President Barack Obama has a problem. It is not his vision for change or the soaring unemployment rate of 9.1 percent. It is neither the dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan nor the growing apathy within his Democratic party. Unfortunately, he inherited some of these challenges from the previous administration. His problem? How does he marry audacious leadership and hope while facing fierce opposition and disrespect?

During the summer, the president sought the middle ground, trying to appeal to independent voters. At first glance, this strategy appeared to be an excellent one for a 2012 re-election: to stay above the fray and reaffirm to independents that he is not an “angry” or “reactionary” Black man, and that he is above the disrespect and childish political antics of John Boehner, Eric Cantor and rest of the Republican Party.

Indeed, the primary challenge facing Obama is contending with the forces who want to gain control of the Oval Office and who are willing to stop at nothing to apprehend it — even if it means bringing the U.S. financial market unnecessarily to her knees.

In order to save America, and even his presidency, the president must emerge as the master strategist to combat forces that would muddy the waters between allies and foes, and stir deleterious and counterproductive debate amongst his voting base that is designed to distract, discourage, dissuade, and ultimately defeat him.

To be victorious, Obama must redouble his efforts to maintain focus and to become what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “…not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.”

Please understand: I enthusiastically support President Barack Obama. In 2008, I organized Clergy for Change, the first interfaith and interracial breakfast in Philadelphia to support and elect then Senator Obama. My call for leadership should not be aligned with the likes of Tavis Smiley or Cornel West.

However, when 14 million Americans are unemployed, the housing market is in a tailspin, the economy is on the brink of a double-dip recession and your most loyal base is feeling the most financial pain, we need our president to dare to be our most audacious leader.

On Thursday night, delivering his jobs speech in the House chamber — a venue used only three times within the past 20 years except for the State of Union addresses — President Obama took a crucial step in bold and daring leadership.

Principally, the president exhorted Congress to pass a jobs bill that would:

— Cut the payroll tax and put more money in the pockets of working and middle class Americans, saving families an average of $1,500 a year;

— Provide an additional tax cut to any business that hires or increases wages;

— Extend jobless benefits to the unemployed, with special emphasis on those out of work at least six months and those in low-income neighborhoods.

— Spend $140 billion to save and create jobs to repair deteriorating schools and rebuild roads, railways, and airports.

President Obama is a gifted politician. He is smart, attentively listens and knows how to take our nation’s challenges and develop them into a clear, bipartisan vision. While he is a great visionary, he must do more than cast vision. He must be guided by his convictions rather than allow his enemies to cast him as one who occasionally acquiesces or abdicates his leadership.

The security of America and yes, even the presidency, dangles at the end of a very short rope. We have less than 14 months before next year’s presidential election. America is in desperate need of our president to rise again as the bold, thoughtful, prayerful, no holds barred people’s champion and leader we know him to be.

At the end of the day, leaders are not judged solely on their poll numbers, but rather their principles. And while poll numbers cannot be ignored, they should never be the compass guiding the leader. We are depending upon this great leader to change this nation and set it on the right course again. Will President Obama emerge as the courageous, audacious leader for these extraordinary times? I believe he will because that’s what great, audacious leaders do.

As always, keep the faith.

The Rev. Dr. Kevin R. Johnson is the senior pastor of the Bright Hope Baptist Church.

NEW YORK — About 30 people including Princeton University professor Cornel West have been arrested outside a New York police station during a protest of the police department's policy for stopping, questioning and frisking people.

There have been cries from certain segments of the African-American community that President Obama has not done enough for Black people.

Among those voices — perhaps the loudest from Tavis Smiley and Cornel West — were critics all the way from the barbershops and beauty parlors to the pulpits, academia and the highest Black social strata.

Some of that criticism — not the personal beefs of Smiley and West — is deserved. However, much more comes from lack of information about things that have helped African Americans because the White House, rightly so, did not separate and label the legislation as “for Blacks or minorities.”

