Obama Bad for Blacks?

The idea that President Obama has been bad for blacks has been popping up recently.  I suspect this is news to people who depend on conservative sources for their news.  But it is now an actual thing in some circles.  And most people would label the proposition preposterous.  But is it?

It certainly is to conservatives.  There he is seen as the unpatriotic President, the anti-white President, the Muslim "president" who was born somewhere else (Kenya, Indonesia, wherever but definitely not in the USA), and, most damningly, THE BLACK PRESIDENT.  Given all this he positively must have been good for blacks, right?

I don't buy any of that (except the "Black President" part - that is unarguably true).  So I was skeptical when I first heard the idea raised.  But there is an actual a case there.  And I have found that when an idea like this appears "out of nowhere" it almost always turns out that it came from a specific somewhere.  I was mystified as to where that somewhere might have been until I saw a mini-review of a book called "Democracy in Black" by Eddie S. Galude, Jr. in The New Yorker.  Mr. Glaude is the head of Princeton's African-American Studies program.  The review indicates that the book contains "a scathing critique of the Obama Presidency" and "describes the 'devastation' suffered by black communities".

I am not positive that this is the one true source for this idea but it is definitely one of them.  That's good enough for the purposes of this post.  So is Mr. Glaude some ivory tower academic with a screw loose, an axe to grind, and a plan to raise his visibility?  I haven't read the book so I can't definitively answer the question.  But my strong suspicion is that he is not.  To understand why let me instead ask a slightly different question:  Have blacks done well during the Obama years?  It turns out that this question is easy to answer and the answer is a resounding NO!

By every measure of economic success blacks are worse off than they were a few years ago.  The number of blacks in the middle class is down.  The percentage of employed blacks is down.  The average income of blacks is down.  And blacks have been hurt more than whites over the period in question.  The middle class as a whole is smaller.  But the black middle class has shrunk more than the white middle class.  Black unemployment rates are much higher than white unemployment rates.  The gap between black income and white income has increased.  Blacks have done badly in both the absolute sense and the relative sense.  Mr. Claude lays the case out in considerable detail (at least that's what the reviews I have read say).

So blacks have done badly under President Obama.  Is it his fault?  There is this theory that the President is responsible for everything, whether good or bad, that happens on his watch.  If you buy this theory then the answer is yes -- President Obama is responsible.  But this theory is inconsistently applied.  To pick just one example:  Jeb Bush has frequently stated that his brother George W. Bush "kept us safe".  Liberals have long said "wait -- what about 9/11" but this observation was ignored until Donald Trump started repeating it.

Lets take a more thorough look at the "blame" question.  Mr. Glaude apportions a generous share of the blame to the President.  Then he moves on to what I feel are more deserving recipients.  But before moving on let's take a deeper look at Obama's role.

Most of the damage was done by the economic crash.  That definitely did not happen on Obama's watch.  It happened on Bush's watch.  This inconvenient truth is ignored by conservatives and Republicans who have invented any number of fanciful excused for why it is actually Obama's fault.  None of them hold water.  But what definitely did happen on Obama's watch was his response.  And the first major action he took was the "stim", his 800+ billion dollar stimulus package.

Conservatives have argued that it was too big.  Liberals have argued that it was too small.  The Obama Administration have argued, rightly I believe, that it was as big as they could make it and still get it through congress.  If the package had been smaller (or not passed at all) it would have resulted in more damage to black economic interests than was the actual result.  So the "stim" was helpful to blacks.  But it was also race neutral.  It was directed neither toward nor away from blacks.  So it was not really an initiative intended to directly help or hurt blacks.  So its effect was best described as neutral.

There was, however, a secondary effect stemming from the "stim".  In my opinion it was poorly constructed.  This was done in what turned out to be a futile effort to attract Republican support.  The "stim" was composed of roughly one third temporary tax cuts (many of which were later made permanent), one third one time subsidies to state and local governments, and one third spending, primarily on infrastructure.  As predicted, the first two thirds were not very effective in stimulating the economy.  But the last third is the part I want to focus on.

Infrastructure projects often include a ribbon cutting ceremony and these ceremonies now commonly feature a giant "check" so that the local TV stations will have a good visual to put on the evening news.  And, of course, there is always a smiling politician standing next to the check taking credit for the funding and, by inference, for his ability to bring home the bacon.  Many of these ceremonies featured Republicans who had voted against the "stim".  And in absolutely every case the Republican in question was careful to ensure that voters were kept ignorant of the fact that the money to pay for the project came from the "stim".  They were thus able to portray themselves as effective at roping in Federal money while simultaneously decrying the hated "stim" as useless spending.  This was one of many tactics Republicans used to rack up big wins in midterm elections in 2010.

And Republicans used the 2010 election win as leverage with which to gut programs that directly and indirectly affected the financial wellbeing of black people.  So by letting the Republicans get away with this trick the "stim" indirectly hurt the economic wellbeing of black people.

