It’s not often I have money-making advice for Mike Bloomberg, but here’s a suggestion: You could improve the ratings of Bloomberg Radio/TV by finding one or two conservatives to spice up the conversation, as Joe Kernen and Rick Santelli do on CNBC. Some spirited disagreement would elevate both the entertainment value and the intellectual level. We might even occasionally hear the words “Obamacare” and “structural unemployment” in the same sentence. Right now, Bloomberg TV’s notion of political diversity is to balance a Manhattan liberal from the upper west side with a Manhattan liberal from the lower east side—perhaps leavened with a couple of West Coast liberals. It gets kind of boring . . . . except when the on-air liberals have to contend with – eeek – a real, live conservative.
A case in point is “The Hays Advantage” with Kathleen Hays and Vonnie Quinn. Much to their credit, they invited as a guest the WSJ’s Jason Riley, to talk about his new book Please Stop Helping Us. Riley—did I mention he’s black!—argues liberals are doing far more harm than good by “helping” blacks with supposedly well-intentioned measures like affirmative action and raising the minimum wage. These initiatives harm the average black person while empowering paternalistic liberal elites that pretend to be protecting downtrodden blacks from racist conservatives—despite the manifest failure of liberal policies to improve the lot of poor blacks. Because they find this anti-racist posturing so personally satisfying and politically expedient, Riley argued, liberals try to destroy any black opponent of racial paternalism by labeling them an “Uncle Tom.” Which is why Riley was very courageous to write the book.
Riley told Hays and Quinn that what poor blacks need to get ahead is not more “help” from liberal elites but, rather, embracing traditional habits of self-help – finish school, get a job, get married, take care of your kids, save some money. Too many blacks dismiss such behavior, Riley said more than once, as “acting white.”
Alarm bells sounded in the liberal brains of Hays and Quinn. Despite their best efforts to play it cool, you could hear the consternation and confusion in their voices as they probed and challenged this wayward black conservative. “Aren’t the behaviors you describe also characteristic of other poor people?” Quinn wanted to know. Late in the interview, Kathleen Hays asked the standard liberal question: “What should Washington do?” To which Riley answered “Stop! Stop trying to help us.” What blacks need is self-help, not help.
Riley ended with a searing indictment of liberals’ cynical opposition to school choice: “President Obama has never found a public school good enough for his own children, not before he was president, not since he became president. Yet since the day he entered the oval office, he has been trying to shut down school voucher programs right there in Washington DC that would give the black poor the same educational options that his own children have.”
You don’t hear conservative common sense like that on Bloomberg very often.
Copyright Thomas Doerflinger 2014. All Rights Reserved.
