Role-Model-in-Chief?

What is wrong with inner-city black boys? Ever since the great migration to the north, one answer has been some variant of this: black men. They are absent fathers, are unmarriageable both because of their lack of earning power and wayward ways, and often violent and abusive toward the mothers of their children.
All of these answers are of course tied up in one tangled ball. If it could only be unraveled some way, black men could be what their children need: a positive male role model.
What role model could be more influential than President of the United States? Enter Barak Obama. A great tide of black boys, it is hoped, would want to be like him, rather than sports, music, or entertainment stars - or "gangstas."
Yet we already know that naming streets after black leaders certainly does nothing to curb ghetto violence. Washington, DC residents are already used to the constant carnage at the intersection of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X boulevards in the Anacostia section of the city.
One response is that these two great figures are already ancient history to today's youth: old guys in old black-and-white pictures wearing suits and ties. Obama is here and now.
But it is the lure of the here and now, sociologists have said, that differentiates the poor from the middle class. The middle class will defer immediate gratification for future reward, like graduating from school or getting the necessary training for jobs.
The reward of the drug trade is instantaneous, and requires little formal training or travel. With profit margins of about 300 percent, would impoverished boys really deny it for some nebulous promised future?
And it is the ever-present neighborhood, project, or street corner that is almost the definition of a ghetto. The president of the country is a lot less important than those who rule the gangs. It's hard to study in a free-fire zone. Any perceived lack of attention to clear and present danger could easily get you killed.
Middle-class black men clearly want to do something about the lure of "out there;" running the streets. In Philadelphia, these men turned out in the thousands to fill the Temple University arena. Their slogan called for "10,000 men" to do, well, something, like patrolling the neighborhoods as a kind of auxiliary police force. Months later, no one has signed up for anything, which the organizers blamed on lack of funds.
The terrible frustration that so many black men feel, as demonstrated in this and the Million Man March in 1995, is painfully evident. They haven't figured out what to do. Neither, really, has anyone else. Sen. Obama, your answer, please?