Role Model-in-Chief

This is the largely unspoken question in the campaign: would the election of a black president actually change the behavoir of ghetto black boys and young men?

When I posed the question to Mayor Micheal McNutter of Philadelphia, he said essentially and honestly that he simply didn't know. Not everyone can go to Columbia and Harvard Law, and for many dealers the four-block or so area around their houses is all that they know.

Ghetto boys on election day kept asking us, the almost lily-white volunteers from New Jersey, if we had any extra buttons. The older boys and young men stayed on their stoops, too cool for that, but certainly did not harass us in any way.

For decades, the media and profesoriat have been lamenting the rise of illegitimate babies in the inner city and the gangs of fatherless boys that would later result. The cure, most thought, would be male role models in areas other than sports or entertainment.

Now you have just such a model in the highest office in the land. It's definitely wrong to think that he can substitute for all the absent fathers in the inner-city, or the quick money of the drug market, but at least it gives boys a path they had never dreamed of.

My cousin worked another area of Philadelphia. There, he said, Obama was at least making some dent in the terrrible self-crippling notion that academic achievement is "acting white."

After the inauguration, you will simply be acting like Obama.