The current American Jobs Act is such a document. Where there is not any minority specified language, there is a lot of aid for beleaguered Blacks, who at 16.7 percent unemployment are suffering their worst since 1984.

The bill calls for an extension of unemployment insurance for a year for those who have been out of work six months or more, and it’s well known who has the highest percentage of jobless people in their ranks.

This will aid 1.4 million African Americans and their families. Coupled with that will be a tax credit to businesses for hiring those who are long-term unemployed.

The president is also proposing reforms that will create a program tailored to support re-employment for the long-term unemployed by providing training while they look for a job.

By placing rebuilding and revitalization projects in communities hardest hit by foreclosures and retrofitting schools in large urban school districts, the bill should provide more jobs for minorities, women and socially and economically disadvantaged people.

The payroll tax holiday puts $1,000 to $1,500 in the pockets of 20 million working-class, Black people in the next year.

The bill also provides funds for the rehiring of teachers, firefighters, police officers and other public employees, and African Americans make up a healthy percentage of public workers across the nation.

The president also included a summer jobs program that will benefit teens and young people. Unemployment among Black youth is more than 32 percent.

It’s called The American Jobs Act not the African-American Jobs Act. It will help jobless and economically distressed people of all ethnicities — whites more than any — but, most importantly, this bill for all Americans doesn’t bypass those with dark complexions.

NEW YORK — The Rev. Jesse Jackson is entering the fray over The Recording Academy's cuts to its Grammy categories: He's asking to meet with the president of the organization and has raised the possibility of protests with the awards less than two weeks away.

Record unemployment and rampant corporate avarice, empty houses but homeless families, dwindling opportunities in an increasingly paralyzed nation — these are the realities of 21st-century America, land of the free and home of the new middle class poor. Award-winning broadcaster Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West, one of the nation’s leading intellectuals, co-hosts of Public Radio’s “Smiley & West,” now take on the “P” word — poverty.

“The Rich And The Rest Of Us: A Poverty Manifesto (SmileyBooks, $12)” is the groundwork the duo provides in their continued crusade to confront the underlying conditions of systemic poverty in America before it’s too late.

In an exclusive sit-down interview on Friday with the Philadelphia Tribune, both men shared that ending poverty is sure to emerge as the defining civil rights struggle of America’s 21st century.

“We believe that poverty has to be a priority in the country — and at the moment it is not,” said Smiley. “We have not had a sustained conversation about poverty in this country since Lyndon Johnson and the war on poverty. And obviously since that time we’ve had both Democrat and Republican presidents, but nobody has seemed to make poverty a priority. It almost as if there is a bi-partisan consensus in Washington that poverty doesn’t matter. So, we argue in the book that poverty is a matter of national security. We argue that poverty is threatening our democracy. And finally, we argue that there are a number of things that have to be done right now to make poverty a priority and reduce it and eradicate it. It can be done. This is not a skill problem — it’s a will problem. We’re just trying to put this issue on the table, and it is not coincidence that this is coming out in an election year, because we want this issue to be discussed this year — unlike last time.”

“The Rich and the Rest of Us” is the next step in the journey that began with Smiley and West’s 18-city bus tour, which gave voice to the plight of impoverished Americans of all races, colors and creeds. By placing the eradication of poverty in the context of the nation’s greatest moments of social transformation — the abolition of slavery, woman’s suffrage, and the labor and Civil Rights movements — Smiley and West ask readers to confront assumptions about poverty in America with 12 poverty changing ideas.

“To put it in historical context, we try to take seriously the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer and others who were talking about organizing poor people in such a way that their dignity and their humanity is affirmed,” explained West. “Right now we’ve got one percent of the population who got 93 percent of the income growth in the last year and a half, and we know that one percent of the population owns 42 percent of the wealth — so we’re really talking about an oligarchy. If we’re really going to talk about poverty, we’ve got to talk about massive job creation, massive investment in education and massive investment in housing that allows poor people to gain access to resources. The way you do that is to first try to tell the truth about their suffering, and secondly, try to engage in a kind of democratic awakening in the country to acknowledge the poverty is the moral and spiritual issue of our time, in addition to the political and economic issue of our time.”

