Of Course Democrats Deserve the Blame for What’s Happening in Baltimore

If a person happens to point out that Baltimore’s criminally inept government has been run exclusively by Democrats since 1967 (with one Republican mayor since 1947) and features not a single city councilor who isn’t a liberal, he may be called a lazy apparatchik. Because not everything, you see, is reducible to mere party politics.

Now, if an economic renaissance sparked by the progressive policies of Stephanie Rawlings-Blake had lifted Baltimore from poverty, I imagine Democrats would be eager to claim credit for the accomplishment. Entire political debates are predicated on the effectiveness of partisan ideas. We blame presidents for recessions they probably have little to do with, yet according to liberal pundits, the party overseeing a city riddled with poverty, failing schools, high crime rates and racial tension bears no responsibility for what’s happening.

The president disagrees. Sort of. After a night of violence and looting in Baltimore, Barack Obama spoke to the press and said that “we, as a country, have to do some soul-searching” — by which he meant “they,” as in conservatives, need to get on board.

Obama said that solutions to mend Baltimore’s suffering are sitting right there in Washington — unpassed because of ideologically inflexible Republicans. “And there’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now,” Obama claimed before going on: “Now, I’m under no illusion that out of this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities, and so we’ll try to find areas where we can make a difference, around school reform and around job training and around some investments in infrastructure in these communities and trying to attract new businesses in.”

What piece of legislation have Republicans obstructed that would have helped keep families together in Baltimore — right now? Which proposal would have created jobs to turn the city around? What law has Obama lobbied for that would have made Baltimore’s police department — which has been answering to one party for decades — more compassionate or effective? Is there a criminal-justice reform effort that Obama’s been spearheading all these years that we’ve all forgotten about?

Yes, the war on drugs is a disaster. But Democrats are complicit in that war, too. And Democrats are also in charge of a city school system that has huge failure rates, despite the fact that Baltimore’s school district also has consistently ranked in the top five among the nation’s 100 largest school districts in spending per pupil. Like most big city districts, there is no accountability. It’s Democrats who consistently sink conservative education reform ideas (ones that in many cities are popular among African-American parents) for their union patrons.

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