Conservative of the Week: Tavis Smiley

Age: 51

Claim to Fame: Author, talk show host and longtime political commentator

Why He's the Conservative of the Week: while Smiley isn't really a 'conservative' per say, unlike 90% of his colleagues in the liberal media, Smiley can almost always be counted on to play it down the middle when it comes to news, politics and his often on-point criticism of Barack Obama--especially when it comes to Barry's lack of concern for the plight of Blacks in America during his terms in office. For the latter, Smiley has earned the ire of both white and black liberals time and time again, who expect their colored journalists to bow down and never dare utter a bad word about the 1st Black President publicly, much less critique him or point out his many lies and hypocrisies. But Smiley ain't having it, as he showed once again this past week in an interview with Hillary Clinton.

From Newsbusters:

Just how leftist is PBS? When late-night host Tavis Smiley interviewed the Democratic candidates for president this week, he read them both a jeremiad attacking the Clintons from The Nation magazine claiming that welfare reform and the crime bill of 1994 “decimated black America” and the Clintons failed to stand up to "the right-wing demagoguery about black communities."

This may be the harshest set of questions Hillary Clinton has allowed to be spoken in her presence in this cycle. He began with Hillary on Tuesday:

SMILEY: So, obviously, the media is focused on how well you're going to do with African American voters. There's no doubt about the fact you have lined up the Black establishment pretty much in favor of your candidacy. Here is a quote from the article I'm sure you saw that Michelle Alexander wrote, author of The New Jim Crow, the article in The Nation magazine, for those who want to read it if you haven't read it. It's in The Nation magazine, the February 10 issue.

The headline was "Why Hillary Clinton Doesn't Deserve the Black Vote. From the crime bill to welfare reform policies, Bill Clinton enacted and Hillary Clinton supported, decimated black America."

Here's the quote. "What have the Clintons done to earn such devotion? Did they take extreme political risk to defend the rights of African Americans? Did they courageously stand up to the rightwing demagoguery about Black communities? Did they help usher in a new era of hope and prosperity for neighborhoods devastated by deindustrialization, globalization, and the disappearance of work? No. Quite the opposite."

She makes the argument and Bernie Sanders last night on this program agreed with her that you may be winning the Black vote at the moment, but you don't deserve the Black vote. How do you respond to that?

Smiley also wasn’t impressed that Mrs. Clinton’s tactic of embracing Obama to gain black votes, since he's perpetually complained Obama wasn't enough of a president for the black people:

SMILEY: His historic election notwithstanding, the data is clear about this, that black folk have lost ground in every major economic category over the last 10 years. So where that particular community is concerned, where you’re headed to South Carolina, tell me how you’re going to serve differently than Barack Obama. Because whatever his intentions were, we didn’t get it done for black people economically.

When Hillary replied that the financial crisis could be blamed on Bush and “trickle-down economics” and deregulation, Smiley shot back “Respectfully, deregulation didn’t start when the Republicans took over in 2000 when Bush came into office. Deregulation started in the Clinton era of Wall Street and many people have made that point time and time again in this campaign.