Obama Disappointment Syndrome

DeWayne Wickham, an African-American writer at USA Today, expresses his disappointment with the job Obama has done regarding black unemployment.  He describes a couple of meetings with Obama including a 2007 speech he attended:

“Today’s economy has made it easier to fall into poverty. … Every American is vulnerable to the insecurities and anxieties of this new economy. And that’s why the single most important focus of my economic agenda as president will be to pursue policies that create jobs and make work pay,” Obama said that day to his mostly black audience.

At that time, the nation’s overall unemployment rate was 4.7%. Whites had a jobless rate of 4.2% while the black unemployment rate stood at 8.1%. Today, the black rate is 15.5%, nearly double that of white job-seekers.

I don’t blame Obama for the economic conditions that are responsible for so many blacks being out of work. The seeds of this problem were planted long before he moved into the Oval Office. But I do fault him for not doing more to fix this problem.

The poor in urban America, he said in that 2007 speech, “suffer most from a politics that has been tipped in favor of those with the most money, and influence, and power.” And then he asked rhetorically, “How can a country like this allow it?” To which he answered, “We can’t.”

But so far, under his leadership, he has allowed it.

Finding work for the jobless is the best anti-poverty program this nation can mount. But while the Obama administration spends $608 million during the first 17 days of its involvement in Libya’s civil war — it can muster neither the money nor the will to combat black unemployment.
The president’s failure to fight this problem as vigorously as he wages war abroad gets a pass from black leaders, many of whom complain to me privately but remain silent in public. They’re reluctant to challenge Obama the way Martin Luther King Jr. did Lyndon Johnson in 1967.

America “would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor” so long as it was involved in the Vietnam war, King said in a speech in which he called for an end to that bloody conflict.

Last month, as the Obama administration applauded the creation of 216,000 new jobs and a slight dip in the overall unemployment rate, the gap between whites and blacks without work widened as the black unemployment rate inched up.

I wonder if Mr. Wickham realizes the damage those anti-poverty policies created by Lyndon Johnson has had on the black community since then? The War on Poverty turned out to be more of a War on the Black Family as fathers were replaced with government checks and the illegitimacy rate in the black community skyrocketed.

Want to get more black Americans working? Quit sending them welfare checks.

I agree with Mr. Wickham that the war in Libya is a complete waste of money, but throwing that money into some sort of black America stimulus program would not fix the underlying problems.  In fact, it would probably make it worse.