A Response to an Email

At the end of last week, a response I received to my blog on whether Obama deserves a second term caught my attention and I thought I would share it with you together with an expanded response.  My friend said, "Yes, Obama deserves another term. In part because the Supreme Court is at risk of admitting justices who are anti-abortion, this is a serious issue and will inject religion further into our national political landscape. I believe Obama has a far superior and progressive social policy than Romney."

My reply was basically as follows: I am always delighted when someone takes issue with me, particularly someone who is as bright as you.  People like you force me to take a second look at my position.  Having done so, I might have responded differently had I not watched "Need To Know" last Friday on PBS.  It covered the voting laws in Florida which some say are designed to take away voting rights of certain of its citizens, including felons. There was one African American woman who was a college graduate, written a book, and had started her own publishing company, all after being released from a federal prison after serving 20 years for a non-violent drug offense.  After years of trying to get back her right to vote she received a notification that her right would not be restored until 2017.

What bothered me most about this story was her having spent 20 years in prison. I am willing to bet that the majority of inmates in this federal prison are black, poor and uneducated. We both know that African Americans do not make up the majority of the prison inmates because crime is in their DNA. Yet in the 4 years that Obama has sat in the Oval Office, I have never heard him say one word about the blatant racism that exists in our judicial system.  My concern today is not with Obama's policies but his failure to use his office to take on what I would call "social corruption."

However, as for Romney, trust me ..., he has no intention of interfering with a woman's right to contraceptives or abortion; and he has no interest in turning this country into a theocracy. Romney is interested solely in this country being economically superior to the rest of the world and he understands that it is only achieved by having a strong middle class (anyone with even a passing familiarity with economics would understand this). Destroying the middle class would send us back to 18th and 19th century Europe, when the nobility thought they were secure with the poor tilling the fields. You know how well this worked out for them.

Obama knows that the rich is this country are really at the mercy of the middle class.  Why?  Because it is the middle class that buys all the goods and services.  Obama’s claim that he is the one who will save the middle class just does not comport with his record.  Compare how little he did to protect the housing market and the homeowners to the actions taken by FDR.   Any improvement to the housing market was in spite of Obama's policies.  Such improvement was the result of economics 101-supply and demand, boasted by the Federal Reserves QE policy to flood the market with newly printed  money.   Obama’s middle class policies were best summed up by Joe Biden when he said the middle class has been buried for the last four years.  Oops.  (Out of the mouth of babes and Joe Biden).   Look at what the stimulus money could have done had some of it been used to upgrade our outworn and outdated electric grid.  Many of those 8 million customers would not have lost their power as a result of Hurricane Sandy.  

America cannot remain the world's largest economy if it crushes the middle class.  Romney understands this.  Even the Chinese recognize this because they are doing everything they can to bring more of their people into the middle class.  This abortion issue is nothing more than a diversion. Without jobs more women will slide into poverty; and if you take a look around you will find that a whole lot of females of child bearing age who are poor and/or poorly educated are having babies. They are not getting abortions or using contraceptives, even though both have been legal for over fifty years.

A democracy is only secure if the electorate is informed.  People like Obama depend on people being uninformed, or at odds with one another.  They appeal to our basic animal instincts and not "the better angels of our nature."  These animal instincts are the ones that most threatened a democracy.  Obama's social policies is the opposite of superior and progressive. because if allowed to succeed they would bring us to a place we have never been.

An enlightened electorate will make mistakes as it did in 2008 although it could be argued that  Obama may have been the lesser of two evils.  But history tells us that the light will eventually break through.  I hope that it happens this November.

Does Obama Deserve Another Four Years?

My mother passed away the year Obama was nominated for president. I know that she would have felt such pride in pulling the lever for him in the voting booth. She was 101 at the time of her passing. She had lived through Jim Crow and would have understood the significance of a black man becoming President of the United States of America.  My mother would have believed that Obama would make a difference if not in her life, at least in the lives of those who came after her.  But she would have been disappointed.  

This time around, Obama will get 94% of the African American vote even though you cannot get 94% of any group to agree on whether the earth evolves around the sun.  Obama will get this vote because he is black.  But, can anyone name one thing that Obama has done to benefit black folks? The drop out rate of black kids in inner-city schools is the highest it has ever been. The incarceration rate of black men is off the chart.  The number of black unwed mothers has skyrocketed.  More blacks are unemployed and their slide into poverty is unparallel.  Yet, all we have demanded of Obama is he stay black. 

Last month the teachers in Chicago went on strike for higher wages (the average pay for a Chicago teacher is $76,000.00 a year, the highest in the country).  The teachers also wanted to  maintain the status quo, meaning no performance evaluations, no time added to their school day, and no system of merit pay. The majority of the students attending the Chicago public schools are Black and Hispanic. The majority of them are poor. Over 55% of these kids never complete high school.  Here was a chance for Obama to take a public stand on behalf of the children, but he kept quiet during the strike because he did not want to offend the union. The Mayor, Obama’s former chief of staff,  brought the strike to a speedy conclusion because he was involved in Obama’s reelection effort.  In the end, Obama was safe but there was no meaningful improvement to the quality of education for the kids. 

Blacks want school choice yet Obama and the Black Caucus have done absolutely nothing in furtherance of securing for these kids any hope of attending the same public or private schools enjoyed by whites.  Obama has had two opportunities to appoint judges to the Supreme Court, yet he failed to appoint an African American even though blacks have been shafted by the judicial system since the Dred Scott decision.  Obama has been more interested in waging a war against the Arizona law which he incorrectly states allows the police to stop an individual who is doing nothing but  driving while Hispanic yet he has been silent on the decade long practice of police stopping individuals who are driving while black. 

Obama is now locked in a lawsuit with Catholic and Evangelical churches over birth control. During the Democrat Convention, he pranced a white law student out onto the stage to advocate a woman’s right to have her birth control pills paid for by her employer or her school. This $9.00 a month benefit was more important than attempting to do anything to halt the rate of teen pregnancies amongst black females who are guaranteed to spend their lives in poverty, while the law student will be spending her life on Wall Street.

I would guess that many Chicago parents voted for Obama because they believed he would do something to improve the education system. I am sure that many black folks voted for Obama because they believed he would do something to stop racial discrimination in America.  African Americans probably think Obama shares their values and understands their experience.  But this was not true in 2008 and it is not true today.   Folks, we deserve better.

Were my mother alive today, I would hope that she would understand why I am voting for Mitt Romney.