Why The Trayvon Martin Case Is Bad For Obama

The Trayvon Martin case is a minefield in just about every way imaginable.

It has the potential in these heady and deeply sensitive times to rip the bandaid off unhealed wounds at the heart of the perpetual work-in-progress that is the modern American condition. But for all the tragedy, the confusion, and the fracturing, dissonant polarization that seems to have exploded from this incident, The White House must be cursing its bad luck.

The reason is pretty blunt. The Martin case has the potential to be a serious lose-lose for the President, who was all over the place in his response to the case in questions yesterday. His statement at once reached out on the one hand to the African-American community, and on the other kept the United States at a distance from the case. But it’s just the beginning of a very bumpy ride for President Obama.

There seems little doubt that George Zimmerman did indeed utter a racial epithet during his pursuit of Martin. And as Jeffrey Toobin suggests, that could carry the potential for the case to be tried under Federal law, because there was clearly some racial animus in play during the confrontation. Over the next few weeks, the pressure for Federal intervention will build. And as it does, a cocktail of social media frenzy and genuine long-term African-American grievances in Florida will push the state’s black minority to breaking point. It doesn’t help that Zimmerman is a Hispanic, just to add insult to injury.

Marches, demonstrations, almost inevitably violence, and even full-scale riots, might send us hurtling back to the sixties, as if Civil Rights was just a chimera. Regardless of the truth of that – and there is a strong case to suggest that an insidious profound racism is still rampant in US society – there may be a wave of anger that will be hard to put back in the bottle in short order. Already, incendiary comments by “New Black Panthers” and others don’t portend well for how this will play out. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are going to work, and the future looks bleak for calm, measured debate on the matter.

During this inexorable rise in temperature, we’ll be moving into a hot, riot-friendly Summer and towards a General Election in the fall. That the contest will be close nobody doubts. That it once more feature Florida as a critical battleground state is also not debated. The problem for the White House is that its room for maneuver in this case is poor, and that could affect how the campaign plays out in the not-so-sunshiny state.

On the one side will be the genuine hurt felt by the African American community in Florida and beyond. An innocent, unarmed black kid was gunned down after he was accosted by a community-condoned vigilante carrying a permitted concealed weapon. The local police, using an absurd, unworkable “Stand Your Ground” law as shield let the shooter walk away after a cursory overview of the 911 tape, and the testimony of a single witness corroborating George Zimmerman’s self-defense story. In classic Jim Crow style they assumed the case would just go away. They were wrong. It may turn out that Zimmerman is telling something approximating the truth. He may well have acted in self-defense, against Martin, but he still should have been arrested and indicted, because his version could not have been known to be true beyond a reasonable doubt at that time. The proper place for the case to have been and to be heard is in the courts.

The question is – which courts.

Barack Obama has always had an awkward relationship with the African-American community. Until some fateful slip-ups by the Clintons back in ’08, played brilliantly by the insurrectionary Obama campaign, black voters were not in his camp. Now they are, especially in Florida, where the economy has been hit especially hard. But if the African-American community sees that their African-American President is not coming to their aid in reversing the injustices in this case, a few percentage points might just be disillusioned enough to stay home in November. And in Florida, as we know, it doesn’t take much to change the decision one way or the other. You can bet that Obama, or his people in the White House or Florida will be on the phone to Governor Rick Scott in Tallahassee to cajole him into doing the right thing and arresting Zimmerman.

As for Scott, he’s looking at the opposite problem. If he has Zimmerman arrested, he’ll have the Panhandle crackers and many Hispanics on his back, which in Florida GOP politics is bad for business. Scott won election in 2010 by a mere sixty thousand votes. It’s not like he needs the black vote to keep his job. He never has and he never will. But he does need North Florida whites. So he’ll stall with inquiries knowing that doing nothing is way better for him and his supporters. And there’ll be the general election on his mind too. Doing right by the national GOP doesn’t do Rick any harm for his reelection bid.

The politics of this case do not favor the President. If he brings a Federal case against Martin, successful or not, there will be a huge swathe of white Americans that will see him as a black man acting to protect his own race. Many of them will be blue-collar Democrats in swing states who are quietly or less quietly racist themselves, and they could trust Obama that much less as a result of his apparent “interference”.  And if he or the DOJ resists calls to Federalize the case, for whatever reason, leaving it in the untrustworthy hands of Rick Scott, then Obama will be seen as having abandoned his black brothers. Of course, the White House will do its best to protect the President from damage, but some of the flak will get through, and in Florida ( and as Florida goes, perhaps America), where only a few thousand votes separate victory from defeat, just a little shrapnel can be fatal. You can be sure that the GOP, are looking forward to playing the race card on this one whenever and wherever they can.

Karzai Takes The High Ground. Not.

I know he’s preaching to his own rabble, but there’s something utterly outrageous about Karzai’s “end of his rope” response to the mass-killing of Afghan citizens by a soldier who – it now seems – was himself at the “end of his rope”. That is not to excuse the soldier’s actions, but they were not those of a sane man. US and NATO soldiers have been bleeding to keep Karzai in the power-game business and keep the Taliban at bay for over a decade. In my humble view, if he wants to score political points at our expense, we should leave him to his fate – which would probably not be dissimilar to that experienced by another blow-hard in North Africa.

Why Gingrich Will Take It To Tampa

Newt Gingrich expected to win the nomination. But two things got in the way. Both are closely related and neither of them is called Mitt Romney. The first is Rick Sanatorium, and the second is the utter breakdown of the GOP primary system and it’s complete disconnect to the US body politic as a whole.

The turning point for Newt was his defeat in Florida. At that point, he realized that the primaries were never going to break his way. Now he’s betting on something new. Something that’s right in his wheelhouse, a perfect fusion of the novel and the historical. A brokered convention. In this scenario, far from ceding the race to Sanatorium, Newt needs Sanatorium to do enough to hole Romney below the water line. All that matters to him is that Romney isn’t able to wrap it up by the time the GOP meets in Tampa. It’s unlikely that Romney won’t get it done, but when the press says as often that something – in this case – a brokered convention – is such a remote possibility, you can bet your boots it could happen. Add to that, Romney’s increasingly anemic limp to the finish line, and Newt is banking on him being broken even if he does make beyond the count he needs. Gingrich is just crazy enough to think he can peel off enough pledged delegates somehow, anyhow, to get in the game.

Once he’s in Tampa, Newt will try to turn the clock back and use all his oratorical powers to make a strong case for himself on a second ballot, where all bets are off. This is his political fantasy in action. Appealing to the delegates in the cut and thrust of a real rather than a stage managed convention, he’ll be in his element lobbying the elite, rather than playing to the rabble. In other words, he’ll be implying that the primary system is broken, and that the vaunted base has delivered a lemon. His point will be simple. Sanatorium is un-electable, Romney is not believable, and that only Newt, and his fast-action debating power can save the day, and skewer the President in a general election.

He’s banking on three other factors. Firstly, he knows that even if the party hate him, it’ll rally to his flag come the fall. Secondly, he knows that he’ll be able to build a campaign team to polish and project him in a way that can help him overcome his negatives. And thirdly, with Marco Rubio on the ticket as he will be, Florida is in the bag.

There’s only one reason for Newt to go to Tampa, and that’s to win his way. It’s not likely, but it is very, very possible. And with that possibility comes another – that the GOP might even cast off the disastrous shackles of its cracker conservatism.