Conservatives also railed against Eric Holder, a black man and Obama's first Attorney General.  Holder was supposed to have some kind of diabolical pro-black agenda whose details now escape me.  But Holder spent most of his time in his first few years dealing with the financial crisis.  I can think of no Holder/Obama initiatives on the traditional "war on crime" / "war on drugs" front during this period.

And one thing he did, or more accurately failed to do, was anything effective with respect to Wall Street.  One or perhaps two low level people went to jail and eventually a number of large fines were levied and collected.  But this was seen at the time as largely ineffective and nothing has happened since to change this judgment.   Since Wall Street is almost exclusively a white enclave (the exception being Asians employed in technical rather than leadership positions) an argument can be made that this was anti-black.  But this is another example of an essentially color blind policy where one can argue that a secondary effect hit blacks harder than whites.  But this same secondary effect hit a lot of whites very hard too.

Another example of a color blind policy where it could be argued that blacks suffered disproportionately more harm was in dealing with the "Foreclosure Mess" aspect of the Financial Crisis.  As the economy melted down a lot of people were put into foreclosure.  There is a lot of blame here but I am going to focus on the actual Foreclosure process as that happened almost entirely on Obama's watch.  A lot of just plain bad execution went into the process.  But a lot of criminal behavior was documented too.  There was illegal "robo-signing".  Houses were foreclosed even though the owners were in negotiation with the mortgage holder.  There were even cases where the wrong house was foreclosed on.  But here again few if any were prosecuted and sent to jail.  Many otherwise law abiding and stable black families were swept up in this, more than the standard distributions and statistics would predict.  But the disproportionate impact on black people was a secondary effect.  It was not an intended result of Obama's or Holder's policies.

So in all these cases the effect was unintended and fairly modest.  There were no Obama administration programs that were designed to disadvantage blacks.  And, as I indicated above, the early Holder years included no activity on the crime/drugs front.  In fact the Obama Administration maintained a hard line on the War on Drugs until well into his second term when he finally slightly loosened up on Marijuana.

On the crime front, there was no policy push at all in the first term.  And nothing was done with respect to specific cases like the Trayvon Martin case.  The shooting happened in February of 2012 and the case played out in the months following with essentially no Federal involvement.  At this point we are just short of four years in.  It was only with the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson Missouri in August of 2014, roughly six years in that the Justice department made any pro-black move.  They eventually became deeply involved.  The Justice department has since been involved in a number of cases.  Blacks are right to fault Obama and the justice department for being somewhere between neutral and hostile when it came to blacks and the criminal justice system.  Claims to the contrary by Republicans are just wrong with respect to roughly the first six years of Obama's time in office.

I have made what I would consider a very weak case for the claim of Glaude and others.  He presumably made a much better one.  And, for the sake of argument, let's assume the case has been convincingly made.  What does Glaude suggest?  He makes what I consider two sensible suggestions and one idiotic one.  The idiotic suggestion is his "blank-out" one.  He suggests that black voters should vote for no one in the 2016 Presidential election.  The idea is to punish Democrats for taking the black vote for granted.  This is a truly idiotic suggestion.

A blank-out vote is effectively a Republican vote.  We have tried the experiment.  Blacks and others turned out in large numbers in 2008 and 2012, the years Obama was running.  In those years, particularly in 2008, Democrats did well.  Did they then work hard to advance a pro-black agenda?  No.  But look at what happened in 2010 and 2014.  Blacks stayed home, they effectively blanked-out in Senatorial, Congressional, and state elections.  And Republicans did very well and picked up lots of seats.

Unlike Democrats or the Obama Administration, Republicans have been actively hostile to a pro-black agenda.  To take the simplest example they have put in draconian voter-ID laws in many states.  These laws are effective at their intended effect, namely denying blacks the vote.  Republicans at the state level (with an assist from the Supreme Court) have often not implemented the Medicaid component of Obamacare.  This has denied poor people (disproportionately black) access to medical care they can afford.  There are other examples.  So recent history has conclusively shown that a blank-out vote by blacks is an anti-black vote.  So what should blacks do instead?

Frankly, they should do what Republicans do and have been doing for a couple of decades now.  And Glaude advocates that in his other two points, the ones I agree with.  One reason Obama has been so late to the party and why what successes he has had have been so modest is a lack of engagement by his supporters.  This includes but is not limited to blacks.  Blacks vote every four years and then they stay home the rest of the time and expect Obama to work miracles all by himself.

Republicans have many powerful, effective, and well organized pressure groups.  The religious right is only one of many.  Karl Rove's ability to mobilize and turn out the religious right in larger numbers than Democrats could imagine is widely credited for Bush's victory over Kerry in 2004.  And this one group has blackmailed the Republican party into its current rabid hostility to abortion.  Abortion is low in most voters' priority list but any Republican officeholder who is not fiercely anti-abortion lives in fear of being primary-ed.

Opinions on abortion have not changed much in recent years.  But the country has made a rapid shift from being strongly anti-gay to being modestly pro-gay.  But being fiercely anti-gay is another litmus test within the GOP.  Very few Republicans who hold office or are contemplating running for office try to buck the prevailing wind on this issue.  Other constituencies within the Republican party guard other issues and agendas fiercely.  And the way they keep their elected officials in line is not by staying home.  They do it by threatening primary challenges.  This does not, at least in theory, jeopardize control of the seat.

