Obama’s big bet on blacks is key to 2012 victory

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson (The Grio.com) – The one thing that sets off the loudest bells and whistles at the White House is any hint of a diminution in the bedrock support of black voters for President Obama’s re-election bid in 2012. The dreaded faint tingling happened when Gallup recently released a poll that showed a not insignificant chink in Obama’s black voter bedrock. Gallup found that 85 percent of blacks gave Obama a thumbs up on the job he’s doing — that’s a drop for a still sky high 92 percent.

But the slide in Obama’s black support is not support lost from just any block of voters. The black vote is the undisputed core Democratic constituency. The Latino and labor vote are major factors for the Democratic Party and President Obama’s political calculations but surveys have shown that neither are the force that they have been for Democratic presidents in times past. The Gallup poll showed that Hispanic voter approval of Obama has fallen to just over fifty percent. And the decade long assault on labor has pushed union membership to its lowest levels in decades.

Then there are the moderate and conservative independents. They defected from the GOP in droves in 2008, and provided a sizable cushion that helped seal Obama’s election. This time around this may not be the case. The GOP has made up much ground in either getting a substantial number of independents back in their fold, or at best, their enthusiasm for Obama has cooled. They are not the reliable force for 2012 that they were four years ago.

The black vote is still Obama’s prime trump card. And they can’t just vote for him as the Democratic presidential standard bearer. They will do that anyway as they’ve done faithfully and loyally for every Democratic president since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Read the full story at TheGrio.com.