Obama Calls for Ouster of Racist Remark

Obama Calls for Ouster of Official After Remark
By JEFF ZELENY New York Times, October 20, 2007
Senator Barack Obama said the leader of the civil rights division of the Justice Department should step down after suggesting that minority voters were not widely disenfranchised by laws requiring photo identification because many members of minorities died before reaching old age. “This administration has shown very little interest in making sure that all people have equal access to the ballot box,” Mr. Obama said in a telephone interview. “It’s important for all of us to embrace the basic notion that we should try to make voting easier, not harder.”
Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination, was responding to a remark made by John Tanner, the chief of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. In a speech to a Latino group earlier this month in Los Angeles, Mr. Tanner said that a disproportionate share of elderly minority voters did not have identification, but added that it was not a widespread problem because of their life expectancy. “Creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance,” Mr. Tanner told the National Latino Congreso, according to a video posted on YouTube. “Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do. They die first.”
On Friday, Mr. Obama sent a letter to the Justice Department, urging acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler to replace Mr. Tanner for making comments that were “patently erroneous, offensive and dangerous.” Mr. Obama said the remarks were “especially troubling coming from the federal official charged with protecting voting rights in this country.” Mr. Tanner declined to be interviewed. But a spokesman for the Justice Department, Erik Ablin, said the remarks by Mr. Tanner had been “grossly misconstrued.” “Nothing in his comments deviated from his firm commitment to enforce the law,” Mr. Ablin said, adding that Mr. Tanner has worked for the department’s civil rights division since 1976 and has been a longtime advocate for minority voting rights. He said officials “have full confidence” in Mr. Tanner. Mr. Obama, who is the only black senator, has been an advocate for voting rights issues before Congress. As a presidential candidate, while seldom speaking about race while campaigning, he has frequently called attention to minority concerns through statements from his campaign or Senate office.
In an interview Friday night, Mr. Obama urged presidential candidates from both parties to call on Mr. Tanner to be replaced. He also criticized Mr. Tanner for his recent approval of a Georgia law requiring voters to show photo identification before voting. He said the rules would disenfranchise members of minority groups, particularly the poor and elderly who may not have driver’s licenses or other government-issued identification. Supporters contend that the rules are needed to prevent voter fraud.
Brief Comments and Reactions by Professor Amechi Okolo
Senator Obama’s reaction to the above terrible insidious statement by John Tanner is in line with what I told the class earlier -- that statements made by top government officials must be taken seriously in any serious society. Racist statements must not be condoned in this society any longer.
For example, I told you that part of my very serious critic of Bush’s “don’t believe in full voting rights” statement was not even that he made it but that Americans ignored it or did not even understand it. Since I have been reading that article in class from 2001, hardly has anyone caught the very serious, shameful, criminal, un-American, unconstitutional nature of that statement that an American President made in 2001 where he publicly said that he does not believe in full voting rights for a section of the citizens of this country.
As I have said many times before, more than any other things Bush has done, that statement alone, is serious ground for his impeachment and removal from office simply because anyone with such views is not worthy of being the President of the United States of America in the twenty-first century. It was a politically correct statement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries during the slave epoch or even in the twentieth century, but certainly not in this twenty-first century. In democracy, it is the job of the people to keep the leaders in check. The people must be the ultimate checks for the excesses of the leadership in a democracy, which is why we abhor and feel superior to Saddam’s model of government. If we are lazy, lousy, uninterested or unaware of what our leaders are doing or saying, then we do not have any rights or claim of belonging to a superior democratic system.
This is again part of my fundamental critic of the Iraq war – both of Bush for starting the criminal plundering, murderous and looting warfare and for some Americans who support the mayhem. I have detailed my full objections to the war on my in my forthcoming book on Bush and Iraq War: Criminality, Looting and Modern Colonialism.

Abandonment of Our Democratic Rights and Duties
My main concern here is to emphasize that Americans do not have the right to support Bush in his rogue designs to remove Saddam, destroy, occupy, murder Iraqis and loot Iraq because we do not exercise our democratic rights and duties of being the ultimate checks on leaders. The ignorance many of us show of our leaders actions and words is unfortunate and often alarming, which is why our leaders take us for a ride. They know that we are too busy working to be alive and to pay our mounting bills or to pay attention to what they are doing. Our leaders shout democracy for the consumption of others in the world, but do everything to obstruct democracy inside America. The lists of obstacles to democracy in America are unending while they go allover the world, shout all over the world, kill, bomb, maim, destroy lives and properties all over the world like vandals – all in the name of promoting democracy – while actively, vigorously proudly denying us democracy and full voting rights inside America. If Americans are equal to their democratic rights and duties, they will stop the leaders from arrogant undemocratic behaviors.