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| Polls Continue to Show an Unstable Presidential Campaign |
August 16, 2008
More Trouble in Obama's Backyard
By Dennis ByrneAnother one of Barack Obama's circle of pastors/friends/acquaintances/supporters (take your pick) is at it again.
The Rev. James Meeks, a key Obama supporter in Chicago's African American community, is calling for a student boycott on the first day of school to protest the "inequities" of Illinois' education funding.
His stunt is to bus as many Chicago public school students as possible on the first day of school to New Trier High School, which serves Chicago's wealthy North Shore suburbs. There, he'll try to enroll them, which Meeks knows won't happen because New Trier, like every other school in the state, serves students and taxpayers in its own district. But Meeks will get what he wants: TV cameras capturing the image of a New Trier official turning away black students, evoking memories of old time Southern segregationists, like George Wallace or Orville Faubus, standing in the school house door. Meeks promotes this despicable image by saying: "I want to keep kids out of the 'colored' schools. I don't want kids to have to go and drink from the 'colored' water fountain. I don't want them to use the 'colored' toilet or to have to sit at the 'colored' desk."
This is nasty business, suggesting that anyone who opposes his political agenda is a racist.
Meeks, a state senator in addition to being a pastor of a large church on Chicago's predominantly black South Side, would have people believe that his school boycott--which will run for several days and also target downtown business--would resolve the school funding debate, which has been underway without surcease for decades. The question is whether the state's funding formula, which ensures a basic level of support for every student in every school and which takes into account such factors as school population, poverty level and (ironically, for Meeks) average daily school attendance, is fair.
The so-called inequities arise because nothing prevents individual school districts, such as New Trier, from imposing higher property taxes to generate additional education revenues. Thus, New Trier spends about $17,000 on each student, while Chicago spends about $10,000, which, not incidentally, is about 11 percent higher than the statewide average.
Al Sharpton and 50 other Chicago pastors have joined Meeks in the call for a boycott, which is opposed by the historically black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, and
organizers of the 5th annual Million Father March, which is asking fathers to escort children to class on the first day of school, Sept. 2. Public opinion, judged by letters to the editor, seems to be overwhelmingly opposed to the boycott and even reformers who agree that the funding formula should be changed fear a public backlash.
Meeks isn't Obama's pastor, as was the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Meeks' relationship with Obama is more like the almost as notorious one with the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a white firebrand pastor of a predominantly African-American Catholic church. Obama, Meeks and Pfleger know one another, and Obama welcomes their support for his presidential candidacy. Meeks is a player in the political organization of the Rev. Jesse Jackson and his congressman son, Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., which strongly supports Obama. As a state senator, Meeks has an overt political agenda, which includes changing the funding formula. The pastor Meeks and the senator Meeks are virtually inseparable and indistinguishable, a fact that troubles not the atheist/agnostic left that rails against faith-based initiatives and any hint of the blending of church and state.
In pursuit of that political agenda, Meeks uses his pulpit to call certain public officials "white slave masters" that control the lives of African American and Hispanic people. He shares a mindset that sees a white man behind every tree and bush, plotting how to keep black people down. I don't believe--or at least I hope not--that Obama shares that mindset. But if a white candidate hung around people of equally racist views, you know that his protestations that he doesn't "really share their views" would be met with skepticism, if not condemnation, by the African American political left. And well they should.
