I don't even think it's what he says--it's the self-presentation thing. I said in a comment thread a week or so ago, "social class, social class, social class," and I think it's true: Obama presents as upper(-middle?) class, quite patrician. Which would be the kiss of death except that he's black, midwestern, and his wife plays that "well, frankly"/teasing her husband thing perfectly. But the poor people don't like him thing is basically what was meant by "he's not black enough."
It's a fascinating primary, with all this coded race and gender and class stuff playing out.
It's a fascinating primary, with all this coded race and gender and class stuff playing out.
Agreed.
Basically, Obama is playing something like the Jackie Robinson role in politics: "Smile and let others (teammate, newspapers) handle issues that come up." The problems are fewer, the virulence is much less, and it is what it is. Either he can do it or he can't. So far, it has worked out pretty well for him, though I increasingly think we're just not quite there yet. And that's fine; we've still moved a remarkable amount. And who knows? Maybe I'm wrong.
Boy, it's a strain talking about this stuff without sounding like you're endorsing something ugly, though. I thought Steinem's editorial was touching on interesting stuff, although couldn't get quite to her conclusions. But while I could see why people were calling it racist, I wouldn't have said that myself -- it's a hell of a set of topics to negotiate without fumbling.
Mark Kleiman posts an email from a friend who thinks that Barack Obama doesn't identify with the poor. Chris Bowers notes that Obama got trounced among New Hampshire Democrats who describe themselves as "angry" with Bush.
Anecdote/data. Correlation/causation.
I'm sure you saw Drum's post yesterday which shows that Hillary did better among voters who want to leave Iraq quickly, and Obama did better among those who were for hanging around. My take is that (shocking, I know) not all voters are issue-driven. Besides, there are quite a few plausible reasons Hillary did so well the other night. It's not a sure thing that Obama would've done better if he could have been angrier. It hasn't helped other candidates.
Of course, Hillary has a strongly analogous problem vis a vis male America, with the qualifier that while Edwards is to Obama's left on class issues, no-one in the race especially gives a shit about women's issues.
Kerry's Obama endorsement: boost, or kiss of death?
John Kerry, perfect timing as always. He couldn't have endorsed Obama two days *before* the critical primary in New England, rather than after?
1: And the generational stuff as well—which I for one did not see coming.
9: Maybe because he actually understood his rep in New Hampshire.
no-one in the race especially gives a shit about women's issues.
Or race issues, for that matter. There are a whole list of things Democrats don't talk about, either because we don't think it's the right way to characterize the problems, we think the major issues have been solved, or because we think there will be an electoral punishment for Democrats if we do so.
Or race issues, for that matter
Well, sure. I said Edwards was to Obama's left on class stuff.
I said Edwards was to Obama's left on class stuff.
I can decide if that was a smart move or not, as judged on purely pragmatic grounds.
Why is the left so obsessed with race? Everything is race.
Iowa picks Obama? Race. NH picks Clinton? Race. If Obama loses? Race. If Obama wins? Race. Dick Durbin, I feel your pain.
Also, as was said somewhere else (Ezra's blog, maybe?), as soon as Obama gives vent to the frustration the populace has with Bush in the same kind of manner that Edwards does, he becomes ANGRY BLACK MAN, and therefore Scary and Unelectable to the punditocracy.
7: What??? Nonsense. Clinton has a good record on women's issues. Edwards, while he needs someone pointing shit out to him (a role I think Elizabeth Edwards is currently filling), will, I think, be reliable as long as he has good advisors.
16: Wow! What a pithy summary of the dominant discussion here the last week or so! How did you know?
17. darn double standards! it's working so well for Edwards!
Hmm, where they overlap Clinton's and Obama's senate voting records are basically the same.
Of course, Hillary has a strongly analogous problem vis a vis male America, with the qualifier that while Edwards is to Obama's left on class issues, no-one in the race especially gives a shit about women's issues.
On the other hand, if the reports out of NH are to be believed, when Clinton got a lot of bad anti-feminist press after Iowa, some undecideds broke for her as a 'fuck you' message. I'm not sure if the press meme becomes 'a black man just can't win the presidency' if we'll see a similar effect, rather than it just becoming conventional wisdom. (It's also entirely likely that all that happened was the midwestern candidate took the midwest and the northeastern candidate took the northeast because that's where their campaigns were better organized.)
There *is* a lot less about women's issues this time out, but it's still early in the primary season and none of the candidates are for anything terribly uncommon for a Democrat.
