Support for President Barack Obama has plummeted dramatically among white males. It’s reached the point that not only is Democratic control of the Congress threatened, but Obama’s chances of re-election in 2012 are slipping, as well.
In the 2008 presidential election, 41% of white men voted for Obama, an accomplishment Democrats had not been able to brag about for three decades. But now, only 35% of white men (compared to 43% of white women) say they plan to vote for Mr. Obama in November. That 6-point shift translates into 3.5 million additional male voters who say they will flee the Democratic fold on November 2.
That’s exactly what happened last January in Massachusetts, where 60% of white men voted for Senate candidate Scott Brown, swamping the 52% advantage that Democrat Martha Coakley garnered among white women.
That stunning upset underscored a lesson that continues to elude many politicians: in most elections, white males are the kingmaker. As David Kuhn notes in The Neglected Voter: White Men and the Democratic Dilemma, “No factor has been more instrumental in causing the Democratic decline in presidential politics than the loss of white men.â€Â
And why not white women? Despite their slight numerical advantage, the white female vote tends to split between the two political parties, casting men as the tie-breakers.
White male disenchantment with Mr. Obama does not stem solely from his Administration’s head-long rush to socialism. The other reason is that Barack Obama, income-redistributor-in-chief, set out from the very beginning to knock down men a few pegs.
It started before the inauguration, when the Department of Labor posted a study showing the gender wage gap reflects differences in women’s work preferences, not sexism. That report was removed before it could cause any embarrassment: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/090312
Shortly after that, Obama announced the establishment of the White House Council on Women and Girls, an Orwellian gesture in light of the fact that boys are now lagging in nearly every respect: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/090322
There was the meat-headed Homeland Security report that smeared whites as racists because they allegedly had “capitalized on related racial and political prejudices in expanded propaganda campaigns.â€Â
Then the June 26 hiring of Lynn Rosenthal as Obama’s domestic violence czar. As we know, the domestic violence boogeyman is one of liberals’ favorite flogging sticks to stigmatize men as abusers, break up families, and make women dependent on the state.
Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor (“I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.â€Â) to the Supreme Court didn’t set too well with the blue-collar lads, either.
But Obama’s greatest blunder came when he set out to rig the economic stimulus package.
During the previous year, 8 out of 10 workers forced onto the unemployment rolls were men, inspiring the new term, “he-cession.†But when the green velvet curtain was pulled aside, the $878 billion package short-changed the manufacturing and construction industries that employ mostly men, while favoring female-dominated fields like social work and teaching: http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/roberts/090723
Hardly the shovel-ready formula that’s needed to repair and restore America’s decaying infrastructure.
And if men still haven’t taken the hint, Barack Obama has gone out of his way to berate fathers as callow and irresponsible.
In his 2008 Father’s Day message, he hectored Black fathers who had been driven from their homes by false allegations of abuse, accusing them as “acting like boys instead of men.â€Â
A year later he wagged his presidential finger, saying “We need fathers to step up,†ignoring how crushing child support payments have forced millions of low-income dads underground.
And pining for the day when men would do housework instead of taking home overtime pay, Obama stated in an NBC interview that men “need to be knocked across the head every once in a while.â€Â
Conservative leader Phyllis Schlafly has opined that the true agenda that underpins the Obama Administration is to “make men, husbands, and fathers irrelevant as family providers.†That’s why Barack Obama may be on track to a one-term presidency.
