White House distances itself from Bennett

September 30, 2005

Apparently, even the White House isn’t willing to stand behind Bill Bennett’s recent remarks on black abortions lowering the crime rate.

The White House on Friday criticized former Education Secretary William Bennett for remarks linking the crime rate and the abortion of black babies.

“The president believes the comments were not appropriate,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said.

It takes quite a bit for the Bush gang to criticize, even subtly, one of their close allies, so this is a pleasant surprise.

Bennett, meanwhile, has presented a defense.

In a radio broadcast on Thursday, Mr. Bennett called the criticism of him “ridiculous, stupid, totally without merit” and said his critics had taken his comments out of context.

“I was pointing out that abortion should not be opposed for economic reasons, any more than racism or for that matter slavery or segregation should be supported or opposed for economic reasons,” he said. “Immoral policies are wrong because they are wrong, not because of an economic calculation. One could just as easily have said you could abort all children and prevent all crime, to show the absurdity of the proposition.”

This is only partially true. Obviously, the context shows that Bennett was not suggesting a social-policy prescription. In other words, this isn’t a case in which Bennett literally recommended lowering the crime rate through black abortions.

But the defense, predictably, misses the point.

Consider Bennett’s quote again.

“…I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”

Bennett’s allies are emphasizing the latter point — about this being reprehensible — to argue that he’s been taken out of context. But the context is bad enough. His point was that reducing the number of African-American children would necessarily reduce the rate at which crimes are committed. Or, in equation form, more black people = more crime.

The point about whether Bennett finds abortion reprehensible is entirely irrelevant.

I detest Bennett, but I really think he is getting a bum wrap on this. In the longer recording I heard yesterday Bennett made reference to the book Freakanomics.

The book argues, somewhat compellingly if you read the underlying data as well as the popular account, that legalized abortion has had a major impact on the crime rate. A much bigger impact, in fact, that many actions normally trumpeted, like tougher sentancing, etc. There is no claim of racial predisposition to crime, just socio economic factors.

Bennett responded to an absurd claim with an absurd claim. He stated that he was being absurd to make a point, and took pains to point out that it was not just absurd, but evil. He put it in some context, but *gasp*, did not filter it though politically correct BS. If he had said ‘poor’ instead of “black”, the uproar would have been less.

But, for all our chest thumping about George Bush foresaking the residents of NOLA, the fact remains that the seriously underpreviledged in this country ARE disproportionately black. We can pat ourselves on the back and talk about how smugly superior we are to the turd brain and his cronies in the WH, but the fact remains that this is OUR problem.

Beating up on a self absorbed snob like Bennett does not change the terrible fact that, for all intents and purposes, ‘black’ is a synomym for hardship and povertyh in this country. IE, the real thing we should be discussing isn’t that Bennet was outrageous, but that he was essentially accurate, and we should all be ashamed.

-jjf

  • To borrow an old and cynical phrase, a political faux pas is when a politician tells to truth about their beliefs. Bennett simply slipped off his mask for a few moments and revealed the ugly hate-filled pus-bag beneath. Sort of like an alien in human form — the beast is still there, just waiting to devour us.

    Bennett is just like the rest of the Rethugs currently destroying our middle class, the country, and the planet. Just one more thug who can’t tell the truth except by mistake.

  • They’re all closet bigots.

    That’s why most voted for Reagan in the first place and the second place, and King Bush the 1st in the 3rd place, etc…. etc….. etc…..

  • The racist argument: More black people equals more crime.
    The liberal argument: More poor people–with little hope– equals more crime. Therefore, fight crime by fighting poverty.

  • Bennett is a dope, but this is getting spun around into something different. He was on a call in show and some ridiculous caller started this hypothesizing, yes based on some interesting trend correlations from Freakanomics, and now it’s being reported as some sort of position he’s advocating. Part of hypothesizing is using all or nothing circumstances to refute a position, and this is what he was doing and got caught when people play the one line. If you try to use it against him, you’ll look dumb too, don’t bother.

