-By Warner Todd Huston
Much as we on the right like to carp about how sold-out the Old Media is to Obama’s reelection effort and how the media establishment is loathe to say anything negative about Obama, sometimes it does publish a piece that raises troubling concerns for the President.
This week it was CBS’ turn with a piece that notes that Obama has a “complicated relationship” with black America. According to CBS, blacks are largely unsatisfied with Obama.
CBS does a pretty good job giving a myriad of examples of that dissatisfaction even as in nearly every other paragraph CBS reporter Leigh Ann Caldwell goes to pains to mention how, dissatisfied or not, they are all still voting for Obama.
But that constant reassurance aside the piece is filled with example after example of the grumbling from black community leaders and politicians all essentially saying how disappointed they are that Obama has done so little for them.
The piece leads with complaining from Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Rep. Maxine Waters (D, Calif.) both of whom are annoyed that black unemployment is so much higher than that of other communities.
Obama is also criticized for not showing much by way of leadership on other issues that affect the black community. The piece notes, for instance, that Obama has done little on the violent crime that plagues big city black communities and he’s also criticized for so studiously avoideding speaking before any of the nation’s African American organizations like the NCAAP and the National Urban League.
All in all, it seems that many in the African American community feel that Obama has failed to live up to his “unique role in history” and that he’s allowing “political expediency” to rule the day.
Some feel this dissatisfaction may lead to a dampening of the overwhelming turnout of African Americans that Obama enjoyed in 2008. And indeed some polls reflect that. On July 13, Gallup reported that black enthusiasm is “lower now than it was in the fall of 2004 and 2008.”
There have been other signs that Obama hasn’t been able to sustain that “hope and change” mystique. In her CBS piece, though, Caldwell avoided discussing these even harsher criticisms of Obama. Just recently, actor Morgan Freeman said that Obama didn’t qualify as the first black president because he had a “very white” mother.
Only weeks ago during an interview with NPR, the popular actor dismissed Obama as the first black president saying, “…Barack had a mama, and she was white — very white American, Kansas, middle of America. There was no argument about who he is or what he is. America’s first black president hasn’t arisen yet. He’s not America’s first black president — he’s America’s first mixed-race president.”
If Obama was as wildly successful as the African community had hoped, this grumbling would not be so pervasive, for sure. But kudos to CBS for at least giving them some attention.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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