According to pundits, the reason he lost these states during the primary was because he couldn’t bowl. His Father’s Day speech was meant to show white conservative males that he wouldn’t cater to “special interests” groups, blacks in this case. This was the consensus of those who appeared on MSNBC and other opinion venues of the segregated media on June 16, 2008, even the progressive ones. (Segregated? Not quite. The two percent of African Americans who support Bush all seem to have jobs as pundits, columnists and Op-Eders). Michael A. Cohen, writing in The New York Times, June 15, 2008, acknowledging Mr. Obama’s Sister Souljah moment, wrote: “Indeed, just yesterday, Barack Obama had his own mini-‘Souljah moment’ as he decried the epidemic of fatherlessness and illegitimacy among black Americans. While it is a message that Mr. Obama has voiced before to other black audiences, speaking unpleasant truths about issues afflicting the black community may provide political benefit for a candidate whom some working-class white voters are suspicious of — just as it did for Clinton sixteen years ago. ” (When is Cohen going to air “unpleasant truths about issues afflicting” his community?)
The talking heads also concluded that Obama’s speech before a black congregation in which he scolded black men for being lousy fathers and missing in action from single-parent households and being boys, etc., was clearly aimed at those white male Reagan Democrats, who, apparently, in Obama’s and the media’s eyes, provide the gold standard for fatherhood, which fails to explain why there are millions of destitute white women, “displaced housewives” and their children whose poverty results from divorce, or why, according to one study, ninety percent of middle class white women have been battered, or have witnessed their mothers, sisters, or daughters being battered. A smug John Harwood of The New York Times said that Obama was telling black men to “shape up.” As long as men of Mr. Harwood’s class dominate the avenues of expression, who’s going to tell white men to “shape up?” Judging from my reading, American men of all races, ethnic groups and classes need to shape up when it comes to the treatment of women.
Blaming black men exclusively for the abuses against women is a more profitable infotainment product. Hypocrisy is also involved. MSNBC host, Joe Scarborough, who welcomed Juan Williams’ latest demagogic attack on blacks, printed in The Wall Street Journal, still hasn’t addressed the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of his staffer, Lori Klausutis, who was found dead on the floor of his office or why he had to resign abruptly from Congress (http://www. whoseflorida. com/lori_klausutis. htm). And is Juan Williams, whose career has been marred by repeated sexual harassment complaints against him really one to criticize the personal morality of others? Is Bill Cosby?
According to the census, a woman’s income on the average is reduced by seventy-three percent after divorce in a country in which fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. Moreover the Times revelation, shocking to some, that elderly whites are taking to cocaine and heroin, a genuine epidemic, hasn’t drawn a response from the legions of columnists and commentators and book publishers who profit from any signs of social “dysfunction” among blacks. Nor have Harwood, George Will, David Brooks, Pat Buchanan, who are always scolding blacks for whatever, commented on the rising incarceration rates of white women. Apparently, Lindsay and Paris are not alone, nor are the Barbie bandits.
Don’t expect Obama to bring up this rampant substance abuse before a white congregation. He had to just about whisper about the values of blue-collar whites, those who he said clung to guns and religion; he was exposed by a woman who recorded his comments, furtively. Even though the media, which rank ratings above facts, continue to criticize him for these remarks and have made them a campaign issue, sixty percent of Pennsylvanians, according to a Zogby poll April 17, agreed with him. (The media were also wrong to suggest that Hillary got the worst of it from the press during the primary. A Pew study from Harvard contradicts this.)
Predictably, Obama’s verbal flagellation of black men, who don’t have the media power with which to fight back, was cheered on the front page of The New York Times, which places a black face on every story about welfare, domestic violence and unmarried mothers, and uses Orlando Patterson to parrot these attitudes on the Op-Ed page, yet a study published by the Times showed a steep decline in the rate of births to unmarried black women over the decade while the rate among Hispanic women has increased, contradicting what Cohen described as an “epidemic of illegitimacy” among blacks. An indication that the Op-Ed editors at the Times are so willing to believe the folklore perpetrated by such writers as Cohen that they don’t fact check a writer whose assumptions are at odds with the reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that they published on December 6, 2007, and at odds with their token black columnist, Bob Herbert, who said on June 20, 2008 that illegitimate births have “skyrocketed” over the decades.
Patterson, Williams and Herbert have to rough up the brothers and sisters from time to time in order to hew the editorial line set by their employers. This was the conclusion of a study (The New York Times, June 23, 2008) by Bob Sommer, who teaches public policy communications at Rutgers, and John R. Maycroft, a graduate student in public policy. They examined 366 opinion articles published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Star-Ledger. They found that at each newspaper ninety to ninety-five percent of the published articles agreed with the editorial page stance on the issue at hand.
Moreover, why aren’t Obama and other tough-lovers acquainted with a study cited by Michael Eric Dyson in Time Magazine on June 30, 2008? In his Viewpoint piece, “The Blame Game,” in which he also takes on Obama’s blame-the-victim speech, he refers to research by Boston College social psychologist that found “black fathers not living at home are more likely to keep in contact with their children than fathers of any ethnic or racial group.”
I asked for a correction of both Herbert and Cohen’s assertions, since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report indicated a higher rate per thousand births to unmarried Hispanic women, but only received an automatic reply from the Times. A June 11, 2009 report commissioned by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and the National Council of La Raza found that “Latino teens have the highest rate of teen pregnancy and births among all racial/ethnic groups.” Why don’t the legion of politicians like Obama, writers like The Manhattan Institute’s John McWhorter, Fox News’s Juan Williams, Harvard’s talented tenthers, all of whom scold blacks under the guise of tough love, love Hispanics, the country’s largest minority group? No box office appeal? No publishing contracts? No votes from Reagan Democrats?
A 2007 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed some alarming statistics. “Latino high school students use drugs and attempt suicide at higher rates than their black and white classmates.” In addition “Latino students were more likely than either blacks or whites to… ride with a driver who had been drinking alcohol, or use cocaine, heroin or ecstasy. ”