Politicas as Usual by Jim Baron

The 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King last Friday was an appropriate time for reflection on issues both national and local.

King has now been in his grave for longer than he was alive (he was murdered at age 39) but his legacy lives on in this particular time in poignant and manifest ways.
That Barack Obama is today the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States — the office that with typical self-effacing American modesty we refer to as Leader of the Free World — is the effect for which King was a big part of the cause.
Obama is the fruit of the tree that sprouted from the seed that grew from the ground King broke back in the 1950s and 60s.
On the night before he was killed, King gave a memorable speech that rather eerily presaged his own mortality. He said God allowed him to go up to the mountaintop and see the Promised Land.
“I might not get there with you,” King told the predominantly black audience in Memphis that had assembled to hear him, “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
Well, Obama might just get there with them.
King and his contemporaries had to fight to get black people the right to vote in the South, and now a black man is on the verge of possibly being elected to the highest office in the land.
While race has reared its head in this contest, as it still does in every corner of American life, nobody is making the claim (as someone surely would have in the 1960s) that Obama isn’t competent to be president because he is black. Nobody is even saying that he can’t win because a black man can’t get elected to the White House in the United States today.
That alone says how far we have come as a nation.
It is also interesting to speculate about what King would have thought about the controversy now raging in Rhode Island and across the nation about illegal immigration.
Carcieri characterizes his executive order, subjecting state employees and employees of companies working for the state to a federal system that verifies their eligibility to work in the United States, and directing the State Police and Department of Corrections officers work with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to identify and deport people who are in this state in violation of immigration laws, as “straightforward” and “common sense” law enforcement measures.
But in effect, that executive order threw gasoline on what was already a roaring hot fire, a fire that had been kindled by the kind of prejudice and bigotry that King would have found all too familiar.
My guess is, the civil rights leader would have made the case that people who have been living in America for years, who have made homes, worked at jobs, gone to school and otherwise participated in American life can’t now suddenly be declared unwelcome and “sent back where they came from.”  That once a people have begun the struggle for human dignity and a place in society, it is impossible to turn the clock back on them and cruel to try.
King might not have agreed with Republican John McCain on much, but he would have concurred with McCain’s statement about illegals that, “they are God’s children, too.”
I suspect King would scratch his head, as many others are doing today, over a dispute currently bubbling up in the General Assembly about who is a minority, and as such, who gets to dunk their bread in the gravy of minority business set-asides for state contracts.
A bill introduced by Sen. Harold Metts would toss Portuguese-owned enterprises off the minority business gravy train.
Current law requires that 10 percent of state purchasing and construction spending be conducted with minority-owned enterprises. Metts, who authored that original bill, asserts that minority businesses today are receiving only about 1 percent of that work.
So he submitted the new legislation, under which, he acknowledges, “women and individuals of Portuguese descent, under the Metts proposal, would no longer be allowed to consider themselves minorities in attempting to benefit from the law.”
Other changes proposed in the bill would include replacing “Black” and “Hispanic” with “African American” and “Latino American.” Also, individuals of Brazilian descent, now considered Portuguese, would be considered Latino Americans and people with Cape Verdean origins, where Portuguese is the official language, would be considered African Americans.
Well, that torqued fellow senators and representatives from districts with large Portuguese constituencies, including Sens. Paul Moura of East Providence, Daniel Da Ponte of East Providence and Pawtucket, David Bates of  Barrington and Bristol and Walter Felag of Warren, Bristol and Tiverton as well as Reps. Jan Malik of Barrington and Warren, Douglas Gablinske of Bristol and Warren and Raymond Gallison of Bristol and Portsmouth.
Felag attacked the Metts proposal as “insulting and insensitive, and fairly presumptuous of some individuals to dictate who is and who is not a minority. Why change a good law — that exists to try to help minority business owners — by eliminating the opportunities for some?”
“It is no individual’s, no group’s entitlement to rewrite the rules just because they think their way is better,”  Bates added. “The proponents of this bill are arbitrarily rearranging ethnic labels as they see fit, effectively harming some people that they’ve decided don’t fit. That’s a dangerous path to start down.”
“The individuals who are supporting this legislation – whose rallying cry has always been fair treatment for all – are arbitrarily declaring another segment of our state population less than equal under the existing Minority Business Enterprise law,” Malik said. “I am not at all sure of the rationale behind this proposal, but I know that by eliminating one ethnic group from the bidding for state work under this statute, others will unfairly benefit.”
“I am appalled that one or two minority groups believe they have the right to declare who is and who is not a minority,” Gablinske chimed in. “I am appalled that groups demanding equality and a chance to succeed are proposing to take that chance away from others, arbitrarily.
Gallison said he is “disturbed by the discriminatory undertones of this proposal, where certain groups get to decide who fits a certain picture and who doesn’t.”
Metts wrote a letter to his aggrieved colleagues and Senate leaders offering to compromise on the language of the legislation.
“My intent,” he explained in a press release, “was to level the playing field for black contractors who were being left out of the state process. It upsets me that this discrimination still exists today.”
I guess it can’t be that bad being a minority these days if people are going to fight so bitterly to hang on to that status. I have never thought of the Portuguese as a disadvantaged minority that needed government assistance to achieve equality, but I guess once a group gets a government goodie, they will always be reluctant to give it up.

Goodbye, Darrell
There are no scientific Brown University polls to show it, but the overwhelming percentage of politics junkies in Rhode Island are bummed at the prospect of losing local pollmeister Darrell West to the Brookings Institution.
The words “the latest Darrell West poll” always get the juices flowing among the Ocean State’s politics/media establishment, and his work has been one of the few sources of objective data available to fuel the perpetual political hot stove league in Rhode Island. He has been the go-to guy for quotes about the local and national political scene for Rhode Island journalists for decades and his commentary has often provided perspective to make a tangled election race understandable.
West starts July 1 as vice president and director of Governance Studies, at the Washington, DC think tank. He’ll be missed around these parts.\