Crisis in the Family

The fundamental crisis that is facing our nation--more fundamental that the economic, the fiscal, or anything that foreign nation is threatening--is the family crisis. I address this matter in my WORLDmag.com column this week ("The Family Crisis"), making reference to the much talked about New York Times article that summarized a recently released report and a Heritage Foundation report last year on the same topic.

The New York Times reports:

After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage. ... Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

Child Trends, the group that produced the study, adds this:

While more than half of these nonmarital births (52%) occur to women who live with the father of the baby in a cohabiting union, these unions are less stable than marriages. Children born to unmarried parents are more likely than those born to married parents to be poor and to see their parents’ union end.

Marvin Olasky's column alerted me to this report.

Last June, Chuck Donovan at The Heritage Foundation called for "A Marshall Plan for Marriage." This is the summary of his report:

Marriage and family are declining in America, following a trend well established in Europe. This breakdown of the American family has dire implications for American society and the U.S. economy. Halting and reversing the sustained trends of nearly four decades will not happen by accident. The federal, state, and local governments need to eliminate marriage penalties created by the tax code and welfare programs and instead use existing resources to better encourage and support family life.

The report included this interesting chart:

After summarizing these reports, I consider that at times of national crisis a statesman emerges to lead the country out of it. Our "crisis of a house divided" over slavery brought forth Lincoln. The Nazi shadow over the continent of Europe brought Churchill out of the wings. Our national malaise in the 1970s gave Reagan his moment. But that is when the crisis has a happy ending. I see no adequate leadership in any direction on the family front. Rick Santorum is offering himself for that role but in my judgment he has neither the stature nor the judgment for the great statesman's role. The man in the sweatervest is neither a Lincoln nor a Reagan.

In my concluding thought, I cast an eye to the current president. "President Obama has a nice family. If he were to take up this cause with energy and understanding, he could become a great president in his second term. Sadly, he seems too committed to advancing the causes of the problem, such as the paternalistic welfare state, to appreciate the nature of the problem and its remedies."

The day after I published this column, my TIME magazine arrived in the mail, carrying with it Rich Lowry's column on the same subject! ("Just Not the Marrying Kind," March 5, 2012; p.13.) He shares some more stunning figures.

The benchmark for discussions of illegitimacy is always the controversial 1965 report on the perilous state of the black family authored by the liberal intellectual Daniel Patrick Moynihan. When he wrote it, 24% of births among blacks and 3% of those among whites were out of wedlock. It turned out those were halcyon days of traditional family mores. Today out-of-wedlock births account for 73% of births among blacks, 53% among Latinos and 29% among whites.

The unraveling that began in the underclass has crept up the income ladder, although illegitimacy is still a class-based phenomenon. Almost 70% of births to high school dropouts and 51% to high school graduates are out of wedlock. Among those with some college experience, the figure is 34%, and for those with a college degree, just 8%.

With reference to the merely 8% of out-of-wedlock births that occur among college graduates, the TIME article remarks: "That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education. 'Marriage has become a luxury good,' said Frank Furstenberg, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania."

Lowry calls this "our most ignored national crisis." For my part, I begin on the same note, but more expansively: "Our nation is in a crisis. Yes, all eyes are on the financial crisis and the stagnant economy, and less certain but potentially ominous is the prospect of a nuclear-armed and religiously fanatical Iran. But it is possible that we might revive the economy at home and disarm our enemies abroad while losing the nation itself. I’m talking about the disintegration of the family that is quietly reaching crisis proportions."

Lowry calls for the sort of public campaign that usually attends a national crisis. Is it environmental? We know how to flood the discussion on all levels with that concern. In (what I am told is) my upcoming article in Relevant magazine, I call for the same national mobilization.

We need a twenty year policy agenda to strengthen and protect marriage and family at least as tenaciously as we protect waterways and wildlife. Ronald Reagan appointed a Special Working Group on the Family to examine all policies for their impact on the family. That was good, but the work needs to be less reactive. Thoughtfully crafted and fully coordinated family policy at every level of government should recognize the requirements for and impediments to healthy family life. Conservatives are rightly hawkish over how a tax or regulation will affect small business and job creation. The family deserves the same protective scrutiny.

The striking difference between Lowry's column and mine is that whereas I look to the president and find him an implausible hero on account of his policy commitments, Lowry looks to Michelle.