21: Which proves that Clinton doesn't care about women's issues and is far more conservative than Obama, right?
21: The lack of breadth was my original complaint about this group of D's. Not that I believe they're indistinguishable, but they really are clustered. It would be great to have a few voices, particularly a progressive one --- not that they'd get the nomination but to force a less superficial discourse. I think this is a big part of the reason there is so much blather about issues of race and sex and so little else. That and the broken media.
20: Fair enough, but the punditry's reaction to Edwards' message is simply to write him off as shrill and unserious, not as a scary-ass threat.
I thought that Steinem's piece was horrible. First, the "black v. women" theme is a deadly and irrational one which I think should be let lie to the extent possible.
Second, she wrote the piece as a Hillary supporter just because Obama won one single primary. If she had waited until after N.H., there would have been no need for her piece.
Third, it just isn't true at all. Hillary's main advantage is that the party regulars (including black) and party machine are both solidly behind her. She was 180 degrees off on what was happening.
Yep.
Though, Mark Schmitt also has a point too. I think he's done this a little more than he had to. He had to win the Democratic primary first, & he was the underdog, & he knew it. People wouldn't have held the rah-rah togetherness stuff against him nearly as much if he'd given them some specifics about what this movement was for...It's interesting how in some ways his problem is the exact opposite of Dean's, but in other ways it's exactly the same.
25. i'm not sure what form in the press it would take exactly, but I do agree that the angry schtick would work worse for Obama. But it's hard for anyone to make it work.
It's a narrative, but if I click on Obama's campaign website I can see all of the policy proposals and compare them with Edwards & Clinton. I don't think the guy is fluff. His speeches tend towards soaring rhetoric, and maybe that's a weakness. On the other hand, I don't think he's running for President without the rhetoric. And the specifics are there.
26: I dunno, I think Steinem's piece might have been part of what happened in NH. God knows there are a lot of women like me, who are supporting someone else but can't help but feel the tug of wanting to vote for Hillary. Those women read a piece by Steinem in the morning, go into the ballot box and see "Hillary Clinton" on the ballot, they might very well decide to vote for her right then and there.
21: Which proves that Clinton doesn't care about women's issues and is far more conservative than Obama, right?
My original thought, insofar as I had one, was just that racial divisions in U.S. society are more politically salient than gender divisions. (Steinem was right about this part, which is not the same as any claim about who is worse off or whatever.) Thus Obama's efforts to "mainstream" himself are going to be more obvious to people than Clinton's.
As to their relative conservatism, I've been saying for a while in these threads that Obama is the vessel for a lot of grad-student-constituency fantasizing about his liberal, change-oriented agenda, just as Clinton is being cast by the same crowd as the most right-wing democrat in the country. Empirically, Obama is four places more liberal than Clinton based on senate votes. Both are in the middle of a right/left distribution of votes defined at one end by Ben Nelson (D, Neb) and at the other by Feingold (D, Wisc).
Also:
I think, actually, that economic justice is most personal to Edwards, feminism is most personal to Clinton, & racial justice is most personal to Obama. Granted, Edwards is making the most overt appeal in his speeches--but that's surely partly because he's not poor, whereas Clinton is very obviously female & Obama is very obviously black. So he has to worry more about charges of inauthenticity than they do; they have to worry more than he does about being dismissed as "the female candidate" & "the black candidate".
I really really really want Obama to win but it as, at some level, pretty great that these are our three choices.
Dick Durbin, I feel your pain.
What pain? He has an immensely popular and competent fellow senator, and even from the same party for once (somewhat unusual for Illinois).
From what my friend who used to work in Durbin's office says, they run a pretty good tag team to take different committees, use each other's areas of expertise, and focus on the issues of the areas of the state where each is more popular. Durbin's life will probably suck more if Obama gets elected to high office and out of the Senate.
"Dick Durbin, I feel your pain."
What? I like Dick Durbin & even better than I like Barack Obama, & he may be the person most responsible for talking Obama into running this time around. But he can do more good in the Senate. I want Obama to be president & Durbin to be Senate majority leader.
30: I suspect some women voters in NH did react to the ridiculous, and ridiculously sexist, media coverage of Clinton's "tears." But I doubt it was the Steinem piece that swayed them. God, I hope not. That piece really is awful. When I got to the part about black men ascending to power I had to abandon the article, but I forced myself to go back and read the whole thing later.
