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by Christi Parsons
Barack Obama is asking supporters to join the drive to get rid of John Tanner, the Justice Department official whose recent statements about minority voters have stirred up controversy in some circles.
Tanner set it off in remarks to a national Latino group earlier this month, when he said that rules requiring photo identification for people to vote don’t especially disenfranchise minority voters.
They may affect older voters, Tanner said, but they wouldn’t have a disproportionate impact on minorities.
“Our society is such that minorities don’t become elderly the way white people do; they die first,” he said.
Obama sent a letter last week to the acting attorney general, demanding that Tanner be removed from his job as the top-ranking voting rights official in the agency. Today, his campaign sent a letter to supporters asking them to visit Obama’s website and send a message of their own to the Department of Justice.
“Numerous studies show that photo ID requirements have a discriminatory impact on African American and other minority voters,” campaign manager David Plouffe wrote in today’s letter. “Yet, in public statements like his October 5th remarks, Tanner continues to justify them with faulty logic. And it adds insult to injury to use tragic discrepancies in life expectancies for African Americans as justification for policies that would further disenfranchise them.”
Obama in recent weeks has been criticized by some activists for not speaking out more forcefully on minority-related issues. Some black leaders thought he didn’t raise his voice loudly enough in the outcry against the treatment of African American teens by prosecutors in Jena, Louisiana. Obama made public statements about the case, but he still drew criticism for missing a recent demonstration in Jena.
This week, Obama is under fire from some gay rights activists for planning a campaign-related gospel tour that includes a singer who publicly preaches the idea that people can be “cured” of homosexuality. Obama said yesterday that he strongly disagrees with those views, pointing out that he has “spoken directly to African-American religious leaders about the need to overcome the homophobia that persists in some parts our community so that we can confront issues like HIV/AIDS and broaden the reach of equal rights in this country.”
His campaign said yesterday it would not drop gospel artist Donnie McClurkin from its event.