It's not hard to think of a spokeswoman. Michelle Obama is the daughter in a traditional two-parent family and the mother in another one that even her husband's critics admire. If she took up marriage as a cause, she could ultimately have a much more meaningful impact on the lives of children than she will ever have urging them to do jumping jacks.

The First Lady cannot turn things around on her own. We need someone who can redirect tax policy, restructure welfare programs, and refashion the way government presents what it does and the way it addresses citizens in their fragile social situations. But her influence would certainly get the ball rolling for a change in cultural attitudes and perhaps for future administrations to act on that momentum. The First Lady could conceivably have a better second therm than the Europeanizer-in-Chief.

Obama-Biden Postmortems Pour In

After Walter Mondale’s drubbing at the hands of Ronald Reagan, Joshua Muravchik wrote “Why The Democrats Lost” (Commentary, Jan. 1985). Then in 1989, he wrote, “Why The Democrats Lost Again.” These postmortems were written after the election was decided. It is interesting that the postmortems on Barack Obama have begun two months before election day. The campaign does appear to be in meltdown. But let me remind you: anything can happen in politics.

Here is a far from comprehensive review. It is just what I have noticed.

Kirsten Powers in “How Obama Blew It” (New York Post, Sept 9, 2008).

Obama's toughest challenge has always been to connect with working-class swing voters. So attacking the poster child for small-town values, Sarah Palin, was a bad strategy. No, Obama didn't engage in the mass sneering at Palin - but he did fall into the trap of disrespecting her. When McCain chose her, the Obama campaign's first response was to ridicule the size of her town. Then the candidate himself began referring to her as a "former mayor" when she is in fact a sitting governor. ...

Lured by the McCain camp, Obama supporters engaged in an argument about who had more overall experience - the top of the Democratic ticket or the bottom of the GOP ticket. This diminished Obama. ...

So now he is weighted down with more baggage as he works to convince an important voting bloc that he and his party don't hold them in contempt.

Clive Crook at Britain’s Financial Times (“Democrats Must Learn Some Respect," Sept. 7, 2008) elaborates on this contempt problem among the Democrats, a problem that, despite all his little-guy sob stories on the campaign trail, Obama has earned for himself. He was recorded telling a private gathering in San Francisco (that didn’t help) that when tough times hit, small-town people "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." Despite billing themselves as the party of ordinary Americans, of Main Street versus Wall Street, Clive observes that Democrats “lack respect for the objects of their solicitude. Their sympathy comes mixed with disdain, and even contempt.”

Democrats regard their policies as self-evidently in the interests of the US working and middle classes. Yet those wide segments of US society keep helping to elect Republican presidents. How is one to account for this? Are those people idiots? Frankly, yes – or so many liberals are driven to conclude. Either that or bigots, clinging to guns, God and white supremacy; or else pathetic dupes, ever at the disposal of Republican strategists. If they only had the brains to vote in their interests, Democrats think, the party would never be out of power. But again and again, the Republicans tell their lies, and those stupid damned voters buy it.

Crook has great sympathy for Obama and would like to see the Democratic party in power more frequently. But he sees from afar the obstacles that the clever and highly paid leaders of that party cannot bring themselves to recognize.

They will have to develop some regard for the values that the middle of the country expresses when it votes Republican. Religion. Unembarrassed flag-waving patriotism. Freedom to succeed or fail through one’s own efforts. Refusal to be pitied, bossed around or talked down to. And all those other laughable redneck notions that made the United States what it is.

Jonah Goldberg (“McPalin Rattles Team Obama,” National Review Online, Sept. 10) faults in part Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as running mate. He may help win Pennsylvania, but for the next two months he is either either useless or a drag on the campaign. As a consequence, Obama is playing two on one defensive ball against McCain and Palin. (“McCain's team doesn't care if no one guards Joe Biden, who seems to spend most of his time yelling to the media, "I'm open! I'm open!" But when he gets the ball, all he does is talk about what a great player he is and dribble in place.”)

The Obama people keep walking (no, jumping!) into the Republican snares.

Thanks to the double-team strategy, Obama has found himself in the awkward position of sounding as if he's running against the GOP's vice presidential nominee. When Obama compared his own experience to Palin's tenure as mayor of Wasilla (leaving out her current job as governor), he ran right into the pick the McCain campaign had set, leaving McCain a clearer path to victory. The more Obama has to explain why being a community organizer - or a state legislator, or a one-term senator with few accomplishments under his belt - is better preparation for the presidency than being a mayor or governor, the more he volunteers his own shortcomings when compared with McCain.