    What he’s trying to postulate is that you shouldn’t use trend correlations to dictate policy, because if you advocate on that you could end up with some truly preposterous results.

    What is interesting to me here is that the White House is even bothering to comment on it and that they’re doing it quickly and vigorously. McClellan should of just said, “the president doesn’t comment on talk-radio subjects like this, he’s got more important things on his plate right now.” They must be off their game, or more likely, they never had a game to begin with. And compared to the response they gave to Robertson’s calling for Chavez’s assasination, the context of them responding to their own nutzoids is a topic on itself.

  • Oh God (which doesn’t exist and of whom we’re all the chosen people) ! I end up defending a Republican, again! The Apocalypse must be nigh or something…

    I agree with Fitz and also with
    Brad DeLong    . Bill Bennett effed’up not by being racist but by doing something you should never do, a reductio ad absurdum argument on talk radio. Problems with those is that wording has to be carefully crafted otherwise you end up sounding like you’re endorsing the very thing you denounce. DeLong explains it much better than I would so go read his post. But to summarize, take the last sentence:

    That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.

    And swap the two statements around the but:

    Your crime rate would go down but that would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do.

    The latest is 100% ok and is what any vaguely sane person would WRITE, given enough time to proof read oneself. The 2 sentences are logically equivalent but they clearly don’t sound the same at all. So, reductio ad absurdum argument is just fine in an article but not in the instant of a verbal exchange, when you’re prone to eff’up.

    Moreover and to cloture my, gasp, defense of Bennett, his response is consistent with his long held positions: abortion must be opposed because it is immoral (in his view). It’s a moral belief, absolute and not an empirical position. Not because it may cause pain to the fetus, or it causes breast cancer (or whatever BS anti-choices spew), nor because it’s icky or because it empowers women. In Bennett’s world, it’s wrong because it’s wrong.

    So a utilitarian defense of his position (what the caller was proposing) is as wrong and abhorrent in his view as a utilitarian justification of abortion. Accepting the utilitarian argument would defeat his whole view: abortion is not an issue open to discussion but a matter of Fundamental Right and Wrong (yup, capitalized).

    So it’s always fun to beat the crap out of Bill Bennett but there, errr, no. Not fair.

  • Bennett cannot be defended by saying “He was merely repeating — and even disagreeing with — the conclusion from Freakonomics.” Freakonomics NEVER made the abortion statistical analysis about race. Inserting race into his retelling of the example was a significant Freudian slip that betrays what Bennett apparently feels is truly driving the result discussed in Freakonomics.

    That not so subtle change in the fact pattern is what Bennett is, and rightly should, be called to account for.

  • Why is it Freudian, because it is true?

    Did you actually study the underlying statistcal work and articles, or just read the simple synopsis in Freakanomics? You cannot consider poverty in a meaningful way in this country without seeing that race is the elephant in the room.

    Anyone who thinks that RACE is not intertwined with poverty wasn’t paying very close attention to Hotel Rowanda playing out on the golf coast a few weeks ago.

    This is like Kennedy’s absurd article on vaccine/autism. If you want to stand for something, principle has to be more important than source. Jesse Jackson has openly talked about the link between race and poverty, why can’t Bennett do the same? Just because he is a toad?

    -jjf

  • Bennett can talk about race and poverty, and it would be welcome were it not at a simplistic, stereotyping way. There undoubtedly is a statistical relationship, albeit likely more complex than this discussion has suggested, between race/ethnicity, poverty, and tendency toward crime.

    Freakonomics did not address race in this example (not because the author was afraid of race issues; he did address race in other examples) but because it simply wasn’t pertinent to the point being made at that place in the text.

    My problem with what Bennett did, and why it is telling, is that he (a) obviously was referencing Freakonomics; (b) chose to deviate from that example by adding race as part of the equation; but (c) did so in a way that perpetuates stigmatizing stereotypes. Here is the simple test — even if you find his assertion objectively undeniable (aborting a large number of black fetuses would cause a later drop in crime), isn’t is equally objectively undeniable that aborting a large number of male fetuses, regardless of race, would have the same impact? Aborting a large number of fetuses from white, unwed mothers under age 17 who never finished high school? Aborting a large number of hispanic fetuses?