Interestingly, on Edwards-type turf (using AFL/CIO data on voting "right" or "wrong" on issues) Clinton and Obama have identical records for 2006.
I don't think the guy is fluff. His speeches tend towards soaring rhetoric, and maybe that's a weakness. On the other hand, I don't think he's running for President without the rhetoric. And the specifics are there.
I don't think anyone here thinks Obama is fluff. I think that a suspicion is arising that the voters may think he's fluff.
In this context it's worth noting that - aside from the press "stories" in the final days, like the iron-my-shirt and choking-up - what HRC did differently in the last 3 days of NH was to get neck-deep in the wonk. That appears to have made a positive impression on at least some of those undecideds who broke for her.*
* I don't think I've seen it referred to here - MY (I think) had a graph showing polling vs. vote results, and it looks like almost literally 100% of undecideds went with HRC. That's striking, to say the least.
34: Heh, Illinois mindmeld. Everyone else just wishes they had Senators as cool as ours.
Someone above was wishing for more ideological diversity among the 3 main Dems. I think it's easy to forget that, a year ago, it looked like we'd have it - Edwards was talking to the left of any Dem since Jesse Jackson (at least), Obama seemed moderately left, and HRC was presumed to be the DLC/left-leaning Republican in the race. But instead they all moved to Edwards. He hasn't moved further left in response, for reasons that I won't speculate on. But that's why there's a cluster - they all went as far left as plausible. What's missing is a strong anti-war/anti-Bush/pro-civil liberties candidate. They're all pretty weak tea on the topic, rhetorically running against Bush without specifically being anti-empire/pro-rights.
Yesterday, Stras linked to a black feminist's very good response to Steinem's piece.
I don't think I've seen it referred to here - MY (I think) had a graph showing polling vs. vote results, and it looks like almost literally 100% of undecideds went with HRC. That's striking, to say the least.
My recollection is that the claim was that Dodd and Biden voters broke for HRC, and that the suggestion was that experience voters broke for HRC. (Or, similarly, people who like candidates with a long history in the Dem establishment (with no negative connotations about "establishment") broke for the candidate with the most similar background.)
without specifically being anti-empire
In a US Presidential election? That's never going to happen.
"In this context it's worth noting that - aside from the press "stories" in the final days, like the iron-my-shirt and choking-up - what HRC did differently in the last 3 days of NH was to get neck-deep in the wonk. That appears to have made a positive impression on at least some of those undecideds who broke for her."
Again, correct.
Of course, we won't know if ANY of them can deliver until they get into office. But even as a matter of rhetoric--first rule of good writing: don't tell me how you're going to change America. Show me.
Edwards is not the first candidate to talk about how he's going to fight for working families--why is he more convincing on this than Bob Shrum's populist campaigns? Because he doesn't just say: "vote for me I am fighting for working families against Washington special interests." He talks about economic justice in a specific, passionate way, & over & over again.
In Hillary's case, the idea is that she'll be most effective because she's really, really, really is competent & prepared & knows her sh*t.
In Obama's case the idea is: he's going to try to mobilize as broad & deep a coalition of the American public as possible in support of Democratic policies by appealing to the country's hopes & its conscience--to roll the dice on the decency & common sense of the U.S. electorate & see what happens. Well, to be convincing, he has to make speeches that actually appeal to the country's conscience on specific issues. Otherwise it sounds like it's all about him & he has no earthly clue what he's up against.
For polling wonkery, I thought the NY Times had an interesting take. Basically, the author proposes that the polling data itself was flawed, and he describes a variation on what some folks call the "Bradley effect" (though he doesn't use that term).
In a US Presidential election? That's never going to happen.
One day it will. Not today. It's a broken model and eventually the US will realize it. Hopefully a bit quicker than, say, UK.
46: Followed your link, he doesn't seem to deal with the problem that Obama's support wasn't overstated (which a Bradley effect might explain), rather Hillary's was understated (which a Bradley effect can't explain).
48: Yeah, dittoing w/d's comment here, Obama's numbers were largely polled correctly, no? It was Hillary's numbers that were way, way off.
without specifically being anti-empireIn a US Presidential election? That's never going to happen.
I would argue that Bush's "humble foreign policy" was, in a sense, just this. That it was a lie is secondary; people took it to mean a slight return, at least, to isolationism, which would be a big improvement over empire.*
I think we tend to forget just how fucked up the discourse has grown in just the last 7 years.