In today's New York Post ("Why Bam's Flailing"), op-ed editor Mark Cunningham argues that that Obama's inexperience in fighting elections has been critical to his failure in this big league competition.

If it suddenly seems like the Obama campaign doesn't have any idea what it's doing, maybe that's because it doesn't. Barack Obama has never run a campaign against a real Republican. ... In the [2004 Senate election], he basically had it won once a Chicago paper took down the GOP nominee by getting a court to unseal unseemly divorce papers, and the local Republicans then tapped Alan Keyes - a carpet-bagging right-wing performance artist - as their standard-bearer.

He says the same of Obama's campaign team. "And his main strategist, David Axelrod, is way out of his areas of expertise. Axelrod specializes in urban politics. He's run a bunch of mayoral races (usually in cities with lots of blacks), plus contests in true-blue states like Massachusetts and New York."

J.R. Dunn at American Thinker was ahead of the game when he chronicled Obama’s flakery and electoral buffoonery, and anticipated a fatal continuation of this until election day. See my August post, “Why Obama Will Lose: He’s a Flake!”

But the amazing Spengler, writing in the Asia Times ("How Obama Lost the Election," Sept. 3, 2008), has to cap it off with this account and a reference back to his devastating profile of Obama that he published back in February ("Obama's Women Reveal His Secret") that predicted the eventual self-destruction of the Obama candidacy.

Fatal step #1: He passed over Hillary for veep.

Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. ...[R]ejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.

Fatal step #2: He chose Biden instead.

Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics' claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place. He had a winning alternative, which was to pick Clinton. That would have sent a double message: first, that Obama is tough enough to make the slippery Clintons into his subordinates, and second, that he is generous enough to extend a hand to his toughest adversary in the cause of unity.

Fatal circumstantial flaw: he cannot get around his glaring inexperience, a weakness that McCain has skillfully exploited in his own choice of running mate.

The young Alaskan governor, to be sure, hasn't any business running for vice president of the United States with her thin resume. McCain and his people know this perfectly well, and that is precisely why they put her on the ticket. If Palin is unqualified to be vice president, all the less so is Obama qualified to be president.

Fatal character flaw #1: “a fatally insecure personality”

Obama, in short, is long on brains and short on guts. ...Obama could have allied with the old guard, through an Obama-Clinton ticket, or he could have rejected the old guard by choosing the closest thing the Democrats had to a Sarah Palin. But fear paralyzed him, and he did neither.

Fatal character flaw #2: subservience to Michelle, i.e. “His peculiar dependency on an assertive and often rancorous spouse."

Spengler calls Michelle “a very angry woman” who “hates America,” and documents both of these claims in his jaw dropping February column, "Obama's Women Reveal His Secret." He cites Robert Novak’s May 10 report that Michelle vetoed Hillary consideration as running mate. You could see the loathing in Michelle's eyes when Hillary was speaking at the convention.

If Novak's report is accurate, then Michelle's anger will have lost the election for Obama, as Achilles' anger nearly killed the Greek cause in the Trojan War. But the responsibility rests not with Michelle, but with Obama. Obama's failure of nerve at the cusp of his success is consistent with my profile of the candidate, in which I predicted that he would self-destruct.

Of course, Shelby Steele's little book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win (Free Press, 2007) explores Obama's peculiar background and equally peculiar character more fully. You can read the first chapter in this NYT excerpt.

Spengler’s bottom line: “He is trapped in a losing position, and there is nothing he can do to get out of it.” He is the author of his own undoing.

But...it's a wild world we live in, and anything can happen in politics.

What The Obamas Learned in Church

Michelle Obama stunned us with her bombshell statement in Wisconsin on February 19, though it was not the first time she expressed the sentiment.

What we have learned over this year is that hope is making a comeback. It is making a comeback. And let me tell you something -- for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country. And not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change. And I have been desperate to see our country moving in that direction and just not feeling so alone in my frustration and disappointment. I've seen people who are hungry to be unified around some basic common issues, and it's made me proud.

We puzzled over how she could forget or dismiss all the good for which this country stands, the good that has happened in this country and happens every day, and that this country has brought to the nations of the world over that past 30 years, i.e. over the course of her "adult lifetime."

