(Washington Post) — Tavis Smiley didn’t like my post saying that he and Princeton University professor Cornel West have too much baggage to lead a bus tour on poverty. In it, I argued that their respective petty grievances with President Obama made their seven-day, 14-city bus tour suspect and that the call for a defined black agenda at the expense of an American agenda was counterproductive. And I let the words of radio host and comedian Steve Harvey speak for me and — judging by the response on Twitter and Facebook — many others who are shaking their heads over what Smiley and West are doing.
An email arrived this afternoon from Smiley’s publicist with a letter from the best-selling author and television host.