* The real problem is that a Dem using a similar phrase would be excoriated for isolationism by everyone from "liberal interventionists" to the Beltway pundits. But I think you could successfully talk about "bringing our boys home" without an explicit, scary peacenik, anti-empire message.
48, 49: Obama and Edwards both polled within a percentage point or two of their actual tally. It was all Hillary surge. Zogby says he saw signs of this on Monday night, but no one believes him.
48, 49 - I took him to be saying, at the risk of oversimplifying, that those with racial biases were systematically undercounted, which I described above as a variation on the Bradley effect. The interesting thing to me about the Bradley effect is that it involves understating the impact of race - but there are certainly other interesting things about it, and I agree that the word "variation" was doing a lot of work in my comment above.
Folks might want to take a look at this Jack Balkin post where he looks at this years race in the context of a typology of presidents from Steve Skowronek "based on the situations they find when they come into office, and the ways they respond to them through leadership".
I will not try to summarize the typology here, but he suggests that Hillary was running to be a oppositional president (like Bill was) while Obama was positioning himself as a potential reconstructive president. In his view Hillary shifted to reconstructive between Iowa and NH (basically just her trying to co-opt the change narrative). For this to all ultimately work out we need Bush II to fulfill the disjunctive role, " the last affiliated presidents in a failing political order".
also:
In addition to this cycle of reconstruction, affiliation, opposition and disjunction, Skowronek argues that each political order makes it more difficult for the next order to really revolutionize things.
I am not doing it justice, I do recommend reading it.
Here's the thing I was calling a Bradley variation:
Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites. Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here's the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.
55: Whatever. It's not like such people aren't going to be allowed to vote down the line. If that's a problem for Obama, it's one Obama needs to solve.
55: Ezra isn't buying it, because the Iowa polling didn't show this artifact. Even though the Iowa caucuses draw a more educated/black-favorable crowd, it doesn't make sense of the polls to have been able to correct for this in Iowa but not NH.
He points out that HRC won women in NH, whereas Obama won cross-gender in Iowa.
I put a lot of weight on the fact that a lot of independents voted for McCain who might have voted for Obama, except they thought Obama was a shoe-in.
Shoo-in?
Here's an interesting examination of the demographic challenges (per Fischer's Albion's Seed) for each of the three Democratic candidates.
The Balkin thing was quite interesting, but he seems to conflate governance strategy with campaign strategy in a way that isn't supported. His historical thesis argues that the next president may govern as a certain type, but it doesn't argue that the best strategy is to campaign as that type.
Many people seem surprised that Hillary Clinton won a plurality of votes in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, after Barack Obama's triumph in Iowa. I'm not sure why.
This kind of sentence always annoys me. If you're going to be condescending about the conventional wisdom, then you need to be condescending before the conventional wisdom is proven false.
60: but it doesn't argue that the best strategy is to campaign as that type.
My between-the-lines read is that the same zeitgeist that will enable governing as type X will also make that an effective campaign strategy. The "change" candidate does not work before the electorate really wants a "change", if you are a premature change agent it will be a flawed electoral strategy.
63: Seems reasonable, but Balkin fails to connect the dots. I'm speaking largely out of ignorance here, but I thought FDR the first-term campaigner was supposed to be quite different from FDR the president. And I think I'd argue that Reagan overcame the final political hurdle when he convinced people that he wasn't particularly radical.
63 is right, but governing as a change agent doesn't nec. require campaigning as one; FDR was much more radical in office than he ran as in 1932.
Just remembered this one, from JFK:
"When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we'd been saying they were."
asl, thanks for that link (in 41).
57: Maybe the caucuses draw a lot fewer less-well-off people who don't answer surveys. Or maybe someone who won't answer a few questions for a pollster is the same sort who won't stand up in front of his neighbors.
But yeah, Kohut is silent on that point.
67: Oh, there's lots of plausible stories, just none that reflect well on the basic competency of the pollsters, who were presumably aware of the demographic differences between an IA caucus and NH primary before Tuesday.
Since we have the various blocks breaking differently between the two elections - plus the wild card of independents who could absent themselves from the Dem side w/o failing to vote - I just don't see any reason to point to a (significant) Bradley/Wilder Effect.
