Barack O’Cosby
Considering as how Obama already has the black vote wrapped up, and motivated to appear in force, this sounds, to this cynic’s ear, like an appeal to white America.
A Sister Souljah moment, if you will pardon the cliche’.
Bill Cosby raised the ire of many in the black community when he started his one-man crusade against all the social ills of black folk. Deserved? Yes, in that he gave every appearance of leading with his ego and had so little to say about the underlying issues that give rise to these social ills. No, in that his message had some truth to it. There are some Bad Things going on in the black community and Something Needs To Be Done About It. I don’t think that Something is to shove a sock in the mouths of mainstream music artists who portray the ills of that culture along with every other teenage obsession.
From the article text - that is, not from BO himself:
The Democratic presidential hopeful noted that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households, making them five times more likely to live in poverty and 20 times more likely to end up in prison.
I fear the staff writer has confused cause and effect to a degree here. Of course, as with any cyclical feedback phenomenon, cause and effect are sometimes hard to distinguish. Nevertheless, one hopes that Barack Obama can correctly distinguish the stronger forcing in that cycle. And, of course, that he is sincere in the first place.
Obama turned me off long ago with his Fatherhood talk (I’m from Illinois). It’s not so much an appeal to whites (I used to think that was the case) but a topic he latches onto to avoid talking about tough stuff like the many problems facing Illinois and our political corruption… so we just get this stuff on Fatherhood and defenses on smears few make and no one really cares about…anything but Tony Rezko, our looming impeachment of our Gov Blagojevich…anything but real politics.