Monday, May 28, 2012
Winston Churchill captured what this presidential
election is about when he observed “the inherent vice of capitalism is the
unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal
sharing of miseries.”
It’s why the young black Democrat mayor of Newark, NJ,
Cory Booker, got high level repudiation from the Obama campaign, including from
the president himself, when he insolently suggested that Bain Capital, the
investment firm once headed by Mitt Romney, might actually do positive things.
Booker, an Obama campaign surrogate, went off script on
Meet the Press when he refused to justify a campaign attack ad depicting the
evils of Bain. “I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity….Especially
that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people are
investing in companies like Bain Capital.”
This was more than insubordination to Booker’s campaign
handlers.
It was unmitigated heresy driving to the core of the
Obama campaign message. The narrative, telescoping the theme of four years of
this presidency, says that the American economy collapsed because of unbridled
capitalism. To recover, the narrative continues, we must allow all knowing, all
powerful, but compassionate political leadership in Washington to re-arrange
the American economy and make sure businessmen never steamroller Americans
again.
But Booker, educated at Stanford, Oxford, and Yale Law
School, is a new breed of young black politician, who is actually trying to
make a difference. And he is too close to realities on the ground to deny the
truth he sees.
As mayor of Newark, he governs a city that is more than
50 percent black with a 25 percent poverty rate. It’s clear that what Newark
needs is more business and investment, not more government.
George Mason University economist Walter Williams
recently noted that America’s poorest cities with populations over 250,000 –
Detroit, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Miami, St. Louis, El Paso, Milwaukee,
Philadelphia, and Newark – have one common characteristic. For decades they
have been run by liberal, Democratic administrations. The mayors of six of them
have been black.
The big government, high taxation, overreaching
regulation model of governing has been a saga of failure in America’s cities.
And it certainly has not served well the black populations that
disproportionately populate them.
And interestingly, in another paradox of black political
behavior (I wrote last week about the stark contrast between the values that
blacks embrace in church on Sunday and the values they vote for on Election Day
Tuesday), blacks are voting with their feet against the same political regimes
that they are supporting in the voting booth.
The New York Times reported last March that, according to
new census data, blacks are departing our failed northern cities and heading
south. Blacks may be pulling the lever for “blue” candidates, but they’re
leaving the blue states and moving to the red ones.
Michigan, Illinois, New York, and other major Northern
black population centers have shown net black population decreases over the
last decade, and “among the 25 counties with the biggest increase in black
population, three quarters are in the South.”
Professor of history Clement Price at Rutgers University
in Cory Booker’s Newark says “the black urban experience has essentially lost
its appeal with blacks in America.”
These black Americans on the move are young and educated
– 40 percent between 21 and 40 and one in four with college degrees – and
looking for opportunity.
And the places in America today with the growth and
opportunity they seek are those areas that embrace freedom and
entrepreneurship.
Cory Booker knows this. And he knows that fixing
America’s blighted urban areas means pushing back on the smothering government
that caused this decay and inviting in creative and courageous business minds
and their investment capital.
So Booker’s defense of Bain and capitalism should come as
no surprise.
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