We have recently discovered the plausible source for these views, however: the America-hating, race-centered victimology-posing-as-theology that is the crowd pleasing demagoguery preached up at Obamas' church where they have been attending for twenty years--Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Consider these fiery arrows let loose from the pulpit to a cheering and even back slapping congregation by the church's long time preacher, Jeremiah Wright. The video from which I draw these proclamations has itself drawn from sermons delivered on several different occasions. I offer these transcriptions largely without editorial comment, though I have arranged them thematically.

U.S. Imperialism and 9/11

• "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into out own front yard. America's chickens are comin' home to roost!"
• "We cannot see how what he are doing is the same thing as al-Qaeda is doing under a different colored flag, calling on the name of a different God to sanction and approve our murder..."

Race and 9/11

• "Yes, 9-11-01 happened to us. And so did slavery happen to us. Yes, the World Trade Center happened to us. And so did white supremacy happen to us. Yes, the Pentagon happened to us. And so did the Tuskegee Experiment happen to us. Yes, Shanklin Pennsylvania [he means Shanksville] happened to us. And so did the Sharpeville Massacre happen to us [actually to black South Africans in South Africa in 1960]. A government sponsored religiosity makes you suffer from amnesia."

Race

• "White America" he calls "US of KKKA."
• "We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. We believe God ordained African slavery. We believe God makes Europeans superior to Africans and superior to everybody else."
• "Black men turning on black men. That is fighting the wrong enemy. You both are the primary targets of an oppressive society that sees both of you as a dangerous threat."
• "Oh, I am so glad that I got a God who knows what it is to be a poor black man in a country and a culture that is controlled by and run by rich white people."
• "Barack Obama knows what it is like to be a black man living in a country controlled by rich white people."
• "...gives them drugs, build bigger prisons, passes a three strike law, and then wants us to sing "God Bless America?" No, no, no! Not God bless America...God damn America. That's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she tries to act like she is God and she is supreme."

He Doesn't See the Irony...

• "He taught me, Jesus did, how to love my enemies. Jesus taught me how to love the hell out of my enemies and not be reduced to their level of hatred and bigotry and small mindedness."

The Preacher Behind Obama’s "Change" and "Hope?"

• "We have got to change the way we have been doing things as an arrogant, racist, military superpower."
• "Hillary ain't never had her own people say she wadn't white enough! Jesus had his own people siding with the enemy! [Remember, Wright claims Jesus was black.] That's why I love Jesus, y'all. He never let their hatred dampen his hope." (Rich Lowry reports in "The Dishonesty of Hope" that the first sermon Barack Obama heard from Wright was entitled "The Audacity of Hope--later, the title of Obama's book--was a diatribe against "white folks' greed" and had a formative influence upon the young Obama.)

Notice that when describing America as "a country controlled by rich white people" he makes no distinction between rich white Republicans and rich white Democrats, between Republican and Democratic administrations or between Republican and Democratic controlled legislatures. Whether it's one or the other, it's all just the U S of KKKA.

In a separate video, Wright claims, in an especially vulgar reference to Monica Lewinsky, that President Bill Clinton betrayed the confidence of the black community. "Bill did us just like he did Monica Lewinsky." He then makes lewd gyrating motions and puffing sounds right there in the pulpit!

How many other black political leaders have been fed on this sort of rhetoric that passes for spiritual counsel? How many other black churches are preaching up this stuff? If we are concerned about the radical Muslim teachings at certain Mosques and madrassas, why should we not be concerned about this?

Michelle Obama, Stating the Obvious

So, at age 44, Michelle Obama has finally seen something that makes her proud of her country. I'm sure the dust up this is causing is a complete surprise to her; she was relaxed, in her groove, among friends and admirers when she launched into what to her was surely an unexeptionable riff. To the left-leaning audiences she is used to, the notions that America should be spelled Amerika; that Americans are deservedly hated and looked down upon by the rest of the world; that America is the source of all conflict, poverty, and inequality; that our basic culture as a country is racist, sexist, phalleocentric, homophobic, colonialist, imperialist, and worst of all, Christian; that if all those gun-toting tobacco-chewing slack-jawed stump-toothed snake-handling fundamentalists out there in fly over country could just be, you know, silenced, we could move forward and not be so embarrassed in front of our European exemplars; these are among the tacitly held commonplaces that make her candid statement that after all, there is something that is able to redeem this disgrace, this Bushitler wasteland of backwardness and darkness, not seem out of place at all.