“The Rich And The Rest Of Us: A Poverty Manifesto” is available at major bookstores and online at smileybooks.com or Amazon.com.

Contact staff writer Bobbi Booker at (215) 893-5749 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

Tavis Smiley and Dr. Cornel West deserve high props for their summer poverty tour. They started on an Indian reservation, hit the inner city and looked at poverty, in all of its manifestations. While many dismissed their high-profile tour as a political ploy, I am absolutely convinced of their sincerity. In addition, these two men are among the few who have dared utter the “p” word in public.

Think about it — the vice president has a middle-class task force, but there has been no focus on the poor or the extremely poor (those who have less than half of the poverty line in income). The Heritage Foundation posits that if you have a cell phone, television, or microwave oven, then you really aren’t that poor. Newt Gingrich derisively called President Obama the “food stamps president,” even though, thanks to the Great Recession, 15.2 percent of all Americans are poor, and 14 percent (20 percent in Mississippi) receive food stamps. That’s more than 50 million Americans on food stamps, half of them white. Why and how should someone decide to make food stamps a divider?

We have turned poverty into a personal problem, not a social problem. People are ashamed and embarrassed to be poor, yet poverty has increased thanks to our economic failings — the financial meltdown of 2008, the mortgage crisis, high unemployment and other matters. Millions of people, especially women and children, are hanging on by a shredded shoestring.

Tavis and Cornel have a book coming out in April, “The Rich and the Rest of Us.” It will share reporting from the poverty tour, and offers a dozen solutions to the poverty problem. Both these men are passionate about eradicating poverty, and about engaging politicians and policy-makers in the task. Would that the entire nation felt as strongly as they do. Indeed one of their solutions is to call on President Obama to convene a White House Conference on Poverty. There’s not been such a gathering since Lyndon Johnson was president.

On Sunday, March 18, Tavis convened a group of women to talk about women, children and poverty, and a powerful group it was. Indeed, I’ve never participated in a conversation where two hours went more quickly. We, had a full house at New York University, and a lively group of women, including Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, former Planned Parenthood leader Faye Wattleton, financial guru Suze Orman, author Sheryl WuDon (“Women Hold Up Half the Sky”): AFT leader Randi Winegarden; Native American leader Cecelia Firethunder, first woman head of her Indian nation; Nele Galan, former head of Telemundo, and founder of the Adalante movement to inspire Latina women, and yours truly.

Talk about fast and furious conversation! Talk about passion for justice, talk about women who care about our images in music videos, our position in the economy, our access to health care, including reproductive health, the state of education and the ways some young people are getting the short end of the stick in our schools, and the extreme importance of financial literacy and money-savvy in preventing poverty, and the poverty of women around the globe. Underlying the conversation — why are people so passive about poverty, why are women so complacent about inequality, where is the movement to improve the status of women?

The “Made Visible” conversation was only a first step, and it was an important step. Tavis and his talkfests often bring hidden issues to light, and this is a great example of such an occurrence. He indicated that this is the first time he has presided over a panel of all women, and hopefully it will not be the last. And with his tour, book, and call to action (he calls it a poverty manifesto), he is laying out possibilities for next steps.

Here is the bottom line — while the economy seems to be recovering, that recovery is not trickling down. More than 43 percent of the unemployed have been jobless for more than half a year. The reported unemployment rate is a special kind of fiction — the “real” unemployment rate is more than 14 percent for everyone, more than 25 percent for African Americans. This has been the case for at least two years. We can’t compete with other countries with the drag of poverty, lack of access to education, and the notion that “austerity” will improve our national prospect. Policymakers ought to tune in to the Tavis PBS show on March 28, 29 and 30, when excerpts of this conversation will air. — (NNPA).

Dr. Julianne Malveaux is president of Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, N.C.