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Twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, for twelve years, "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" came to a halt so that Tavis Smiley could hold forth. The show, which supplements R. & B. songs and comedy skits with listener call-ins and lots of good-natured banter, claims to have eight million listeners, making it the most popular radio broadcast in black America. Joyner, who once sang in a group with Lionel Richie, is a gregarious host with a high, wheezing chuckle, and he presides over a gently irreverent gang. Smiley, who hosts his own nightly talk show on PBS (in many markets it airs after "Charlie Rose") and a weekend radio show distributed by Public Radio International, is a gifted orator and a budding media mogul: in an era that would seem to have little need for an old-fashioned black advocate, he has made himself just about impossible to ignore. On the "Morning Show" his job was to provide the uncomic relief. He said, "When I come on, they stand down." The sidekicks were shushed, the sound effects silenced, and the music faded out so that Smiley could deliver a secular sermon, a rat-a-tat treatise on politics and the black community.
Smiley's first commentary of the year was broadcast on Tuesday, January 8th, and his subject was Senator Barack Obama, who had won the Iowa caucuses the previous week. Joyner had emerged as an ardent Obama supporter, but Smiley, in his commentary, urged listeners not to be taken in by "the hysteria and the hype." He said, "You can't short-circuit the process of holding folk accountable just because you fall in love."
The phone calls and e-mails started immediately. Listeners couldn't understand why Smiley was speaking out against a man who could be the first black President. On his next show, he acknowledged the "pain, anguish, anger, and disappointment," but he didn't back down. And although he criticized Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign in the following weeks, dissatisfaction with Obama was often the focus of his commentary. He was disgusted by the idea that the Senator "transcends race""Nobody asks white candidates to transcend their race," he said. And he worried that, for some people, "voting for the guy who happens to be black might be the easy...