Word: wattenberg
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...controversial article last year in Commentary, Political Analysts Ben Wattenberg and Richard Scammon announced that a slim majority of blacks had made it into the middle class. They based this conclusion largely on the fact that a majority of blacks in the North earn more than $8,000 a year and a majority in the South make more than $6,000. Some black scholars scoffed that this was a perilously low income measure for the middle class in a time of oppressive inflation. They would prefer to place the floor as high as $11,500, in which case only...
...time, and even now, I think this logic made sense. As election analysts Scammon and Wattenberg have noted, the "social issue" was particularly powerful in 1970. Many working class whites--who had real doubts about our activities in Indochina--ended up supporting hawkish candidates because of their displeasure with student disruptions. If the blue collar workers in New York City knew what James Buckley stood for in the 1970 Senate election, he never would have gotten 65 per cent of the Catholic vote. A number of liberals, like Adlai Stevenson III in Illinois, had to swing sharply to the right...
...decade. The needy simply sought public assistance in far greater numbers-and got it. Increased welfare rolls were an indication that society was showing more concern for the poor, not that the poor were growing in number. The appallingly high black crime rate also creates a false impression, say Wattenberg and Scammon. Most of the violent crime is committed in the slums that upwardly mobile blacks have deserted for better neighborhoods. Without the stabilizing influence of working families, ghettos tend to disintegrate. Unhappy as this situation is, it is part of the price paid for progress. Write the authors...
...Wattenberg and Scammon give American liberalism much of the credit for improvements in black life. "Something did indeed happen in the 1960s: the logjam broke-politically, socially, legally, economically, even spiritually-and there is no going back." They may underrate the role of the decade's booming economy, which made life better for everyone. But they wisely take issue with the apocalyptic view of some liberals that life is inevitably becoming worse for blacks. As long as blacks are portrayed as "stereotyped examples of human misery and degradation," they write, whites will scarcely want to welcome them into their...
...Census Bureau statistics refer to "Negroes and other races." Since Negroes constitute 90% of this category, Wattenberg and Scammon believe that the figures are reliable...