Detroit — It has been a murderous summer in Detroit, with some 254 shootings and 52 dead. But Pres. Barack Obama’s Labor Day speech here had no time for citizens under siege. This visit was about politics. The president’s choice of Motown as a backdrop was meant to highlight what appears to be a national success story: the renewal of Detroit in the wake of his administration’s managed bankruptcies of GM and Chrysler.
In truth, however, Detroit represents the greatest failure of this president.
Determined to transform America into a green, centrally planned state, Obama has an agenda that is too utopian. Trying to graft European democratic socialism onto American individualism was always a Frankenstein-like proposition. The result is a mess, with America more politically divided than ever, and its mighty economic engine crippled under heavy-handed regulation and misguided spending.
Had Obama instead focused on simply transforming America’s inner cities — Detroit is America’s poster child of urban dysfunction — he could have made a real difference in curing America’s most vexing problem: the permanent underclass.
Spare us presidents with Big Ideas. Give us leaders who understand the small fundamentals.
As America’s first black president, Obama had a unique opportunity to tackle the inner city’s chronic family failure by personally connecting with people to transform a culture of dependency. This high-profile family man could have taught by example the importance of family and job responsibility. Instead, Obama’s orgy of welfare spending has only exacerbated Detroit’s problems — helping doom a generation of black children to poverty.
Obama’s auto fairy tale never held water to begin with. As Dick Cheney reminds in his new autobiography, it was George W. Bush who first bailed out the auto industry (Cheney was opposed) before Obama came to power. Indeed, Obama then used Washington’s involvement to corrupt the bankruptcy process by stripping bondholders of their legal rights and favoring Big Labor.
But the Detroit that Obama spoke of on Labor Day is a fiction. It is no longer synonymous with the storied middle class created by Big Auto’s high wages. That middle class, black and white, has fled to the suburbs — run out by crime and rotten schools caused by the implosion of the urban family.
That family collapse (echoed in lower-class families of all races) has created the pathologies that haunt urban Detroit: a 24 percent high-school-graduation rate, 49 percent adult illiteracy, 30 percent male incarceration rates, and 47 percent black teen unemployment.
Barack Obama could have made a profound difference.
But he won’t, because these ills are the direct result of the Big Ideas of social engineers before him. As the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has documented, the fall of the Detroit family came with the rise of the Great Society. With welfare programs from Medicaid paying for births to food and housing subsidies, government has replaced fathers in the home. Obama has overseen spending on these programs to record levels.
Without fathers, poverty inevitably follows. Indeed, the lack of a two-parent family, Rector notes, is the leading cause of poverty in America.
But instead of helping Detroit’s suffering children, the president seems aloof from their pain. He parachuted into this city’s sanitized, heavily securitized downtown square mile of corporate headquarters and Whole Foods markets — safe from the murderous streets of the city’s other 138 square miles that have claimed 250 lives already this year and put Detroit on the path for a staggering murder rate of 50 per 100,000 residents in 2011.
After his speech, the president was quickly swept back to 30,000 feet again to work on Big Ideas , his rock-star image unsullied by the bloody streets of Detroit.
President Obama could have performed a signal service just by saying that he found something desperately uncool about body ink and tattoos.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseExcept for the robot policeman, Robocop is a documentary. Witness the Pontiac 6000SUX getting 8 miles a gallon, the rampant crime, and the homogenized "New Detroit"
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Spare us presidents with Big Ideas. Give us leader who understand the small fundamentals."
What wins football games? The most sophisticated offenses are useless if you don't block effectively. No defensive scheme works if you don't tackle the guy with the ball.
Fundamentals. This president can't be bothered with the fundamentals. This is why America is losing under his leadership.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"Spare us presidents with Big Ideas. Give us leaders who understand the small fundamentals."
Heh. You mean like Reagan?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYeah, like Reagan. You have no clue that what you wrote means the opposite of what you think it means.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt means exactly what I intended it to mean, Colonel. You should be careful of trying that mind-reading stunt in public without a little more practice.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBig ideas are fine, when they are the right ideas consistent with our history, traditions, and virtues. Obama's "big ideas' are contrary to all of those. That is why he's a failure in most eyes. he has succeeded in his own -- created a leviathan health care monopoly, transferred activity from the private to pubic sector, killed the domestic energy industry -- to him those are all good things. They just won't get him re-elected.
Obama is a classless punk. Has always been, and will continue to be.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"a 24 percent high-school-graduation rate, 49 percent adult illiteracy, 30 percent male incarceration rates, and 47 percent black teen unemployment."