    The point is that Freakonomics statistically linked abortion – generally – to later crime reduction. I am willing to bet I can cross-tab that data set in teh ways above — by gender, by socioeconomics of the mother, by other races or ethnicities — and get the EXACT SAME RESULT. By suggesting that the Freakonomics result is due to the abortion of black children suggests that blacks (and apparently no one else) are the problem – presumably even upper social class blacks.

    He perpetuated a stereotype that blacks because they are black are more likely to be the crime problem. Like all stereotypes, that is unfair to the group as a class and many many of its members. It is also likely statistically invalid — the better correlation is almost certainly with economic status, not race; the race correlation is a byproduct of the correlation between race and poverty. That sort of blatent, class-based stereotyping is offensive; calling him on it should not be controversial.

  • Fitz, zeitgeist,

    Ok, complicated loaded subject, so I’ll just do a touch’n go on it.

    Bennett and Jackon are both very right and very wrong. Bennett is right when he assumes that there is something wrong with black folks. The black minority is and will remain a high-crime high-poverty section of the population and anti-poverty programs and anti-racism education won’t solve that. And yet, he’s still 100% wrong because he is also a cheap-rent racist and believes that black people have some inherent crime-inducing racial/genetic flaw that justifies discrimination.

    Black are in deep shit not because they are specifically black because they remain a large, clearly identifiable minority within the American population. And that’s where Jackson is deluded with his visions of a peaceful multi-racial society with a distinct African-American community, if only we would put enough efforts in it. It’s hopeless.

    Racial and cultural diversity is by itself a cause of inequality in itself within a society.

    Racism and xenophobia are hard-wired in human nature. It’s down there in the reptilian brain. You can fight that with assistance and education at an individual level but you can’t fight it at a macro level. The most equalitarian societies (and lowest crime rates) are found in very coherent nations, such as Japan or Northern Europe countries. Those are nations where strong public solidarities are best accepted and most consistently sustained because racism and xenophobia can’t find large groups to single out and transform in a crime-prone underclass (*).

    America won’t solve its poverty problems before it sees racial assimilation on a large scale. The right indicator to watch is the rate of inter-racial marriage, not just as a symptom but as a cause. So, that’s where Bennett would go all red in the face. At some level, he is correct but the solution is not to push minorities in a corner but to, literally bring them in the family 🙂

    If liberals want to seriously eradicate poverty, they also have to take stock of human nature, as they did every time they were successful. Racism is human, deal with it. They must drop the multi-culti vulgate and aggressively promote assimilation. No room there for pieties. That’s social engineering on a grand scale. But it’s not morally clear cut. I actually believe some are entitled to call it a “soft genocide”. Otherwise, we need to accept that whatever is done against poverty and racism in America is a band-aid that will need to be mended and patched over and over and over again. Then policies need to be designed to be resilient to regular outburst of society-wide racism and sold to the majority accordingly.

    [* Not to say that racism is not present in those societies. Actually, it can be pretty fierce: Ainu and Korean minorities and some social minorities, Burakumin, Hibakusha, in Japan have a truly shitty lot. But those groups are small enough so racism against them doesn’t tear apart the whole social fabric and determine its politics as it does in America ].

  • The above comments comprise a good and thoughtful discussion. Personally, I think Blowhard Bill is in love with his own voice and yammers so much and so often that he’s bound to say something questionable simply based on sheer volume of blather.

    Having said that, I also think Bill Bennett is walking, talking proof that abortion should remain a legal option.

    Ali

  • I’ve read the context in which Bennett made
    his remark, and agree with those who have said
    the knee jerk reaction of Democrats is not
    warranted. To be sure, Bennett’s example
    is incredibly insensitive, and totally unnecessary
    in order to make his point. He should have
    apologized for using a bad example, then
    explained what he actually meant.

