A debate has raged over the past week between the two Democratic Party front runners for president which is both ridiculous and scary. In an apparent bid to appeal to neo-conservative, afraid-of anything-not-American voters, both New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Illinois Senator Barack Obama have engaged in a duel over who can be tougher on certain foreign policy issues.

Obama wants to wind down the war in Iraq but step up the one in Afghanistan. He also threatened to launch a military campaign in Pakistan (without that country’s approval) if as president he receives “actionable intelligence” as to the location of 911 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton refused to “take the nuclear option off the table” if the military gave her a general idea as to where bin Laden was located.

At least Obama had the good sense not to go that far apparently realizing that dropping a nuclear bomb on a general area and killing tens of thousands of innocent people just because bin Laden “might” be there is both immoral and insane. Nevertheless, Obama gave a speech in Chicago last March to the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC which was so full of support-Israel-at-all-cost, macho military rhetoric that you could barely distinguish him from President Bush. One Jewish publication called it “a powerful pro-Israel speech.” Indeed, it displayed a near-religious respect for Israel and almost total disrespect for Arabs and Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Obama has extended this appear to middle-of-the-road white voters with a series of so-called “tough love” speeches to African Americans which largely ignore historic and institutionalized racism and instead suggest that our problems primarily flow from individual failures. I realize this is campaign season but Obama must realize (or be told) that the voters who most believe in the tough-on-foreign-policy and tough-on-Blacks rhetoric are the hard core neo-conservatives with borderline racist views who are least likely to vote for him regardless of what he says.

Virtually every major poll suggests that Americans – Black, white, Hispanic and Asian – are war weary. They are increasingly coming to see the fallacy of the neo-conservative view that all foreign problems can be solved with war and all domestic problems can be solved with jail. Thus, the next time you talk to Obama, his strategists or supporters tell them to tell him to stop trying to appeal to the right-wing, imperialistic minority. He will not win their votes but he will scare away more progressive voters who are looking for a change from George Bush.

Robert N. Taylor is editor of the digital newsletter “The National Black News Journal at http://www.freewebs.com/blacknewsjournal or email him at TaylorMediaPrime@yahoo.com .