Blinded By Ideology

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), chairman of the Black Caucus, says that if Barack Obama were not the president, he and his colleagues would be marching on the White House:

Unhappy members of the Congressional Black Caucus “probably would be marching on the White House” if Obama were not president, according to CBC Chairman Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.).

“If [former President] Bill Clinton had been in the White House and had failed to address this problem, we probably would be marching on the White House,” Cleaver told The Miami Herald in comments published Sunday. “There is a less-volatile reaction in the CBC because nobody wants to do anything that would empower the people who hate the president.”

Cleaver is reacting to the fact that the Obama administration has been a disaster for African-Americans, among whom unemployment currently stands at 16.7 percent. The truth is that anyone who claims to represent African-Americans should be marching on the White House. Cleaver, unfortunately, can’t connect the dots. Blinded by his own liberal ideology, he can’t understand, or maybe just won’t admit, that what African-Americans need is something like the Reagan administration, which knew how to promote private sector growth. Leftism can work reasonably well for the powerful and the connected, but if you are starting out on the bottom, you need economic growth to give you a shot at prosperity. This fact seems rather obvious, but one of the tragedies of our era is that most African-American leaders either can’t figure it out, or perceive their own interests as lying elsewhere.

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