McKinney was one of the early advocates for an alternative commission to investigate the September 11 attacks. She argued that a cover-up was taking place and the American public was not being told the truth about what happened. While in Congress, she also called for the impeachment of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
After leaving Congress, she also left the Democratic Party. She joined the Green Party and became their candidate for president in the 2008 elections. The party had attempted to recruit her in 2000 and 2004 but she declined their earlier overtures. Her running mate was Latino hip-hop artist and activist, Rosa Clemente. Theirs was the first women-of-color presidential and vice presidential ticket in U.S. history. Their platform included calling for an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, protection of civil liberties, impeachment of Bush and Cheney, creating a Department of Peace, releasing currently classified information on the Kennedy and King assassinations and September 11, and redirecting the national budget to address social needs.
Her critique was of both major parties. As she stated in her acceptance speech, “In 2008, after two stolen Presidential elections and eight years of George W. Bush, and at least two years of Democratic Party complicity, the racket is about war crimes, torture, crimes against the peace; the racket is about crimes against the Constitution, crimes against the American people, and crimes against the global community.” In that same speech, without speaking his name, she also took a swipe at then-candidate Obama stating, “The Democratic presumptive nominee wants to increase the size of the overused military and the budget for an already-bloated and wasteful Pentagon. I am the only candidate who has consistently voted against the Pentagon budget, voted against the war in Iraq, and I voted against the bills that funded it.”95 For a party that has been mostly white, the selection of McKinney and Clemente was a breakthrough in terms of race. Unfortunately, it happened in a year when black votes and two-thirds of Latino voters were supporting an African American candidate who genuinely had a chance of winning the presidency. Green Party members of all colors were flocking to the Obama camp. Unlike some of her supporters, McKinney was careful to frame her critique of Obama as an overall criticism of Democratic Party politics.
One of the key goals of the campaign was to win five percent of the total vote, which would allow the Green Party a number of benefits in terms of ballot and federal matching-funds. The Greens have around 200 elected officials around the country, mostly elected at the local level such as school boards and city councils, but like all third parties have an extremely difficult time getting on the ballot in many states. In the 2008 elections, the party did not achieve its goal. On November 4, McKinney received 161,603 votes, about 1 percent of the total.
Two Who Should Have Run: King and Powell
Finally, it is relevant to mention two individuals who were promoted and would have presented serious campaigns if they had run for president. In 1968, there were calls for Martin Luther King Jr. to run for president. King’s leadership of the Civil Rights Movement and his April 4, 1967 speech opposing the Vietnam War made him an attractive potential candidate for progressives. His sharp rebuke of the war was a political earthquake given the prevailing view at the time that civil rights leaders should stay out of foreign affairs. King demanded that President Johnson halt the bombings, declare a unilateral ceasefire, get out of Laos and Thailand, bring the North Vietnamese into the peace negotiations, and set a deadline for the removal of all foreign troops out of Vietnam.96 That speech got the attention of many in the peace and anti-war movement. On April 15, King spoke at an anti-war rally at the United Nations that brought out over 125,000. In addition to King, other speakers included pediatrician and activist Dr. Benjamin Spock, singer-activist Harry Belafonte, former SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, CORE leader Floyd McKissick, and William Pepper of the National Conference for New Politics. In his remarks, after King had spoken and chanted “stop the bombing, stop the bombing,” Pepper suggested that the civil rights leader become a candidate for president in 1968. Spock and other peace leaders joined the effort to get King to run. The Nation magazine and Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas were among those who urged King to run as a third party candidate. According to Peter John Ling, King seriously considered running.97
Speculation about a King candidacy was a nightmare for the Johnson administration and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI who were tracking his every personal and political move. Such a step by King would bring together the civil rights and anti-war movements. FBI wiretaps kept the agency and a worried administration informed about King’s deliberations.
However, King demurred almost from the first suggestion that he run. He told one of his assistants, “I need to be in the position of being my own man,” and a Boston crowd, “I have never had any political ambitions, and it is strange territory for me to consider. I have never thought of myself moving into the presidential arena.”98 As the days passed, King became more resolute in his decision not to join the race. On April 25, he met with reporters and read a statement, “I have come to think of my role as one which operates outside the realm of partisan politics. I have no interest in any political candidacy and I am issuing this statement to remove doubts about my position on this subject.”99
In an intriguing take on King’s presidential possibility, in 1997 the Discovery Channel produced a fictional documentary that elaborated on the notion that King had not been assassinated and went on to become president. In the film, King was able to push through what is termed “the most radical legislation since Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ program,” NASA selected black astronauts to travel into space, and the doll Barbie had black friends. Racial tensions eased around the nation and a new era of progressivism was begun.100
Colin Powell
In the early 1990s, there were efforts to draft Colin Powell to run for president. The popular ex-general was courted by both Democratic and Republican leaders. He had worked in the administrations of both parties but was mostly associated with the Republican Party. He made his affiliation clear when on November 8, 1995, he announced both that he would not run for the presidency and that he had joined the Republican Party.101
There was an assumption that Powell’s popularity across party and racial lines would translate into electability. In reality, he would have faced difficulty finding support from both the black community and the more conservative wing of the Republican Party. Though frustration with the Democratic Party was high and growing among many blacks, it was due to what many felt was the party’s drift to the political right. It was likely that whatever racial pride may have surfaced with a credible run by Powell, his Republican affiliation was certain to lose him a substantial amount of black votes unless he qualitatively broke from the Republican agenda.