    If only the Democrats would go after the
    policies and corruption of the Bush
    administration with the same zeal they
    are trying to make a case out of this
    faux pas, we might actually gain a yard
    or two on the Republicans, after having
    been slaughtered about 197-0 slightly
    into the third quarter of this regime.

  • “One could just as easily have said you could abort all children and prevent all crime, to show the absurdity of the proposition.”

    Then why didn’t you say that, Bill?

    What those who think Bennett is getting a bum rap are forgetting is that neither Freakanomics nor the caller that Bennett was responding to said anything about race. Bennett could have easily made his point about absurdity without specifying “blacks”.

    Are we to believe that there is a random number generator in Bennett’s head, and when it came time to fill in the blank in the statement “you could abort ___ children”, the number came up for “black” instead of the number for “all”, “poor”, “white”, or “male”?

    It was a gratuitous shot; Bennett knows who his audience is and what scores with them.

  • Zeitgeist:

    First, I’m sorry if my comments above seemed harsh or personal. That was not my intent.

    Second, we can agree that Freakanomics made no explicit reference to race – in the abortion context.

    However, we’ll have to agree-to-disagree about a number of things. First, I would disagree that the book makes, in your words, a “statistical” argument about anything. The book contains virtually no facts and figures and does not even bother with citations or a bibliography. For all the references to science and the importance of questioning conventional wisdom on the book tour, it is essentially Ann Coulter journalism, provacative conclussions without presenting a shred of evidence.

    That is why I asked if you had, in fact, looked at any of the papers and studies that this particular assertion is based on. Contrary to what the book might have led you to believe, the connection between abortion and crime is not a particularly new observation.

    Bill used black as a synomym for disadvantaged and poor. Sure, he is a jerk. Who knows if he is a closet racist? But if anyone is actually interested in the hard numeric facts about poverty, his synomym does not fundementally change the Freakanomics assertion.

    Don’t take my word for it. Try the CDC and the US censor figures (those actually used in the two scholarly papers from the same author). Life expectancy, infant mortality rate, representation in the prison system… We live in two Americas. To me, the sad part is not that Bennett was insensitive, but that we are wasting all this energy chastising him, instead of chastising ourselves. To me, the truth behind the words is a lot more important than the political correctness of them.

    -jjf

  • ” To me, the sad part is not that Bennett was insensitive, but that we are wasting all this energy chastising him, instead of chastising ourselves. To me, the truth behind the words is a lot more important than the political correctness of them.”

    You are right, Fitz, and so am I, to go after the authors
    of the policies which result in the ever increasing
    gulf between rich America, and the several levels
    below. There are not just two Americas. But we
    can’t chastise ourselves, either, because we have
    no control over the policies. The Democrats won’t
    oppose the Republicans in any meaningful way,
    and have abandoned the progressive principles
    for which they once proudly stood.

    I don’t know what the solution is, but it sure as
    hell isn’t going after Bennett.

  • ‘Minister” Louis Farrakhan can openly and vociferously accuse the white race for blowing up a levee in New Orleans, “Reverend” Al Sharpton can without evidence accuse the NYPD of rape and institutional racism and everybody can call the President a murderer without anyone batting an eye, but let a conservative make a reference to a hypothetical, and the world comes to a screeching halt.

    The political left needs to get out more.

  • If we aborted all white babies, the drug use in this country would be almost eliminated. Fair comment? Its’ true, statistics bear it out.
    What white people are in denial about is that they have not loved their neighbor as themselves since they brought black people over from Africa. They have continued to place their guest in peril ever since, by commision & ommision, then ridicule him for his dysfunction.
    Crime occurs equally in both societies, however money & nepotism determines who gets exposed & who doesn’t. What about the O.C. sheriff’s son who gang raped the girls, twice? How’d he get off? again! Which wife killer is hated Robert Blake or OJ? The black man of course. Why is a difference made for one over the other? Stupidity. This nation must repent of its ugly prejucices and hateful bigotries in the name of Jesus.

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