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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (57319)	10/19/2012 6:03:05 AM
From: Hope Praytochange	1 Recommendation Respond to of 71588

Obama Hope Not There On Jobs, Crime, Race, National Security Society: Four years ago, candidate Barack Obama asked Americans "to listen not to your doubts or your fears, but to your greatest hopes." Today, on jobs, crime, race and national security, hope is hard to find. The president's best-selling book, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream," takes its title from a sermon by the president's virulently anti-American pastor, Jeremiah Wright. When you're "scarred and bruised and bleeding," Wright said, God wants you to take what "you have left and to have the audacity to hope." But now that Wright's best-known disciple has been president for nearly four years, it's American society that is "scarred and bruised and bleeding," with the hope Obama promised hard to find. After a reported drop in unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8% that was too well-timed before the election to be believed, raising questions of statistical skewing, the Labor Department on Thursday announced a 46,000 jump in weekly unemployment claims, which now total 388,000 — the highest in four months. The Congressional Research Service just reported that the federal government's spending on welfare has risen 32% over the last four years, reaching over $1 trillion. Welfare is now the biggest item in the budget, with much of its growth the result of Obama's stimulus and his expansion of welfare eligibility. The fattening of welfare is symptomatic of government spending out of control. The Weekly Standard's Jeffrey Anderson looked at Treasury's latest statement of receipts and outlays and found that under Obama, "for every $7 we've had, we've spent nearly $11." But lack of hope goes beyond government dependency and the economy. The Bureau of Justice Statistics on Wednesday reported that violent crime was up an unexpected 18% last year, the first rise in nearly two decades. Assaults increased by 22%, with a million more of them last year than the year before. Crime involving property rose for first time in 10 years. As the "Broken Windows" work of social scientists James Q. Wilson and George Kelling shows, increases in such less-serious crimes can lead to the growth of more serious, life-threatening criminal activity. Well, at least we have our first black president, and that gives long-suffering black Americans a boost and improves race relations, right? Not so fast. A new study by Washington University in St. Louis finds that the hopes many blacks felt at Barack Obama's election in 2008 have greatly faded in the years since. James L. Gibson, the Sidney W. Souers Professor of Government and professor of African and African-American studies at the university, conducted the study utilizing national surveys from 2005 to 2011. Gibson found that by last year, the election of Obama having worn off in their minds, many black Americans felt less free. In 2009, 71% of blacks felt "as free as they used to," but in 2010 it fell to 67% and by 2011 it was down to 56%. "The election of a black American to the U.S. presidency did seem to empower African Americans, causing an increase in levels of perceived freedom," according to Gibson. "But that increase seems to have been epiphenomenal, with perceived levels of freedom after 2009 soon reverting to their prior level. The boost in empowerment that earlier research has documented may be of little long-term consequence." In other words, the hope and change Obama offered turned out to be a sugar rush, the reality of his failed economic policies revealing that it was all just rhetoric