Powell’s views on race were shaped by his experiences as a second-generation Jamaican-immigrant child in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. In his mixed raced, multi-national neighborhood, he states that he had “no such sense” of a black racial identity.102 While many blacks from the Caribbean and Africa identify with the struggles and goals of black Americans, many do not. While Powell grew to become more appreciative of the black American effort for equality, inclusion, and justice, his views on race issues have been mostly moderate. He supported affirmative action but tended to reject black-only approaches to addressing black community issues. He recognized the need for government intervention but leans much more toward self-help solutions. This posture would have made it very difficult for him to receive support from most black leaders and many others in the black community.103
His other problem was that many within the Republican Party, particularly as it migrated further and further to the right, viewed Powell as too moderate. His support for affirmative action, a woman’s right to choose, and diplomacy along with force in international relations made him suspect in the increasingly neoconservative climate. There were those who blamed him for President George H. W. Bush’s de
cision to not go after Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf war. All of these criticisms surfaced when Powell was put forward as George W. Bush’s Secretary of State. His conflicts with Vice President Dick Cheney, long running from when they were both in the Reagan administration, arose almost immediately and he barely made it through Bush’s first term before being asked to tender his resignation. Although Powell represented the only voice of moderation in the administration and mitigated the global animosity toward Bush, he had few friends in the president’s inner circle or party and he had to go. Unsurprisingly, although he remains a Republican, he endorsed Obama for president over Republican candidate John McCain. And while Republicans on and off Capitol Hill are steadfast in their effort to destroy Obama, Powell serves as one of his most trusted shadow advisors.
Black Presidents in Popular Imagination
While Obama may actually be the first real black American to win the White House, popular culture has produced black presidents for many years. In novels, films, and television, a black president has presided over and usually overcome all manners of crises dealing with racial and non-racial affairs. There are similar themes in nearly all of the fictional accounts of a black presidency. First, the gender politics are pretty consistent. All of the presidents have been male. Second, the presidents are politically liberal to moderate in their domestic policies, including even those relative to race. Early expressions of black presidents’ foreign policy, except for references to Africa, were generally missing. This coincided with long-held views by many whites and some blacks that African Americans should stay out of foreign affairs except for Africa and maybe the Caribbean. In other words, it appears that issues such as national security, the Cold War, relations with the United Nations or the European Union, or Asia were beyond the intellectual scope of these writers. Third, black opposition to the president was generally portrayed as muted or, if expressed at all, extremist or black nationalist, a position the president could not take. Fourth, all of the presidents (eventually) demonstrated the highest moral and ethical code to which one could aspire. These are no prevaricating Richard Nixons, George Bushes, Bill Clintons, or Lyndon Johnsons. Fifth, in most of the twentieth-century versions of the black president, race was central to the narrative, but not so much for twenty-first century iterations.
One of the first novels about a U.S. black president was actually published in Brazil in 1926. Writer Monteiro Lobato’s O Presidente Negro tells the science fiction story of how James Roy “Jim” Wilde, an African American, became president in the year 2228. Wilde’s elevation, as envisioned by Lobato, is a consequence of the apartheid-like state of U.S. society. Extreme racial and gender segregation have resulted in a triadic political split between Wilde’s Black Association, the all-white female Sabinas and the all-white male Homo Party. The Sabinas’ candidate, Evelyn Astor, is running against the Homo Party’s Kerlog, who is the current president. Astor and Kerlog command about 51 million votes each as whites split close to evenly down the gender line. At the same time, Wilde controls about 54 million votes since black men and black women decide to vote along racial lines. Kerlog cuts a deal with Wilde whereby he will ease the enforcement of the Codigo Raca (Race Code) in exchange for black votes. However, black voters support Wilde regardless and he is elected president. Kerlog then forms a white alliance with Astor and they threaten to never let Wilde assume office. On the morning that he is to officially take over, he is discovered dead in his office. Kerlog is then re-elected and, along with Astor, begin their final solution of ridding the country of blacks.
While the story concerns Lobato’s view of race relations in a distant American future, in many ways it is about his view of race in contemporary Brazil and his embrace of eugenics. In Brazil in the 1920s, eugenics was offered as a solution to the “problem” of race mixing. Brazil, like many Latin American countries, attempted unsuccessfully to whiten their populations in the post-slavery period through strategic racial mixing as a way of avoiding apartheid policies. Those efforts only achieved a browning of the populace. Similar to the Nazis in the 1930s, there were those who desired a more effective eugenic solution such as sterilization, or a ban on mixed marriages and relationships—strategies that are employed in O Presidente Negro. Lobato’s real politics are spoken by the book’s Miss Jane. She is the daughter of the Brazilian scientist who invents the “porviroscopio” (“Future Scope), a kind of crystal ball, which allows her to see the hyper-segregated American future. She says regretfully, “Our solution [in Brazil] was mediocre. It spoiled the two races, by fusing them. The Negro lost his admirable physical qualities of the jungle and the white man suffered an inevitable depression of character.”