Good lord! Are these numbers true? Half the adults in Detroit can't read?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI can't speak to the incarceration rates or the unemployment rates (although both seem entirely possible given the other two statistics), but the illiteracy rate seems accurate according to local reporting...
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The graduation rate may not be quite that bad, although the best case scenario doesn't seem all that bright, either...
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However, that same story goes on to say that "only one public school -- Renaissance High -- managed to adequately prepare 10 percent of graduates for college. "
Think about that - in a "record" performance year for graduation rates, only ONE school could prepare a measly 10% of its students for college. I suspect that if properly tested and measured, only a small percentage of those recent graduates are actually functionally literate.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think "illiteracy" doesn't necessarily mean that they can't read a single word, but more like they can't read and understand a paragraph.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's a bit odd to hear a supposed conservative wail about Obama's failure to "help the suffering children" in a particular city. I thought that was mostly the responsibility of local communities and the state.
As for the illiteracy numbers, I'll second what Julie said, as I've taught illiterate adults before. In this context, "illiteracy" probably refers to *functional* illiteracy. There are a bunch of different definitions, but basically it means that they cannot read well enough to handle the basic requirements of modern society. In practice, they can read and understand simple words and perhaps a simple sentence, but they can't manage a more complicated sentence, and a paragraph is well beyond them.
You can imagine the effects this has: they can't really use the Internet, they can't read job applications or job ads, they can't handle basic government documents (like a paragraph of instructions on how to renew your driver's license), they can't read safety instructions. They cannot do any of these things without help. It's devastating in modern society, and in my view it plays a major role in Detroit's problems.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIn Detroit, illiteracy is a symptom of poverty not a cause, though it is part of a spiral. The problem in Detroit is a microcosm - the slow slide since the 1960s away from a working economy to an entitlement economy.
I'm a product of the Detroit public school system, but luckily I got out before the Great Society and the Dept of Education came to 'help'.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere are many disappointments with Obama, but one for me is his silence about the breakdown of the black family.
I sure wish that he and Michelle had used their elevation to the White House as a platform for motivating and encouraging traditional family structure among urban blacks. Sadly, so many black youths in the inner city see studying hard and getting good grades as "acting white". So many of these youths don't have a clue who their father is. And the cycle continues generation after generation.
What an impact Barack and Michelle could have had influencing the black inner-city community for good. What an example they could be that education is important, that a traditional family is important, that none of this is "acting white".
Sadly, there's no evidence that Obama is interested in changing the culture of black youth or influencing the inner-cities for good. What a missed opportunity.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhy would he do that? For Obama to encourage urban youth (since to say "black kids" would be RAAAAAAAAACIST) to stay in school, learn to read and write proper English (not to think "Ebonics" is acceptable), go to college, get married BEFORE you have a couple of kids, etc., would be to drain the endless pool of Democrat votes that liberalism relies upon to maintain permanent power. Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. Give a man a fish and you've got a reliable vote from a constituent you've made dependent upon you for alms.
Walter Williams IIRC said that the KKK in their wildest dreams couldn't have wreaked as my destruction on the black family as liberal policies. Obama is a liberal. His loyalty is to the Marxist tenets of liberalism above all. If he condemns people with superficial similarities in melanin content to poverty and predation, so be it. Besides, white liberals have destroyed plenty of white folks lives, so what's the difference if Obama does the same to blacks? Liberalism is death to all subjected to its application.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"... could have taught by example the importance of family and job responsibility." Really?! What's his history? Mother? Fathers? Grandparents? Mentors? Jobs? He does not support and voted (when he bothered to vote) against all of those things. Any feelings he has toward his wife and daughters is in keeping with their percieved membership in a progressive elite and not the less deserving and unqualified masses and nothing to do with the importance of family and responsibility to everyone. He's never had and doesn't understand either.
Nobody scores perfect in these categories, but this guy is way at the bottom of those bell curves.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBe it resolved that Obama has no interest in promoting the concept of the married, two-parent family as the central factor in reducing urban poverty and crime. But where are the leading conservatives, and GOP leadership on these issues?
Perhaps if conservatives were more actively engaged on matters like urban family formation, we might also witness a resulting demographic political shift, as well.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSome of these comments are absolutely laughable.
Obama's story itself is one of perseverance without a father. He leads by example. He's a family man with a happy wife and well-adjusted children, who by all accounts are successful in school. He's takes his knocks and doesn't give them back (which demonstrates true Christian forgiveness, and that better than Sarah the Criticizer in Chief has ever shown), and yet here you all are, writing, "The man knows nothing, is nothing, and worst of all can't get the do-nothing, know-nothing Blacks out of poverty."
Hypocritical a-holes. You don't care about the inner city, except to hold it up as another example of Obama's perceived failure.
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