Crime

President Barack Obama recently went to Chicago to promote his poverty and gun violence initiatives and actually spoke a good deal of truth. “There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families, which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood,” he said. Reiterating a line from his State of the Union speech, he observed: “What makes you a man is not the ability to make a child; it’s the courage to raise one.” And though he paid the obligatory tribute to single mothers, he added with remarkable candor: “I wish I had had a father who was around and involved.” 

What Obama didn’t say also came as a relief. In the worst of all possible worlds, he could have trotted out hackneyed poverty and racism themes from the academy—that biased law enforcement and an “epidemic” of incarceration, for example, are harming what would otherwise be law-abiding inner-city communities. Unfortunately, the president’s deputies are pursuing policies informed by such ideas behind the scenes, but at least Obama is not putting the power of the presidential bully pulpit behind them. 

Had Obama left it at that, he would have made an important contribution to public discourse. But though he rightly recognized the distinction between civil society and government (“When a child opens fire on another child, there is a hole in that child’s heart that government can’t fill”), he came to Chicago bristling with big government programs that threaten to cancel out his personal responsibility theme. The administration is promoting an initiative called “Promise Zones,” based on a concept that has been endlessly flogged by liberal foundations: that if we can just form “collaboratives” to coordinate the existing morass of taxpayer-funded social service agencies and programs, we will achieve a breakthrough in the self-defeating behaviors that cause poverty today. The Ford Foundation’s Grey Areas program in New Haven in the 1960s was a progenitor of this idea (and the seedbed for the War on Poverty); more recently the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s New Futures collaborative bombed spectacularly. 

Paradoxically, streamlining social service delivery requires adding yet more agencies to the existing mix: The Promise Zones project will involve, inter alia, the U.S. Departments of Justice, Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Education, and Housing and Urban Development. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, explained the Promise Zones idea to the New York Times: “The premise behind this is that the federal government has to be a positive actor in all of this effort—but as an actor who’s a partner.” Got that? A “partner,” not just an “actor.” 

Actually, Promise Zones are not even new to the Obama administration. Since 2010, the Department of Education has doled out nearly $100 million to “Promise Neighborhoods” (almost the same thing as Promise Zones) in over 50 cities. Not surprisingly, the administration is mum about the results. 

The Promise Zones will also give out tax and regulatory breaks to encourage businesses to locate in distressed areas. While it is always gratifying to see liberals acknowledge, however fleetingly, that lower taxes and less onerous regulations are good for economic activity, lower taxes alone do not overcome the disincentive to locate a business in a crime-plagued area. 

Obama’s other announced antipoverty initiatives—such as raising the minimum wage and providing universal preschool education—are progressive evergreens whose efficacy is deeply contested, to say the least. But the biggest disappointment in the president’s agenda is his unwillingness to move the debate on gun violence beyond the stale polarities of gun control and gun rights. The fact that he chose Chicago as the site for his speech was a tip-off that he would be breaking no new ground. 

In campaign remarks yesterday at the Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago, Illinois, President Barack Obama praised his adopted city, where he lived before becoming president of the United States. "Chicago is an example of what makes this country great," Obama said. His audience applauded. 

Books in Brief

No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times by Dorothy Rabinowitz (Free Press, 256 pp., $25). The term "witch hunt" has been used so often--and so inaccurately--that one automatically mistrusts it these days. Yet one recent set of events does bear a striking resemblance to the Salem trials: the hysteria over sexual abuse of children in day-care centers that frenzied the nation in the late 1980s and early 1990s.