Detroit to Appalachia: Obama’s incomplete journey

Posted by hpayne on January 29, 2013

President Obama has ignored the poverty of Detroit and Appalachia. Pictured is a distressed street mid-town Detroit neighborhood just off Hamilton Avenue.

“Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia, to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for and cherished and always safe from harm.”

— President Barack Obama, second Inaugural address, Jan. 21, 2013

That line, delivered a week ago by President Obama at the emotional height of his speech has stuck with me.It was powerful; it was a nod on Martin Luther King Day to MLK’s iconic “I have a Dream” speech (“Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania. . . “); it was a call to help the needy among us.

And it was totally empty.

The president’s tenure has been notable for his avoidance of the nation’s most pressing problems — the economy, inner-city violence — while forcing political goals —- national health care, global warming regulations. The “streets of Detroit” line is typical of this president’s rhetorical window-dressing fronting for a political machine hell-bent on consolidating Democratic power. Where has he been on violent inner cities? On coal families?

At its best, his administration has ignored these problems — at worst it has declared war on the coal miners of Appalachia.

The president couched his re-election campaign as important so “that the wealthiest corporations and individuals can’t take advantage of loopholes and deductions that aren’t available to most Americans.”

In truth, he has given disproportionate attention to big special interests. His signature health care law was written by the Big Hospital and Big Pharma lobbies. He has extended billions to politically-connected, green, mega-corporations such as LGChem and Solyndra, and so on.

This is indeed a historically significant president — not in the service of the “the little guy” but in uniting Big Government and Big Business to alter the country’s political balance of power.

Take Detroit and Appalachia.

To Obama, Motown meant Big Labor and a key to securing Michigan and Ohio electoral votes. Meanwhile, he has ignored a metropolis that in 2012 recorded a staggering 52 murders per 100,000 citizens.

Underlying Detroit’s slaughter is a child illegitimacy crisis exacerbated by federal welfare programs. These programs also afflict Appalachia (this writer’s backyard). After a visit to rural Kentucky (where illegitimacy birthrates hover at 50 percent), liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof observed:

“Antipoverty programs . . . discourage marriage: In a means-tested program like (Supplemental Security Income), a woman raising a child may receive a bigger check if she refrains from marrying that hard-working guy she likes. Yet marriage is one of the best forces to blunt poverty. In married couple households only one child in 10 grows up in poverty, while almost half do in single-mother households.”

From left to right, public policy activists tell me they dream that Obama, a model husband, would use his celebrity status to celebrate marriage. At a White House event honoring the NBA champion Miami Heat this week, the president made an off-hand comment about basketball stars like LeBron James and Dwayne Wade, who take “their roles as fathers seriously.” What if that was the basis of a public service campaign rather than a throw-away line at a Washington photo-op? Unaddressed, the illegitimacy crisis dooms another generation of children to poverty.

Worse for Appalachia, his administration has declared a War on Coal that is crippling working families. Thousands of miners have lost their jobs thanks to EPA anti-global warming regulations that all but eliminate future coal plant construction.

The tragedy of the Obama presidency has been that one of the most inspiring individuals in U.S. history has used that capital for political ends — not for addressing America’s most urgent problems.

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