But there are few Democratic pressure groups who reliably deliver votes if Democratic candidates toe the line and credibly threaten primary challenges if they don't.  Take the classic black pressure group, the NAACP.  The NAACP almost went out of business in the '90s.  Then Republicans started making anti-black moves like voting restrictions.  This breathed some life back into the NAACP so it is still around.  But it can not turn out large blocks of voters so it has little actual power.  Theoretically there are pro-women's groups, and anti-war groups, and so on.  But they are not as effective as their Republican equivalents.  If they were Republicans would be unable to consistently clean up in off year elections and would not have achieved a near-lock on state government.  Glaude advocates that blacks get way more active and organized and I agree with him.

Glaude also advocates that blacks be more willing to "disturb the peace".  Theoretically, this level of activism is counter productive.  But gays used it effectively.  They went from being invisible to visible to effective in advocating for their agenda.  We have seen the same thing with the Black Lives Matter movement.  There have been people within the black community advocating for years.  But they were not heard.  The "in your face" tactics of many in the Black Lives Matter movement has resulted in attitude and policy changes.  In the years before Black Lives Matter these issues were not a priority of this or previous administrations.  But consistent pressure exerted over a broad front and for a substantial period of time has garnered results.

And there is no doubt that this is a tried and true and effective tactic of conservatives.   We have gotten to the point where gun tragedies are completely routine.  Yet the NRA is famous for its "take no prisoners" tactics.  It is also notorious for its ability to set the legislative agenda.  They have been completely successful at the national level.  They have been only slightly less successful at the state and local level.  The anti-abortion movement has a similar track record.  Clinics have been firebombed.  Employees and patients have been threatened.  Doctors have been murdered.  Yet the NRA and anti-abortion movements are seen as legitimate.  And, more importantly, they are effective.

And this is a broader problem.  Republicans decided at the beginning of the Obama administration to blindly and categorically impede any Obama initiative.  They have been ably supported by their pressure groups.  This has allowed them to maintain this stance for a long time and simultaneously be successful at the ballot box.  Obama has advanced many initiatives that are broadly popular but have gone nowhere.  This is because he has generally been on his own.  He has had little or no active support from pressure groups.  More telling is the fact that he has been routinely subjected to vicious personal attacks.   "He is not Christian."  "He is anti-American".  "He is not an American citizen."  "He is exceeding his authority."  Any similar attack lunched against a Republican from outside the Republican party would result in a fierce counter-attack.  But there is little or no response from outside pressure groups to these attacks on Obama.

There has generally been no sustained and vocal groundswell of support from the constituencies these initiatives are designed to support.  This is true of black issues but also of issues pretty much up and down the line.  Obama is expected to deliver on his own.  An exception is the gay movement.  There has been a lot of outside pressure and Obama has been able to get results.  But this means that in most cases a Republican attack is free of cost.  This has effectively tied Obama's hands behind his back.  It should be no surprise that he has been less effective and slower to the starting line than many constituencies would like.  On the other hand, Republicans in states have been very successful in pushing their agendas.  Their pressure groups have been active and vocal.  Groups that oppose these policies, on the other hand, have been pretty quiet.

We may now be on the brink of more "same old same old".  We are seeing record turnouts for Republican caucuses and primaries.  Blacks (and others) should be shocked and appalled by the promises being made by Trump and the rest of the GOP crowd.  They should be pleased and comforted by the promises being made by Clinton and Sanders.  But people are not turning out on the Democratic side, even for Sanders who has made increased turnout a cornerstone of his campaign.  Sanders people seem to be up for turning out for a rally but not up for showing up on election/caucus day.  Turn out so far on the Democratic side is substantially below 2008 levels.  Blacks and other groups that traditionally support Democrats should be concerned.  If we get a general election that looks more like 2010/2014 than 2008/2012 we will get results very like 2010/2014.  And it will not be pretty for blacks.

The tank was supposed to revolutionize fighting in World War I.  In its first couple of battles it did not.  But it became a game changer when tactics were changed from "tanks can replace infantry" to "tanks and infantry can support each other".  Blacks and others need to vote and to organize and to be in our faces.  Voting is necessary to provide persuadable elected officials.  But people also need to actively participate in the efforts of pressure groups working on their behalf.  This is the tactic of tanks (pressure) plus infantry (voting) that worked in World War I, works for Republicans, and can work for blacks and other constituencies.  We have lived through the political equivalent of "trench warfare" when infantry alone (elected officials) could not get the job done.  Democrats need to go back to the methods Democrats used successfully several of decades ago.  Then elected officials were beholden to active and vocal pressure groups.  Politicians were expected to deliver results but in exchange they could depend on the pressure groups delivering the votes necessary to keep them in office.

Obama has a remarkable record of success given what he has been up against.  Imagine what he could have achieved had he been properly supported.