Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The articles of faith in the presidential campaign 2012 is that nothing that GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney can do will attract much support from Latino voters. President Obama virtually sealed the deal with Latino voters with his decision to stop deporting most undocumented youth. Picking Florida Senator Marco Rubio...

Arkansas Tea Party leader Richard Caster gave all the appearances at least publicly of being a man genuinely outraged at what one of his Ozark Tea Party steering committee members said and did. Inge Marler told a meeting of the Ozark Tea Party in Mountain Home, Ark., on...

Less than two weeks before his death, I was scheduled to interview Rodney King on the public stage at the annual Leimert Park Book Fair in Los Angeles. I had two conflicting thoughts about the interview. One was that if the well-worn term, accident of history, ever applied to anyone,...

The GOP-controlled House Oversight Committee's threat to bring contempt charges against Attorney General Eric Holder are merely the tail end of the GOP's endless ploy to harass, embarrass, and ultimately weaken President Obama. The GOP always saw Holder as the weak link in the Obama administration; the one appointee who...

The racial pillorying of first Lady Michelle Obama was bad enough. The occasional snide digs and ugly depictions of the Obama's daughters were even more despicable. But now the presidential family's pet Portuguese Water Dog, Bo, has taken heat. A Brown University social scientist used polling experiments and an independent...

The chatter flew hot and heavy that former President Bill Clinton may be more of a liability than an asset to President Obama's re-election drive. His alleged sins are two-fold. He is a loose cannon who might say anything at any time that could harm or embarrass Obama. His quips...

A defiant Florida GOP governor Rick Scott essentially told the Justice Department where it could go when it demanded that Florida stop its loudly trumpeted campaign to purge tens of thousands it claims aren't eligible to vote. Despite Scott's bellicose rant against the Justice Department mandate, election officials...

President Obama was indeed prophetic when he said at a press conference a year ago that his release of his long form birth certificate would not convince countless numbers of anti-Obama skeptics that he was a bona fide American. Nearly a year after the president called it right on the...

The GOP swift boaters were hardly deterred when GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney denounced their planned hit ad bankrolled by a Super PAC fronted by billionaire Joe Ricketts that dredged up the old slur that linked President Obama to his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. This was just a preliminary probe....

Presumptive GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney got exactly what he wanted at the Universal Bluford Charter School in West Philadelphia. That was the ultimate photo-op. He had a room filled with black teachers, administrators, and at times, smiling students. But most importantly he had banks of TV cameras and reporters...

Newark Mayor Cory Booker is a rock solid Democrat and a President Obama backer. But he inadvertently and almost certainly unintentionally raised a campaign problem for Obama. The problem is the danger to Obama of what many perceive as going negative in his campaign salvos at presumptive GOP presidential contender...

The latest census report confirms what has been an unstoppable trend for the past two decades. That America is well on the way to becoming a majority non-white nation. With fewer white babies being born than Latino, black and Asian babies, that may come a lot sooner than...

The word from GOP insiders close to presumptive GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney is that he will pick "a boring white guy" as his vice presidential running mate. That's true for one obvious reason and another even more fundamental reason about the vice presidency. The obvious is Sarah...

The vote on the gay marriage ban in North Carolina's Halifax County drew some national ink. The county in the northeast part of the state is mostly rural and the majority black. It backed the state's anti-gay marriage initiative by a whopping two to one majority. The anti-gay marriage vote...

It was never whether, but when President Obama would say yes to gay marriage. The tipoff that he'd back gay marriage came long before Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said yes to gay marriage. It came before legions of top Democrats said yes to gay...

A hanging effigy that looked suspiciously like President Obama on a flatbed truck in New York City and the sign on the Peach Oyster Bar in Unincorporated Draketown, Georgia "I do not support the N..... in the White House" normally could be written off as the by-now pro-forma...

The scramble to dig up any piece of salacious dirt, gossip, or innuendo about President Obama before he was President Obama is never ending. The latest in the long train of purported tell-all exposes on Obama is no different. Due out in June, Barack Obama: The Story is a story,...

House Majority leader John Boehner's "green light" to the GOP controlled House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to consider a contempt of Congress citation against Attorney General Eric Holder is just the latest in the continuing dance of political gamesmanship the GOP is playing with President Obama. That's right Obama....

Accused murderer of Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman almost certainly will eventually face a jury. And what if that jury is all white? A recent Duke University study showed that all white juries in Florida were more likely to convict a black defendant than mixed ethnic juries. Though Zimmerman isn't black,...

As president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, social commentator, and longtime critic of many of the Los Angeles Police Department's racial practices, the invitation I got three years ago was unprecedented. Then Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton called and asked me to be his special guest at...