58: "Albion's Seed" via Kos:
The growth of ethnic pluralism did not diminish regional identities. On balance, it actually enhanced them. This was so because the new immigrants did not distribute themselves randomly through the United States. They tended to flock together in specific regions. Ethnic pluralism itself thus became a regional variable. Further, the new immigrants did not assimilate American culture in general. They tended to adopt the folkways of the regions in which they settled. This was specially the case among immigrant elites
I've always found this argument stupid. It's like he had worked out his thesis, then realized it was wrong, and threw in a little patch so he wouldn't have to spend another couple years getting things right.
One of my pet ideas is that Lutheran and Catholic areas of the US (German, Irish, Scandinavian, Italian, Polish) are distinctly different and more communitarian. Albion's Seed lumps all of this into the Puritan tradition, AKAICT. But the New England Puritan tradition tends to be less communitarian and more individualistic and competitive.
The transition from New England to Catholic / Lutheran ways was documented by Veblen is his writing about his childhood, though he didn't formulate it that way.
My theory may account for why Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa and even Missouri to a degree, and maybe Illinois and Michigan are less Republican than the rest of the interior. Heebie has even confirmed that Texas Lutherans are singificantly less horrible than other Texans. These states also share with New York City and much of the East a non-Anglo-Saxonness. The still honky-Puritan areas of New England have tended to be Republican until very recently.
On the other hand, the "Albion's Seed" thesis is pretty good for much of the South, the border states, and the interior West (which has a strong Southern influence).
On an unrelated note, did Obama pwn himself in the debate?
thanks for the link jp, interesting.
My take is that we could be due for a realignment; it just that even after the wheels fell off (and were being burned in teh street) of the new deal coalition, the reconstructive candidate didn't show up until reagan and the economic malaise caught up to social breakdown, and nixon's implosion was part of that. And so HRC=nixon/ford, and obama=reagan.
I am baffled why someone like Edwards didn't campaign on what are called women's issues but are really parenting and caregiving issues. The mommy wars drive me round the twist. In the 70s the feminist agenda was that society and the economy would change fundamentally so that moms and dads could share equally in child care. Now everyone seems to work longer than a 35 or 40 hours week; grandparents are either employed or too far away; day care centers are not staffed by professional teachers who are offered a career path, so the turnover is terrible. How dedicated can anyone be at $10 an hour? In New York City, almost all nannies are women of color; some have left their own children with relatives back in the islands so their mothers could rescue the family from crushing poverty.
Men almost never work in day care or nursery schools; the sexual abuse day care hysteria ended that. People don't want to hire boys as babysitters or men as nannies. That is revoltingly sexist. Misogyny is hatred of women; sexism applies to both sexes. Women seem to have made more progress than men in bursting through gender stereotypes. So guys, you might be entitled to call your mate a "female chauvinist pig." Men rarely seem to complain about the sexism inflicted on them since such criticism would be seen as girly.
I have five brothers and four daughters; now I have a male grandson whom I take care of three days a week. He greatly resembles his adventurous, word traveling mother, who has lived in places like Niger, Kosovo, and Rwanda. I eagerly await defending this enchanting bundle of rambunctiousness from sexist constrictions of his creativity and determination. He is only 8 months old, but together we could offer a childproofing service. When I put him down on any floor, he immediately crawls toward the most dangerous object in the room.
Every industrial Western nation has more family centered government policies than we do. American families no longer believe that government could make it more possible to be good parents, good caregivers of the elderly, and good workers.
The recurring reference to women's issues needs to be clarified. Are we talking about abortion, the scandalous C-section rate, and the obscene harrassment of nursing mothers? If companies expect women to pump in a filthy toilet, that is a woman's issue. Those are three I could think of. But almost all so-called women's issues are parent issues, caregiver issues. We seem to have made no progress on parents' sharing equally in child care and elder care responsibilities. I have read hundreds of pieces on mommy wars that never mention fathers' role in child care. At the other end of life, the oldest daughter is frequently her parents' caregiver, no matter how many siblings are in the family.
Virtually all nannies and home health aides are women. How they are shamelessly exploited would qualify as a women's issue.
People don't want to hire boys as babysitters or men as nannies. That is revoltingly sexist.
You gotta admit though, not a lot of chicks showing up to a meet with a "Dora the Explorer doll, hoop earrings and petroleum jelly ".
Ick. But that's still one in a million even with men, so long as they aren't Republican officials.
