It’s no secret that Obama courts rappers. He loves to talk about how he loves the hip-hop. He’s called it a “genius” art form. With an Obama presidency, will we be seeing the “culture” of thugs, pimps, and hos in the White House? A Newsweek article explores the idea of that.

When superstar lyricist Nas declared, “Hip-hop is dead!” in 2006, he reignited a long-running debate among artists and observers in the rap community. While the money-guns-girls wing of commercial rap is certainly here to stay, many fans insist that hip hop’s political roots are rotting. But on the eve of an election in which a presidential candidate is a professed Jay-Z fan who brushes off his shoulders in speeches and fist-bumps his wife, it appears that the political soul of hip hop is primed for a reawakening.

It’s no secret that the most widely covered news stories involving hip hop in the last few years have been less than flattering. Rapper Ludacris recently made headlines with a pro-Obama song he released in July. On “Politics as Usual,” he rhymes in support of Obama about Sen. John McCain and Sen. Hillary Clinton: “Hillary hated on you, so that bitch is irrelevant; McCain don’t belong in any chair unless he’s paralyzed.” The lyrics prompted an Obama campaign spokesman to condemn the song as “outrageously offensive.” Then there was Don Imus’s referral to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes” last April. What followed was a national backlash that pinpointed commercial rap as the source of the kind of misogyny many felt he had aimed at a group of young black women. The Imus comment, and the anti-rap fallout, became such a big deal that Oprah devoted a show to the subject of misogyny in rap music. Hip-hop pioneer Russell Simmons and rapper Common appeared on the show, defending rap artists as poets who simply paint pictures of the world as they see it.

It wasn’t the first time Simmons was called upon to defend the culture of rap. In 2001, he founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN), a non-partisan organization dedicated to fighting poverty and injustice through voter education and other programs. With commercials on MTV and through initiatives such as Hip Hop Team and “Vote For It ’08,” HSAN is making voter registration and political education as easy as poking friends on Facebook. (In March 2008, Simmons stepped down from his leadership role to publicly endorse Obama, who he said “represents the best candidate to suit the ideas that matter most to me—eradicating poverty, conflict resolution, the environment and foreign policy.”)

Another hip-hop political organization, The Hip Hop Caucus, founded by the Rev. Lennox Yearwood in 2004, has recruited artists like T.I. to evangelize. Voting is a particularly personal issue for T.I. who will not be allowed to pull the lever for any candidate on Nov. 4, because of a prior felony conviction for gun possession. So T.I. (born Clifford Joseph Harris Jr.) has joined forces with the Caucus as the spokesman for its “Respect My Vote” campaign. “If I can’t vote, the least I can do is to make up for my minus-one by urging others to vote,” he says.

Poor T.I. Multiple arrests must be tough. Of course, if he could only stick to his probation, and maybe refrain from buying machine guns and silencers without registering them, maybe he’d be able to vote. Thug life has consequences, yo.

Here’s the thing: rap is not “poetry”. There is nothing “genius” about it. Writing songs filled with violence, drug references, the worst kind of misogyny, and constant swearing is not genius. And let’s face it, that’s what the majority of hip-hop is. And a lot of rappers put their money where their mouth is. They don’t just rap about thug life, they actually live it. Consider rapper 50 Cent. You can’t have even the briefest knowledge of his career without knowing that he was shot nine times before making it big. Those gunshot wounds are looked at by many in the hip-hop industry as badges of honor, proof of his street cred. It’s not often mentioned, however, that the shooting was directly related to the fact that Curtis Jackson (his real name) was a drug dealer starting at the age of twelve, arrested multiple times, and dealt the hard stuff, like heroin and cocaine. After quitting drug dealing, he was shot. He claims that the thug life is all behind him, but lo and behold, an “altercation” between 50 Cent and rapper Ja Rule led to 50 Cent being stabbed by a rapper signed by Murder Inc, Ja Rule’s label.

Gangsta life is glorified in rap culture. Yet politicians everywhere suck up to rappers constantly, like Shirley Franklin, mayor of Atlanta, who put out a statement recognizing rapper Ludacris’ “good works”. And even one of our presidential candidates, Barack Obama, talks about how much he enjoys rap music. Politicians like to talk about how denigrating rap music is, but they’ve got no problem courting it when they feel like they need to boost their image with the youth voters.

People are free to listen to whatever kind of music they want, and artists are free to make any kind of music they want. But glorifying rap music is just plain ridiculous. A culture of violence, of female degradation, of sex-drugs-and-money is not something to be idolized or given legitimacy by politicians. Of course, I’m just an unenlightened cranky conservative, but I don’t see how hip-hop has any place in the White House.