Blacks Still Support Obama: Jobs Is High Concern

Black voters, like those who lined up in the District to cast ballots for Obama in 2008, may be less enthusiastic about midterm elections. Many are concerned about persistently high unemployment.
(Marvin Joseph/the Washington Post)
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Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, July 11, 2010


KANSAS CITY, MO. -- Curtis Adams, who owns Curtis A's barbershop here and who is also the establishment's senior political analyst, is a close observer of President Obama. This is something of a full-time job itself at Curtis A's, a gathering place in a black neighborhood five miles from downtown. All day every day, men (and occasionally women) come for a trim and wind up lingering to argue about jobs and the oil spill and the war in Iraq.

But mostly jobs. "If Obama was in this chair right here, I would tell him to give me a job. That's what I would ask for," said customer E.J. Jones one recent afternoon. Jones has worked off and on since he was let go from an Army ammunition plant in 2008.

The recession was especially rough on Kansas City's black community, where unemployment is 15 percent, nearly three times the rate for whites. Adams pointed to the empty chairs in his shop. He's down 75 customers a week. Of Obama, he said: "That man has a hell of a workload, and Bush left a hell of a mess. I like what he's doing. But I can't feel it."

Despite his frustration with the slow pace of the recovery, Adams, who has portraits of the first family on the walls of his shop, doesn't think Obama bears the blame for his troubles. And neither do most black Americans. Just the opposite:


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Polls show that 90 percent of African Americans believe Obama is doing a good job, far higher than the president's overall 46 percent approval rating. Obama's popularity has dropped among nearly every segment of the population -- old, young, Republican, Democrat, white, Latino.

Yet blacks still overwhelmingly support him, even though they are among those who have lost the most since he was elected.


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"We understand the difficulty of being a black man in his position, because of our close proximity to race and how it affects our lives, so we are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt,"


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SOURCE: WASHINGTON POST