The 2014 Democratic campaign for urban hegemony is now
officially underway.
It will involve the usual tousle among Democrats for
political prestige and power in Connecticut’s larger cities. During his first
campaign for governor, then Mayor of Stamford Dan Malloy – on becoming
governor, Dan requested that the media refer to him henceforward as Dannel --
easily captured the urban vote and slid past Republican gubernatorial nominee
Tom Foley by the slenderest of margins. Mr. Malloy, once again in his
reelection contest, may face Mr. Foley -- or some other worthy Republican
champion; State Senator John McKinney has announced and Danbury Mayor Mark
Boughton is teasing from the sidelines -- and the remembrance of slender
margins past has caused some wonderment among the state’s left of center media
concerning Mr. Malloy’s recent campaign endorsements.
A Hartford newspaper has wondered aloud editorially whether
it is politically prudent for the governor to pick winners and losers in urban
primaries. Mr. Malloy recently traveled to New Haven to offer a ringing
endorsement of Toni Harp as mayor, even though it had been widely reported that
Ms. Harp’s now deceased husband is the city’s most celebrated tax
scofflaw. Most recently, the former
mayor of Stamford publicly rejected the mayoralty choice of Stamford’s
Democratic Town Committee by endorsing a non-party endorsed candidate. People took notice. This is not the way to gain
friends and influence Democrats in Stamford. Then too, the governor’s primary
endorsements feed the growing apprehension that Mr. Malloy just can’t restrain
himself from upsetting apple carts and sticking his thumb in every warm pie.
The Connecticut Republican Party, unfortunately, has
withered away in the state’s larger cities. Urban populations, fleeing urban
problems, have left behind a minority residue wholly at the mercy of a party
that has made no serious attempt to drive people at the economic margins of
society into jobs and social configurations that would not leave them at the
mercy of urban gangs and ubiquitous social service agencies. President Bill Clinton’s noble attempt to “end welfare as we know it” has in recent times suffered a perhaps irreversible decline under an
increasingly progressive regime. Any attempt seriously to address the issue of
social disintegration in cities – fatherless families or single parent families
locked into a ridged and unalterable social service structure -- is hooted down
as an indication of racist bias.
Republicans in Connecticut are so fearful of being thus
tainted that they have simply surrendered the “social issues” front to Democrats who, especially in cities, are
finding it more and more difficult to quiet a restive population that wants
what Martin Luther King said it wanted half a century ago – their piece of the
American dream. Among African Americans in cities, fifty years after the “I
Have A Dream” speech in Washington D.C., the traditional African American
family, robustly restored in Northern cities after the Civil War, is now a
byword.
The decimation of the African American family has
accelerated at a rapid pace from the 1960s forward. The statistics are too
astonishing to be any longer ignored.
The most recent Urban Institute Report finds that
17 percent of African-American children lived in a home with their mother but
not their father in 1950. By 2010, the number had increased to 50 percent. Out
of wedlock childbirths from 1965 to 2010 increased from 8 to 41 percent; the
figure today has risen to an astonishing 72 percent. In 1950, the number of
African American women married and living with their spouses was 53 percent.
That figure has been reduced today to 25 percent.
Many of these figures have been in the public domain since
1965, when then Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York released “The
Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”
The recent Urban Institute report updates the figures to 2010. The
Moynihan report is not dated in its principal conclusion: “…at the heart of the deterioration of the
fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the
fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”
There is a Berlin Wall of silence surrounding these figures
– and others: On average, 1,876 black babies are aborted every day in the
United States, and black women, according to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, are
more than 5 times as likely as white women to have an abortion; African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times
the rate of whites. The
conclusion that Mr. Moynihan has drawn in his earlier report is no less
pertinent today than it was in 1965, two years after Martin Luther King had let
loose his thunderclap before the Lincoln Memorial.
These figures, it may safely be predicted, will play NO part
in any urban election in Connecticut – none. If you know what the problem is,
hard solutions offer themselves. But politically, any effective remedy that
disturbs the status quo causes a tighter breathing and chills the bones of
politicians to zero. The road to Hell, as Martin Luther King well knew, is
paved with cowardice; only courage can set you free.
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