OH DEAR, OH DEAR, I GUESS IT REALLY ISN'T 2008 – AT 9:44 A.M. ET:  We've reported that President Obama is trying to tighten up his base, which also means re-energizing the African-American vote.  Apparently, there's one key black leader, a certified bomb thrower, who isn't convinced.

Maxine Waters is a hard-left congresswoman, racialist, and all-around spoilsport from California.  She is, for some unfathonable reason, influential in the Congressional Black Caucus, and she has been on Obama's case recently.  The charge:  He has been inattentive to his own ethnic group.  So Obama went and gave a speech over the weekend to a major black audience, and Maxine still is ruffled.  From The Politico: 

Rep. Maxine Waters on Monday called President Barack Obama’s comments to black Americans that they should stop complaining “a bit curious” and said she doesn’t “know who he was talking to.”

The California Democrat told CBS’s “Early Show” the president would never have addressed other communities like gays or Jews or Hispanics in the way he did at the annual awards dinner for the Congressional Black Caucus on Saturday when he told the audience to “stop complaining.”

“I don’t know who he was talking to, because we’re certainly not complaining,” said Waters, who has been critical of Obama in the past. “We are working. We support him and we are protecting that base because we want people to be enthusiastic about him when that election rolls around.”

Obama told the audience at the annual gala to “take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do, CBC.”

Waters said she found some of the language Obama used “not appropriate” and said it “surprised me a little bit.”

I'm no fan of Maxine Waters, but she does have a point.  Obama was very patronizing...although politicians often feel that they can speak differently to their own group. 

“I found that language a bit curious because the president spoke to the Hispanic Caucus and certainly they are pushing him on immigration and despite the fact that he's appointed [Justice Sonia] Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, he has an office for excellence in Hispanic education right in the White House, they’re still pushing him and he certainly didn’t tell them to stop complaining,” she said.

COMMENT:  It's hard to know how much this reflects black opinion, but if Maxine is unhappy, her unhappiness is bound to spread.  The issue here is not whether blacks will support Obama in 2012.  They will.  The issue is the level of that support.  Remember that Obama is of mixed race.  If he's seen as "going white" it could dim the enthusiasm of a community that, very understandably, cheered his election in 2008 as a major breakthrough. 

Black unemployment is high, and it's not getting better.  While ethnic solidarity is an important factor in American politics, it has sometimes come apart under the pressure of compelling issues.  Just a few weeks ago we saw that happen in New York's 9th Congressional District, an iconic Democratic district that had been Democratic since the early 1920s.  The district has a large proportion of orthodox Jews, and yet rejected an orthodox Jewish Democrat in favor of a Roman Catholic Republican – out of anger at Obama.

Times they are a-changin'. 

September 26, 2011