Why Obama can't help unemployed blacks

It's the ideology, stupid. It won't allow him to do anything that will boost the economy. All he can do is make it worse. Victor Davis Hanson calls it Obama's racial crisis:

Unspoken, of course, is the truth that Obama’s statism, deficits, interferences in the private sector, and spread-the-wealth rhetoric have frightened business owners into stasis -- and the resulting slowdown hurts blacks most of all. But in this fantasy world of racial spoils, Obama’s profligate spending and borrowing can be faulted only for not being profligate enough. To suggest any other diagnosis would be to call into question the entire federal racial industry of the last 50 years -- and those who have benefited the most by administering it.

I clumsily tried to express something like that the other day:

The truly discouraging aspect of Obama's conflicts with the CBC is that neither he nor they would ever advocate any policy that would promote real opportunity for poor, entitlement-dependent blacks. All they've got to offer are more government programs. The CBC's only complaint is that Obama hasn't been able to expand entitlements even more than he has. But the sad truth is that his alleged jobs bill won't create jobs, nor do anything else to improve the lot of poor black Americans. This turgid drama is really a farce.

I can but try. More from VDH:

Indeed, there is something curious in the liberal argument that Obama, once deified as the ideal megaphone for progressive agendas, is now to be faulted for the current unpopularity of liberalism, given that he remains a far more effective advocate than Jimmy Carter and a far more doctrinaire leftist than Bill Clinton. It is almost as if liberal scapegoating of Obama is an attempt to shift responsibility for progressive failure from the message onto the hapless messenger — an unfairness that a [Morgan] Freeman would never discuss.

Or understand, I daresay. In this clip, Freeman strikes me as a very naive man. Maybe if I slogged through the entire interview I'd conclude he was something other than a useful idiot but I haven't got time for the pain. (Others aren't quite so cynical.)

Back to Prof. Hanson, who penetrates more layers of reality than Morgan Freeman or Barack Obama will ever dream of in their dim, narrow philosophies:

To criticize Obama endangers the historical nexus between government entitlements and those who ensure them. So powerful and lucrative is this relationship that whites who question both its utility and its intent, and blacks who are vocal about its unintended destructiveness, are labeled respectively racists and Uncle Toms. Indeed, that paradox is at the heart of Obama’s racial crisis: It is his own orthodox leftist agenda that has stalled the recovery and decimated black America. Yet for those who are invested in a crumbling Great Society, the remedy of unleashing the private sector and downsizing government would be worse than the recessionary malady itself. [emphasis added]

Yes, indeed. Doing the right thing by the economy would exact too high a price from the left. Obama's ideology makes any positive economic move on his part a virtual impossibility. He and his fellow statists can do nothing other than run the country into the ground. It's who and what they are. Anything else would be heresy.

More from Prof. Hanson:

The paradoxes of race have even stranger contours. In the case of a Harry Reid or a Joe Biden in 2008, there was an almost gushing relief that a black candidate for president did not sound or act “black.” With Obama, they at last could square the circle of publicly prizing their close associations with a black presidential candidate while (almost) privately being relieved that he sounded indistinguishable from themselves.

In contrast, white tea-party conservatives, to my knowledge, have not expressed any worry that the accent or cadence of a Herman Cain (or of, say, a Clarence Thomas) was different from their own. They apparently are less apt to equate talent or aptitude with a predetermined brand of diction or mannerism, far more ready to appreciate authenticity and candor that accrue from practical experience in the workplace. To a conservative, someone who fought in the fierce arena of private commerce deserves respect in a way that someone establishing race as essential rather than incidental to his character, in hopes of garnering state advantage, does not.

Who, then, in the Tea Party, cares that the businessman Cain does not sound like a Yale academic, or that the crease in his pants might be not so straight, or that he cannot excite tics in cable anchormen’s legs? For tea-partiers, race is irrelevant: Being a Godfather’s Pizza CEO apparently is proof of greater accomplishment than a long political career, an Ivy League degree, or a distinguished tenure on Wall Street.

Just so. But the left needs to spin the Tea Party as a racist entity, for all the reasons mentioned above. Read the whole thing and pass it on. Truth is a powerful weapon.

Thanks to Michelle Malkin for the Buzzworthy link.
Thanks also to Doug Ross.
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