According to a Fox News survey released on Wednesday, Obama’s approval rating stands at 45 percent among all registered voters. However, among black voters, Obama’s job approval soars to 86 percent.
Given Obama’s devastating impact on black Americans, this is even more confounding than the whereabouts of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.
Obama’s election, no doubt, generated considerable ethnic pride. Seeing a black man (or, precisely, a half-black man) inaugurated was a truly exceptional milestone for all Americans — black and otherwise.
But Obama reached the Oval Office nearly five years and four months ago. Since then, his performance should have dimmed his halo among blacks, especially considering how much they have suffered on his watch.
• When Obama entered office on January 20, 2009, U.S. unemployment stood at 7.8 percent. By April 2014, that Bureau of Labor Statistics figure had fallen to 6.3 percent — a modest improvement. Among blacks overall, joblessness dropped, though less significantly — from 12.7 to 11.6 percent. But for blacks aged 16 to 19, unemployment grew from 35.3 to 36.8 percent.
• Obama’s somewhat more sanguine unemployment numbers, such as they are, seem less about job growth and more about people simply abandoning the workforce — whereupon they conveniently exit the unemployment rate. The more revealing labor-force-participation rate thus fell from 65.7 percent in January 2009 to 62.8 percent last month, a portrait of disengagement last witnessed in March 1978. For black adults, that number slipped from 63.2 to 60.9 percent. While 29.6 percent of blacks aged 16 to 19 were working when Obama took power, only 27.9 percent were employed last month.
• Poverty has increased under Obama. Overall, 14.3 percent of Americans were below the poverty line in January 2009, versus 15.0 percent in 2012, according to the latest available data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. Similarly, the share of black Americans living in poverty expanded from 25.8 to 27.2 percent.
• Inflation-adjusted median household income fell across America, from $53,285 in 2009 to $51,017 in 2012, the most recent Census Bureau data indicate. Blacks slid, too, from $34,880 to $33,321 — and at a much lower income level.
• America’s population of food-stamp recipients soared overall from 32,889,000 in 2009 to 46,022,000 in 2012, the latest Agriculture Department statistics show. For blacks, the analogous numbers are 7,393,000 when Obama arrived to 10,955,000 in 2012.
• In spite of $275 billion in housing-market bailouts that Obama unveiled in his first month in office, home ownership actually has waned. In the first quarter of 2009, 67.3 percent of Americans owned homes. By 1Q 2014, that Census Bureau figure was 64.8 percent. Meanwhile, black home ownership during this interval sagged from 46.1 to 43.3 percent.
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In light of this dismal record, about the best that Obama can say to black Americans is, “Nothing personal.” Obama’s focus on resentment and redistribution — rather than robust growth — has failed the entire country, not just black folks.
Also, these sad statistics do not capture the intangible humiliation of watching America’s first black president expose himself as a lazy, incompetent liar. This inescapable truth is confirmed by Obama’s eerily detached demeanor, his& 169 rounds of golf in office, his scores of skipped intelligence briefings, his unforgivable absence from the Situation Room during the Benghazi massacre, and his burgeoning scandals — from Fast and Furious to the IRS’s persecution of conservative groups to the 40 or more war heroes who died without medical care while languishing on secret Veterans Affairs wait lists. And remember, Obama’s oft-repeated “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it” promise was PolitiFact’s 2013 Lie of the Year.
Save for Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who frequently addresses black audiences, few Republicans bother to share these facts with black voters. Republicans should — early and often. These data are toxic, and the GOP’s growth-and-prosperity antidote is just what black Americans need.
Republicans should ask black voters this question: What has Obama done for you lately?
— Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.