police handle black on black crime and black on white crime was probably the single biggest thing that infuriated the tens of thousands that flooded Jena’s streets. Studies repeatedly show that black teens such as Bell are far more likely than white teens to be arrested, tried, and convicted in adult courts, given harsher sentences and are more likely than white teens to serve their sentences in adult prisons.
But this tormenting double standard doesn’t totally explain why Bell languished in jail since December. Nor does it tell why even after civil rights leaders and activists belatedly raised his bond money when the case jumped into the national spotlight, that the judge promptly revoked his bail. The judge had the perfect legal hook to keep Bell in jail. It had little to do with his conviction for the beating of a white student, and much to do with Bell’s prior offenses. In this case there were three of them that included a battery charge, and a charge of criminal damage to property. The battery charge landed Bell on probation until January 2008.

Prosecutors and courts have wide latitude to hold a juvenile offender with high bail or no bail that they deem a threat to the community. In Louisiana bail is permitted after a conviction and the maximum sentence is more than five years. But, as in other states, prosecutors can request and the courts can deny bail if they believe the offender is a threat to the community. Jena prosecutors quickly slapped that tag on Bell. However, this would not have flown if there were no prior charges.
That’s a powerful cautionary tale of how and why legions of black teens such as Bell stay in jail much longer than white teens even when they are charged with the same or similar felony counts. Though juvenile crime rates have plunged in the past decade, and the crime plunge has been steepest among black teens, media sensationalism on gangs, drugs, and drive-by shootings, as well as the far harsher treatment of black juveniles in the courts reinforce public fears that black teens commit more crimes and especially more violent crimes than whites.

When a teen has a prior record this further reinforces the notion that young blacks are habitual offenders, and they become instant cannon fodder for a legal system that is harsh and unsparing toward them. It’s biased, and unfair, but it gave the Jena prosecutor the right to say with a straight face that the Jena case is not about race and that Bell’s continued jailing has nothing to do with beating a white kid. Though thousands fumed at the court’s hard ball play toward Bell, his record gave the judge the legal cover to get away with revoking his bail.

The warning signs that some black teens repeatedly put themselves in legal harm’s way glare like neon. They are heeded only the rare times that a case explodes into the national arena. Then the anger, finger pointing and hand wringing over what went wrong begin. In Bell’s case, his father and local ministers publicly pledged to put him on a crash program of mentoring, counseling and tougher fatherly supervision when he’s released. The idea is to do everything they can to get him back on the straight path.

Bell’s prior record, and the much needed intervention by his parents and community leaders doesn’t absolve the prosecutors and courts of the gross overkill on the charges against the him or even revoking his bail. He’s still a teen and the presumption is that teens can turn things around if given a fair chance at rehabilitation. And, it certainly doesn’t wipe away the double standard that deeply taints the juvenile criminal justice system that hammers Bell and other black teens even when they have no prior records.

Still, it is another tragic warning that there’s little margin for error in the criminal justice system for black teens. Once Bell is freed, and eventually he will be, the trick is to make sure that he and the countless others that do not have a cast of thousands shouting to free them but face a similar legal plight, stay free.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation between African-Americans and Hispanics (Middle Passage Press and Hispanic Economics New York) in English and Spanish will be out in October.

Hutchinson Political Report Update

Jena 6 defendant Mychal Bell's $90,000 bond was revoked by a judge. Bell has been in jail since last December. The $90,000 bond was in place BEFORE the revocation. That was certainly ample time for civil rights leaders and activists to raise the money. They didn't. That was the point and criticism in "Civil Rights Leaders Failed Jena 6 Defendant Mychal Bell" by Earl Ofari Hutchinson.
The point and criticism still stands.