IS THE POWER BASE OF BLACK POLITICS SHIFTING!?!

// October 20th, 2009 // Hott Look@Politics

since barack became pres … a lot has happened! …?

“The power base of black politics is shifting to elsewhere in the country.“

HOTT LOOK@POLITICS!

With President Barack Obama in the White House as the country’s first African American commander-in-chief, one may think Harlem, a center of black politics in this country for decades, would be soaring. Harlem produced New York’s first black governor and the city’s first black mayor.

Instead, the power base of black politics is shifting to elsewhere in the country and the city, according to an article in Tuesday’s New York Times.

As the article points out, two of Harlem’s, and the nation’s most well-known, black politicians–Congressman Charlie Rangel, chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, and New York Gov. David A. Paterson–are experiencing difficulties. Rangel is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee regarding his financial disclosures, and Paterson is polling so poorly that the White House has requested he not seek the Democratic nod for governor next year.

According to the New York Times:

Nationally, Harlem is increasingly eclipsed by Chicago, the home base of President Obama and much of his inner circle, while the power Mr. Rangel and others once wielded in New York City affairs is rapidly dispersing to Brooklyn and Queens, home to a younger generation of elected officials eager to assert themselves. If Mr. Paterson goes, some black leaders say, the Harlem machine goes with him.

Younger politicians in Brooklyn and Queens who supported Obama’s unlikely candidacy over that of Hillary Rodham Clinton are now stepping up to fill the potential power void:

But while Harlem and its voters remain influential, Governor Paterson and Mr. Rangel have few heirs. The president pro tem of the State Senate, Malcolm A. Smith, is a product of southeast Queens. His likely successor, John L. Sampson, the Democratic leader in the Senate, hails from central Brooklyn, part of a close-knit group of younger black lawmakers with overlapping districts and ambitions. The party’s standard-bearer in this year’s New York mayoral race, William C. Thompson Jr., is also from Brooklyn, as is the chairman of Albany’s Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, Assemblyman Darryl C. Towns.

“That’s how it is. The younger generation will challenge the older generation, and that’s how it should be,” said Ronald Walters, professor emeritus of government and politics and former director of the African American leadership Center at the University of Maryland. “Back in 1984 to 1988, when Jesse Jackson ran for president, a new generation of people came aboard and learned the skills needed to make it into politics and worked their way in to the media and policy.”

The reluctance of some African American elected officials to support Obama’s candidacy, combined with the failure to groom the next generation of African American leaders, is being cited for the shift.