Is Obama Losing His Black Base?

An interesting post on The Daily Beast yesterday regarding disappointment that some prominent blacks feel toward President Obama may, ultimately, hurt Dems and Obama in 2010 and 2012.

“He may be just a different face, and that face may happen to be black—and if it were Hillary Clinton, it would happen to be a woman,” says Danny Glover. “But what choices do they have within the structure?”

“I think the Obama administration has followed the same playbook, to a large extent, almost verbatim, as the Bush administration. I don’t see anything different,” the activist movie actor said of Obama’s policies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Middle East. “On the domestic side, look here: What’s so clear is that this country from the outset is projecting the interests of wealth and property. Look at the bailout of Wall Street. Why not the bailout of Main Street?”

....

...[S]uch prominent voices as Rep. John Conyers, the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and New York Times columnist Charles Blow have been among those taking shots at Obama over his policies, rhetoric, and political positioning.

“He called me and told me that he heard that I was demeaning him and I had to explain to him that it wasn’t anything personal, it was an honest difference on the issues,” Rep. John Conyers told The Hill. “And he said, ‘Well, let’s talk about it.’ ” But the 80-year-old Conyers informed the president that he was in no mood to chat. “I’ve been saying I don’t agree with him on Afghanistan, I think he screwed up on health-care reform, on Guantánamo and kicking Greg off,” Conyers added, referring to the forced resignation of White House counsel Gregory Craig over the Guantánamo prison issue...

“There was an expectation, particularly among African Americans, that the first African-American president would at least be vocal about feeling their pain,” [NYT's] Blow said last week on MSNBC’s Hardball. “I think that has not been the case. The president has given a couple of speeches and he has been very heavy on the stick and not very heavy with the carrot… Just in the inability for him to commiserate with that group of people, people feel a bit deflated… He said he’s not going to focus separately on African-American issues at all. That let a lot of people down.”

“A lot of people are pissed off out there,” said one well-known political player...

[Emphasis added.]

Given the anger from the Left on health care and Afghanistan, combined with African American disappointment, it appears Obama is alienating more of his base...the base that he (and Democrats) will need to rely on in 2010 and 2012 to get out and vote.

While it would be delusional to think that this base would vote for anything other than a leftist, the chances are many of them may just stay home.

In that case, Mr. President, keep alienating and disappointing your base.  The rest of the country will thank you for it.