'To Heck and Back' Obama's model for America: Detroit.

We've heard that before. Sixteen years ago, when we were an editor at City Journal, we worked on an article by Julia Vitullo-Martin titled "Detroit Fights Back." "No American city ever fell as far or as fast as Detroit," Vitullo-Martin began. "But now Detroit is poised for a comeback. Every signal--economic, political, social--is positive." One hopeful development was the retirement of five-term mayor Coleman Young, whose tenure had proved disastrous....

[Obama] parachuted into this city's sanitized, heavily-securitized [sic] downtown square-mile of corporate headquarters and Whole Foods markets - safe from the murderous streets of the city's other 138 square miles that have claimed 250 lives already this year and put Detroit on path for a staggering 50 per 100,000 residents murder rate in 2011....

Meanwhile, Coleman Young, who had been a civil rights hero, deliberately accelerated his city's decline:

Middle-class citizens, white and black, sought the lower taxes and better services available right across Eight Mile Road, Detroit's northern border. White flight escalated again during the court-ordered school busing efforts of the seventies. Mayor Young antagonized whites further by promoting a confrontational stance toward the suburbs--a stance that allowed him to consolidate his political base by fanning the resentments of an increasingly black Detroit. . . .

Many white Detroit business people, unwilling to be quoted by name, look back on the Young years with particular bitterness. Says one, who left the city in 1982: "Coleman was a racist, and he made it clear that white businesses were unwelcome, which meant to me that we would go unprotected. We could get robbed, burned out, preyed upon by city inspectors, and Coleman wouldn't do anything. He encouraged attacks on us. There was absolutely no reason--not a one--to stay in Detroit."

I think you're dead on. Here is a blast from the past,

Barack Obama will be America’s first urban president, and it’s likely the decision he made as a young man about where to reside will show up in ways large and small during his White House years.

Let’s be clear: Urban is not meant as a euphemism for black or liberal, although the president-elect is both.

Mr. Obama is a city guy — not a suburban or rural person — somewhat by upbringing, but more by choice as an adult who could live anywhere. As such, he sees the world through a different prism than those presidents who came from more suburban or rural locales.

“He chose an environment where he came face-to-face with issues that people who live in the suburbs don’t know or think about,” says Bill Frey, a Brookings Institution demographer.

Mr. Obama made the choice for an urban lifestyle when he became a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago. That decision set him apart from most of his countrymen, only about 20% of whom live in the big cities.
http://blogs.wsj.com/capitaljournal/2008/11/23/barack-obama-america%E2%80%99s-first-urban-president/

That's always been in the back of my mind when thinking about Obama and how America reacts to him. It's not that he's black or white. It's that he's urban. He thinks urban. He thinks in terms of things like rent control, smog limits, renovation permits and parking permits. In the cities they are right on top of each other and anything one person does affects another. In the more rural areas, we really don't care what our neighbors do.

He thinks it's normal for people to ask for permission to do anything. We think he's nuts. He just doesn't get normal economic activity because he has a city mindset where stuff just comes (magically) to the city. Where does milk come from? The milk jug! Where does electricity come from? That little plastic thingy on the wall!

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