Like many white Americans, Lobato could not see a future United States that was not segregated. Although Lobato had not visited the United States before he wrote the book, segregation in the U.S. South was well known and served as a model for the Hitler regime, the Apartheid government of South Africa, and other racists around the world. Interest in the long forgotten and somewhat embarrassing book, of course, was sparked by the surge of Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries and caucuses. As it became clear that he could possibly win, the book was rushed into re-publication. The book has now been translated and published in Italy with plans underway for Spanish and English versions.
In the United States, Irving Wallace’s 1964 novel The Man was one of the first works of literature to address the possibility of a black commander-in-chief. In the novel, which was also made into a film staring James Earl Jones in 1972, the president and the speaker of the house are accidently killed when a ceiling in a 600-year-old Frankfurt palace collapses on them during a visit. At the same time, the vice president is unable to assume the office because he is ill. That sends the president pro-tempore of the U.S. Senate to the White House—Douglass Dilman, a black man.
The accidental president is a moderate who must deal with his black militant daughter, racist southern politicians, and backstabbing Cabinet officials. He overcomes all of these issues and, and brimming with newfound confidence, plans to run for the office in the next election cycle. The novel and the film only superficially address the complications of race and politics. While it attempts to be comprehensive, it comes across more as scattered.
Other presidents in film have ranged from the comedic (Chris Rock in Head of State) to the deadly serious (Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact). Rock plays dedicated Washington, D.C. alderman Mays Gilliam. Similar to The Man, the Democratic president and the vice president are killed in a freak airplane accident in which their two planes collide in midair. Gilliam becomes a candidate when the party, figuring it had nothing to lose and seeking black votes, deceptively asks him to run. Not sure if he is qualified, advice from his brother Mitch (Bernie Mac) to speak the truth leads him to rise in the polls and best the Republican candidate, sitting Vice President Brian Lewis (Nick Searcy). In the general election, implausibly, Mays is elected president. The film is a throwaway in most aspects.
But underneath the silliness, stereotypes, and predictability is a rather sharp critique of the manipulative nature of American politics. Both parties are only interested in winning and are willing to sacrifice principles for potential votes. Once Mays discovers why he was chosen and then believes that he has no chance of winning, he is unrestrained in terms of telling the truth. Rock, who wrote and directed the film, is also raising the issue of African American politicians buying into this corruption. As one of the contemporary young black comics who has a vast crossover audience, Rock consistently addresses topical issues in his stand-up in order to expose hypocrisy, dishonesty, and social inequality. As with his comedy, Rock’s solution to the sorry state of U.S. politics is populism, which can lead to a variety of outcomes, from the banalities of Sarah Palin to the inspiring rhetoric of Jesse Jackson.
In the disaster film Deep Impact, Freeman brings his legendary gravitas to the role of President Beck. Upon realizing the inevitability of a destructive comet hitting the United Sta
tes and potentially destroying all life on earth, what the film calls an “Extinction-Level Event,” Beck develops a dual response to the crisis. One plan is to send a crew into space to destroy or split the comet in two to minimize the destruction. The other plan is to save one million Americans in caves, 800,000 of whom will be chosen by a lottery.
Beck’s race is a non-issue for the entire movie. There is no discussion about how Beck became president. Neither are his politics or ideological bent clear. It can be assumed, however, from his impressive and creative response to the crisis and his soothing but strong demeanor in sharing it with the public that he is eminently qualified for the office.
Perhaps the most skillfully handled and most long-term depiction of a black president has been on the television series 24. For the first five seasons, Dennis Haysbert played President David Palmer, who was a target of assassination as a candidate, pursued for impeachment by his cabinet, and faced with multiple crises while fighting terrorist attacks. His personal life was dominated by a psychotically ambitious wife who would stop at nothing to obliterate her enemies, including Palmer after he divorces her. At the beginning of the fifth season of the show, the retired Palmer was successfully assassinated. And then in the sixth season, his brother Wayne, played by D. B. Woodside, and who had been David’s chief of staff, becomes president. He is eventually stricken with a debilitating illness after a failed assassination attack and mysteriously disappears from the story.
David Palmer is a liberal Democrat who must confront the fundamental thesis of the show that extreme and illegal measures, most notably torture and racial profiling, are undesirable but necessary methods in the fight against imminent acts of terrorism. The show preceded September 11—it first aired two months after that on November 6, 2001, but was filmed much earlier in the year—and benefited from the fear-mongering tactics of the Bush administration. The show’s co-creator and producer, Joel Surnow, embraces some of the conservative wing of the Republican Party’s most cherished beliefs. Referring to 24 as a “patriotic show” and arguing that conservatives “are the new oppressed class,” Surnow not only admires George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan but wants to resurrect anti-communist Senator Joseph McCarthy as an “American hero.” Surnow really does pal around with the nation’s right-wing elite, including friends such as radio host Rush Limbaugh, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and pro-McCarthy writer Ann Coulter.104
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