Someone had to write about this, and someone finally has.
Question: How successful was Barack Obama as a community organizer in Chicago? Shouldn’t the answer to this question have some bearing on whether he’s elected president?
This would have been a good question for someone to ask in 2008. The fact it’s being asked now — and that Heather Mac Donald is asking it — is cause for encouragement, maybe even hope.
Throughout his four years working for “change” in Chicago’s Roseland and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods, Obama ignored the primary cause of their escalating dysfunction: the disappearance of the black two-parent family. Obama wasn’t the only activist to turn away from the problem of absent fathers, of course; decades of failed social policy, both before and after his time in Chicago, were just as blind. And that myopia continues today, guaranteeing that the current response to Chicago’s youth violence will prove as useless as Obama’s activities were 25 years ago.
Think back … George W. Bush’s military record, which was supposed to be a presidential credential (along with his years as governor of Texas), was vetted extensively and sometimes unfairly. Same goes for John Kerry, who unlike Bush actually saw combat. I don’t recall that either man’s supporters objected to the scrutiny; they just wanted the findings to be articulated fairly and accurately.
So why was so little attention paid to Obama’s years as a community organizer? As gunfire erupts all over Chicago this summer, it might have been useful to find out that the organizing principle behind community organizing as Obama practiced it is defective … and well we might have, if the question had been asked.
Here’s another variation on the same theme, courtesy of William McGurn in The Wall Street JOurnal.