Opinion: Hillary Clinton has the black vote in the bag, right?

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is widely considered to have the African-American vote in the bag, but like much else in this topsy-turvy presidential campaign, the actual picture may not be that clear cut.

Certainly the polls and primary voting support that long-running media narrative. It was the black vote in the South and urban North that helped propel Clinton to victory over her Democratic challenger, Bernie Sanders.

And current polls show nearly 9 out of 10 black voters supporting Clinton over Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Trump has long since been dismissed by the mainstream media as “racist,” and they have plenty of ammunition from the nominee’s statements to back up that claim.

Clinton interrupted her August round of fundraisers on Thursday to drive that perception home with a blistering attack against Trump for building his campaign “on prejudice and paranoia.” She specifically censured him for his putative links to the “alt-right” — which she characterized as “an emerging racist ideology.”

But race is an exceedingly complex and vexed question in this country, and close scrutiny might show that the Democrats’ smug confidence that they own the issue is misplaced.

This was evident last week in the appearance of the Green Party’s vice presidential nominee, Ajamu Baraka, in a primetime CNN Town Hall last week.

Baraka is virtually unknown to the public, though he has spent his four-decade career as a civil rights activist. He is by anyone’s definition — including almost certainly his own — a radical, and is more likely to cite the iconic anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon than Martin Luther King.

In the Town Hall, CNN anchor Chris Cuomo took Baraka to task for calling President Barack Obama an “Uncle Tom.”

Cuomo was indignant that anyone, African-American or not, would be so rude as to refer to the nation’s first black president with a “very ugly” and “negative” term.

Baraka modestly replied that his remark was in front of a “specialized audience that understood the context and why I framed it in that way.”

His main criticism of Obama, Baraka went on to say, was that the president “missed an historic opportunity to transform this country” and allowed his “commitment to neoliberal policies and a neoliberal worldview” to undermine his chance for greatness.

For one leftist blogger, Cuomo’s questioning was purposefully designed to discredit Baraka. The term “Uncle Tom,” Eric Draitser wrote in a spirited defense of Baraka, which usually refers to a black man who is overly eager to please white people, is provocative but in this case was used by a black leftist to “deconstruct the mythology” about the first black president.

“Does anyone doubt that, from a purely objective perspective, President Obama has indeed abdicated his responsibility to improve the political, economic, and social lives of Black Americans?” Draitser asked rhetorically. “A quick look at the statistics for Black America reveals that, if anything, the lives of black people have gotten considerably worse under Obama: life expectancy, per capita wealth, employment levels, infant mortality, children in poverty, etc. all point to a deterioration of the living conditions for blacks under Obama.”

Baraka — and no doubt Draitser — are vehemently opposed to Trump, but this leftist critique of Obama sounds strikingly similar to the charges leveled this week by the Republican nominee in his much-derided “outreach” to black voters by asking them “What do you have to lose” after Democratic policies have left many of them in a parlous economic situation.

The New York Times, like Cuomo, was quick to take umbrage at this claim because it doesn’t take account of the “variety of the black experience.”

Times reporters interviewed “roughly a dozen blacks” in Atlanta — including a retired postal worker, a couple of college professors, a newspaper publisher, an IT specialist, and the president of the National Urban League — who all not surprisingly found that Trump’s dire picture of crime and dysfunction didn’t jibe with their daily reality.

Donna Brazile, the interim chair of the Democratic National Committee and a longtime Clintonite, took to the pages of USA Today to defend the Democratic Party against Trump’s charges.

However, the best this prominent African-American could come up with for Obama’s achievements on behalf of African-Americans was that he rescued them from the Great Recession and implemented a health-care reform – accomplishments, such as they are, that apply to all Americans.

Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, an African-American commentator controversial for his right-wing perspective, criticized the impact of Democratic policies on inner cities earlier this month as he urged Trump not to write off the black vote.

Riley suggested Trump take his message of restoring the American dream — a vision as appealing to blacks as it is to whites, this columnist maintains — into these distressed areas “and talk to the residents about why so many lots are empty, why all those buildings are boarded up, why foreign nationals run so many of the small businesses, why the bodega charges so much for milk and eggs, why good schools and jobs are so scarce.”

Or maybe even some Times reporters, as part of their quest to capture the “variety of black experience,” could go into these areas and ask the residents there whether Trump’s “dire” vision is familiar to them.

The old-guard black leaders are firmly in the Democratic camp because of the civil rights breakthroughs of King and Lyndon Johnson, and black voters will no doubt follow their lead in this election and deliver large majorities to Clinton.

But maybe not as large as people think. The black vote is not as monolithic as the pundits would have it, because there is another side to this Democratic success story.

If you can’t stomach listening to it from Donald Trump, then listen to it from African-Americans spanning the political spectrum from Ajamu Baraka to Jason Riley, and other critics — Bernie Sanders comes to mind — who decry economic policies that disproportionately disadvantage minorities but that Hillary Clinton is likely to continue.