You have to call them "family issues." Americans love to talk about families, and all the GOP family values/children tax breaks etc. rhetoric is just sitting there. Say its sexist (or misogyny/androgyny) and you just bring up ideas of discrimination and it won't be persuasive. Convincing people and getting them to see what shitheels they are usually don't work well together.
Convincing people and getting them to see what shitheels they are usually don't work well together.
I just thought this bore repeating. Good point.
People don't want to hire boys as babysitters or men as nannies. That is revoltingly sexist.
It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem; as long as childcare (and kindred professions) is seen as feminized, it will be a pretty small minority of men who will consider this kind of work, and therefore the proportion of perverts in that sample is going to be way above average. Anecdotally I would say that the same is true, for slightly different reasons, of scout masters, camp counselors, and wrestling coaches. In a sense, it's not irrational when people look askance at a man interested in taking care of children; there is an inclination to ask onesself whether there is some nefarious ulterior motive at work. A result of sexism? Of course. But the motives of the individual are not necessarily sexist.
Slightly OT, I have a window into the au pair community where I live, and it is increasingly common for young men to participate in these programs (usually for parents who want a male role model for their older boys). Of course, there is a plausible motivation at work (living abroad and learning a foreign language) that linders the natural suspicion.
Further to 79: the salient fact about the male au pairs is that they are *swimming* in booty (at least in a community like mine where there are a lot of au pairs). It's like being a male undergrad at Vassar, circa 1979. If this fact were better publicized, it might attract more young men to have a go at child care. Fighting fire with fire, you might say.
My brother has been an elementary teacher in Portland Maine for about 20 years. Now male teachers would be terrified to touch or hug a 5 year old who had hurt himself or herself, although a female teacher would be glad to do so. It is outrageous to say the perverts are more likely to care for young children. I doubt that perverts are more likely to choose to work for peanuts. What possible proof can you give? How can men tolerate such assertions? What message does it convey to young children if they have no male teachers. Boys learn that only girls are caregivers People speculate the boys have more trouble adjusting to the feminized environment of school.
Things were different in the 1970s, at least in New York City. Nursery schools and kindergartens tried very hard to recruit male teachers. When my daughter went to a Montessori nursery school down by the world trade center, she had a wonderful male teacher.
Fathers spent lots of time taking care of young children and to the best of my knowledge their willies don't fall off. Whoops, I am married to an Englishman. Taking care of young children is incredibly exciting and fascinating. They are the best learners in the world.
81 etc. Seems to me this ties in with the much broader social/media fantasy that there are suddenly `predators' everywhere. Kids can't play unsupervised, you must drive them to school, etc. etc. The crime statistics don't support this change, aiui, it's a shift in perception.
Things were different in the 1970s, at least in New York City.
I know a man who was told flat-out by Boston school district that men were forbidden by law to be elementary school teachers. This was in 1967. I don't know if the law was true or not, but the effect certainly was -- he didn't apply.
Fortunately, in my area, the courts are starting to focus more on the parenting skills when determining custody and less on the reproductive organs.
Kids can't play unsupervised, you must drive them to school, etc. etc. The crime statistics don't support this change, aiui, it's a shift in perception.
Not disagreeing with this at all. The availability heuristic (and the tendency of the news media to play up the SCARY predator stories) is to blame.
It is outrageous to say the perverts are more likely to care for young children. I doubt that perverts are more likely to choose to work for peanuts. What possible proof can you give? How can men tolerate such assertions?
Well, law enforcement agencies for one believe that perverts often try to engineer situations where they will have contact with children on an occupational basis. N.B. there is a big difference between "perverts are more likely to care for children" and "people caring for children are likely to be perverts". Even if the probability is (ex recto) double, triple, or quadruple the baseline probability, it's still a small probability that a caregiver is a pervert (soupbiscuit's point).
And yet... I once worked in a summer camp for boys, and a whole bunch of my colleagues were exposed as molesters. This experience sensitized me to that fact that at least a small degree of a priori suspicion is warranted toward grown men who want to spend all their time tending to boys. Of course I have benefited from many adults in my life (men and women) who dedicated their careers to children out of the noblest of motives, and surely they are in the overwhelming majority. But just as surely, there can be a non-sexist, non-crazy motivation for scrutinizing males more closely in these situations.
In my experience, people providing in counseling and therapy, including one guy with a PhD, are highly susceptible to exaggerated rumors of all kinds. There are lot of self-appointed experts who go from place to place giving little presentations, and in some of the materials I've seen the extremest stories are accepted uncritically.