And what is it that can redeem such a pathetic wasteland, that allows her to admit, for the first time, she is proud of her country? Why, that people--at least the moth-like creatures drawn to the porchlight eminations of the Obamas--are hoping again! Hope has made a comeback, she says, in the form of the One Who Would Come--and the people are getting it! That is what makes her proud--all the little people out there have been able, with the help of the mesmerizing powers of the Second Coming of JFK (or is it MLK?), to rouse themselves and dare to place their hope in...Him!

The Obama campaign theme--The Audacity of Hope--has been given a new meaning I think.

Obama Offers Civil Religion on Steroids

In this election cycle, religion is showing up in novel and surprising ways. We have seen religion playing a prominent role since Evangelicals broke their isolation in the late 1970s. Since then, we have seen the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, Preacher Pat for President and, on the Democratic side, Reverends Jackson and Sharpton. In the campaign for 2008, we have a Baptist minister advertising his “Christian leadership” as he surges ahead in Iowa, and even Hillary Clinton (amazing grace!) has found religion.

Barack Obama is employing religion in an especially interesting way. Rather than invoking the Savior or pointing to Him, the junior Senator from Illinois is claiming to be the Savior…or at least supporters who are intimately close to him are doing so.

It seems that Obama may be transforming from a man of faith into an object of faith. In his column today, “Obama the Messianic” (The New York Post is more aptly titled “Oprah the Apostle”), Rich Lowry observes Oprah’s anointing of Sen. Obama as what she called “the one” who was to come. You can view the video here or at BarakObama.com.

In a her long introduction to the candidate before a packed South Carolina stadium, Oprah Winfrey said, "We need politicians who know how to tell the truth. But more important, we need politicians who know how to be the truth." (The emphasis was hers.) Barack Obama, a professing Christian (though his Evangelical orthodoxy is at least open to question, such that even David Brooks can see it), is surely familiar with Jesus' messianic claim to divinity, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6).

Michelle Obama seems to be following this Messianic theme (I have not been able to locate the source): "We need a leader who is going to touch our souls, who's going to make us feel differently about one another." Of course, Jesus does that. It's called spiritual regeneration -- being born again. To Michelle, Obama is the Life. To Oprah, he is the Truth.

What does the prophet Barack say? In a South Carolina church a few weeks ago, he said that, through the new politics that he will bring, we will "create a kingdom right here on earth." Did the congregation gasp as they should have? I doubt it.

The American Revolution was, as Martin Diamond put it, one of "sober expectations." It recognized the sinful depravity of man and designed a constitution that could bring out the best in us and manage the worst in us. It was the French Revolution that promised "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité," a Republic of Virtue. Obama's rhetoric, and that which he is condoning, places him in the radical French tradition which led of course to the Terror and to Napoleon's tyranny. Excessive expectations for what is possible to achieve through politics always do. Hillary Clinton is more practically political, less inspiring, and even more selfish, and in those respects -- believe it or not -- she is a safer candidate.

A previous reflection on the longings of the soul and immoderate politics, "Community and the Longing Soul," is relevant here.

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Oprah then suggests that Obama is perhaps not a god or a person within the Godhead, but rather a more highly evolved form of our species. "We are here to evolve to a higher plane. And the reason I love Barack Obama is because [sic.] he is an evolved leader who can bring evolved leadership to this country."

In the immediately preceding statement, Oprah claimed that Obama would not only love our country, but also love our enemies. "All human hearts are the same. Every mother losing her son in every country feels the same." This simply repeats the peacenik arguments from the 1980s that, because "the Russians love their children too," there is actually no threat of war coming from the Soviet Union. They skipped over the fact that even that argument depended upon maintaining credible nuclear and conventional threats. Oprah's own argument does not, of course, account for the women who have supported their children in their suicide bombings. Nor does it account for the little influence that tender hearted women have in our enemy nations. But not to dwell too long on an entertainer's silly remark.

She then adds that, "We need a president who cares about our friends and also cares about our enemies." Does Senator Obama stand behind this statement? Does he propose that, when he is President, he will be above politics, above the America-world distinction, the friends-enemies distinction? Would he see himself as representing not just American interests, but in some way the worldwide common good? Does he understand that there are irreconcilable conflicts between national interests or between various local aspirations? He is so unseasoned, and he presents himself as being so idealistic, that I would take nothing for granted.